The Poker Game of Life

Clients I work with regarding anxiety sometimes tend to overanalyze the decisions they make in life, most of the time in a negative light. They might have a decision to make regarding a job opportunity, a choice about a romantic relationship, or some other important option that has the potential to change their lives in a big way. If the choice they make turns out badly, they excoriate themselves, reinforcing the image they have about themselves as making poor choices, doing the wrong thing, and having things always turn out badly in the end.

This reminds me of a concept that is often applied in the game of poker called “results-oriented thinking.” If the client plays poker, I might describe it in a more detailed way. If they do not, I will just sketch out the general idea. The concept of results-oriented thinking refers to the tendency for us humans to decide whether or not we made the right decision based on the outcome of our decision. However, this approach minimizes one of the most important factors affecting the results of our decisions: Chance. Luck. Fate. Whatever you want to call it, sometimes the most important factors affecting the decisions we make in life are out of our control. So what can we control? Only the things we take into consideration before we make our decision.

Let’s say a client has a choice between job offers at two different companies. They analyze their options, make a list of pros and cons, consider the possible future outcomes as best they can, and then make a decision. Two months later, one of the companies files for bankruptcy and goes out of business. The other company is bought by a larger company and flourishes. Two completely different scenarios.

If this client chose the job at the company that ends up flourishing, they’d probably feel like they made the right decision. If they chose the job at the company that went bankrupt, they’d most likely feel like they made the wrong decision. The truth, however, is that they made the best decision they could with the information they had at the time. Not a good or bad decision, but the best one. This relates to poker in the sense that logic and rational decisions affect your ability to win, but ultimately there is a certain amount of luck involved that is out of our control. You might have a 99% chance to win a hand based on a decision you made to put all your chips into the middle. You’ve made the best choice you can. If that 1% outcome happens, though, and you lose all your chips, of course you’re going to feel bad about it. But are you going to wish you made a different decision? You certainly would if you could go back in time knowing what you know now about how the hand turned out. But that’s impossible! And the irony is that we often treat ourselves as if we should have known what was going to happen. That is where much of the anxiety and regret we feel about choices that turn out badly come from. We are essentially giving ourselves a hard time for not being able to predict the future!

Positive outcomes make it easy to think we did everything right. Negative outcomes make it easy to think we did everything wrong. The results are what counts, right? Well, certainly the results are important, but we’re setting ourselves up for disaster if we consider only the results when assessing our choices. If we prepare for a decision without much effort or care but still succeed, what lesson will we take from this? That what little we did to prepare last time was enough to succeed, and we can approach the next decision with the same attitude and expect things to work out well again. If we prepare well but fail, what lesson will we take from that? That we’re not able to do the thing we tried to do, even though we put so much work into it, so why bother trying our best again if we failed last time?

We can only do our best. If we put in the work, the effort, and the energy, then we have done all we can. If it doesn’t work out, we can’t let that dictate how we approach things in the future. We can’t be afraid to fail, and we can’t get lulled into complacency by success. Do your best in preparation, and if you win, great. If you don’t, be confident that you’ll get lucky the next time. In the poker game of life, there is a lot you can control, but more that you can’t. Keep playing the game as best you can, making the best decisions you can with the information you have at the time, and eventually you’ll be the one stacking all the chips.