Goalless Poker

The ability to set goals is thought to be extremely important in many avenues of life like business, self-improvement, and poker. There are many great books out there, telling us how to go about setting goals, highlighting the importance of the process, describing the best practices and common mistakes.

A quick look at social media feeds of our friends can prove just how ubiquitous the idea of goal-setting became in recent years. It seems like everyone with a Facebook, Twitter or Instagram account is trying to lose weight, gain muscle, earn more money, become an entrepreneur or a high stakes baller.

Recipe for Success

If we simplify the great works of contemporary psychology the recipe for success seems fairly straightforward. You're either lucky enough to be one of the extremely future-oriented people who are unconsciously conditioned to sacrifice present temptations for the future benefit - in which case you're bound to become more successful than your peers - or you're one of the mere mortals who find it extremely difficult to resist the temptation to scroll through the Facebook feed in the middle of their poker session. If you belong in the latter category you have to work on becoming more future-oriented and that's why goal setting is thought to be so important.

Unfortunately, most of us forget that changing our orientation from present to the future is not a simple matter of flipping the switch, self-awareness and mindfulness are vital parts of the process, but they are also far less sexy than posting your new year's resolutions on social media with a stock picture of a landscape covered by some letters forming a vaguely insightful motivational message.

Dangers of Goal Setting

We all know the old adage about climbing the ladder that's leaning against a wrong wall, which stresses the importance of goal setting. Unfortunately, the aforementioned quote fails to convey the fact that we have walls aplenty and finding the correct one to lean our own ladder against it's not that simple. There are loads of mistakes we can make when deciding on the goals that we want to pursue, and here are some of the examples:

• We don't know what we want. Steve Jobs once said that "A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them". We're notoriously terrible at figuring out what's good for us. Maybe your goal of becoming one of the best MTT grinders out there is unrealistic because you don't take into account the fact that as an extrovert, sabotaging your social life will greatly decrease your mental capacity? Maybe the fast action of zoom poker tables that you find so attractive on a superficial level, prevents you from tapping into your slow, analytical style that would serve you better at regular speed tables? Maybe you think you like holdem, but you'd absolutely love PLO? There are numerous ways you can mistake what you think it's good for you, with what's actually good, and form a bunch of big goals that are in fact sub-optimal.
• We set ourselves up for disappointment. It feels really good to write down "I'll play 100k hands this month", but very few players can actually pull this off. Chances are you're not of them and by writing something like that down, you're inevitably setting yourself up for disappointment. The issue becomes even more pronounced when our goals touch something that's - at least partially - outside of our control. "I will become a mistakes grinder by the end of the year" can make your October sessions at NL50 feel really miserable, robbing you of the ability to play your A-game. 
• We can limit ourselves. According to Parkinson's law "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". The existence of variance in poker makes it so choosing a timetable for achieving our goals is bound to be somewhat arbitrary. Moving up from $7 Spin and Go's to $15 ones can take you a few frustrating months or a few pleasurable evenings on an extreme heater. It's entirely possible that the latter scenario could be disrupted by the fact that you gave yourself a month to move up. That arbitrary amount of time can delay your progress by causing you to cut the extremely profitable sessions short, or make you reluctant to take a reasonable shot at the higher level because you think it's "too soon". 

Goalless Poker

How do you go about becoming a successful poker player without setting goals? By focusing on self-awareness, mindfulness and developing good long-lasting habits through them. Instead of trying to figure out which wall your ladder should be leaning against, you try to become as good as humanly possible at climbing the steps. The first step that you should take is to establish some basic intentions. Think about how your days look like and how to optimize them for poker. For example, if you're working a full-time job, instead of forming some grand idea about quitting and becoming a full-time poker pro within a year, make it your habit to spend the two hours of free time every evening on grinding and see where it gets you. Poker can be stressful enough as it is and there's no point in adding more unnecessary pressure to the mix. 

Success is usually a matter of small, disciplined and measurable progress over a long period of time. This doesn't sound very glamorous, but if you commit to two hours of evening grind come hell or high water, you're likely to achieve far more than people who take pleasure from forming and visualizing their goals but are unable to follow through with the necessary work. Visualization can be deceptively dangerous, our brain isn't that great at differentiating between achieving something and imagining the achievement. Discipline is easier to build without a grand overarching theme guiding the process, it's a simple matter or putting in some hard work one day at a time.

Record your progress. Instead of starting with writing down the desired end of your journey and figuring out the steps necessary to get you to that destination, you should focus on the steps and figure out if the thing they are leading you to is the one that you desire. Establish a habit of recording the amount of work you did at the end of the day and aid your self-awareness by periodically summarizing your effort and results. Focus on small measurable improvements that you can make on daily basis.  

Road Less Traveled 

Given that the science of goal setting is fairly robust and, planning for the future is all but confirmed to be beneficial when done right, why not just account for the dangers associated with the process and go from there?

For the same reason why some people have no problem playing 12+ tables at the time, some can only focus on 4 and most play 6-10 even though they would benefit from cutting that number down by 2 or more. It's hard to figure out what's the optimal approach for us if we don't experiment and shifting your focus from being goal-oriented to being habit-oriented might be exactly what you need to take your poker to the next level. When the entire table is playing tight, it usually pays to start playing loose.

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