Delivering Happiness

Continual Learning
Educate yourself. Read books and learn from others who have done it
before.
Learn by doing. Theory is nice, but nothing replaces actual experience.
Learn by surrounding yourself with talented players.
Just because you win a hand doesn’t mean you’re good and you don’t
have more learning to do. You might have just gotten lucky.
Don’t be afraid to ask for advice.
Culture
You’ve gotta love the game. To become really good, you need to live it
and sleep it.
Don’t be cocky. Don’t be flashy. There’s always someone better than
you.
Be nice and make friends. It’s a small community.
Share what you’ve learned with others.
Look for opportunities beyond just the game you sat down to play. You
never know who you’re going to meet, including new friends for life
or new business contacts.
Have fun. The game is a lot more enjoyable when you’re trying to do
more than just make money.
Aside from remembering to focus on what’s best for the long term, I
think the biggest business lesson I learned from poker concerned the most
important decision you can make in the game. Although it seems obvious in
retrospect, it took me six months before I finally figured it out.
Through reading poker books and practicing by playing, I spent a lot of
time learning about the best strategy to play once I was actually sitting
down at a table. My big “ah-ha!” moment came when I finally learned that
the game started even before I sat down in a seat.
In a poker room at a casino, there are usually many different choices of
tables. Each table has different stakes, different players, and different

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dynamics that change as the players come and go, and as players get
excited, upset, or tired.
I learned that the most important decision I could make was which table
to sit at. This included knowing when to change tables. I learned from a
book that an experienced player can make ten times as much money sitting
at a table with nine mediocre players who are tired and have a lot of chips
compared with sitting at a table with nine really good players who are
focused and don’t have that many chips in front of them.
In business, one of the most important decisions for an entrepreneur or a
CEO to make is what business to be in. It doesn’t matter how flawlessly a
business is executed if it’s the wrong business or if it’s in too small a
market.
Imagine if you were the most efficient manufacturer of seven-fingered
gloves. You offer the best selection, the best service, and the best prices for
seven-fingered gloves—but if there isn’t a big enough market for what you
sell, you won’t get very far.
Or, if you decide to start a business that competes directly against really
experienced competitors such as Wal-Mart by playing the same game they
play (for example, trying to sell the same goods at lower prices), then
chances are that you will go out of business.
In a poker room, I could only choose which table I wanted to sit at. But
in business, I realized that I didn’t have to sit at an existing table. I could
define my own, or make the one that I was already at even bigger. (Or, just
like in a poker room, I could always choose to change tables.)
I realized that, whatever the vision was for any business, there was
always a bigger vision that could make the table bigger. When Southwest
Airlines first started, they didn’t see their target market as limited to just
existing airline travelers, which was what all the other airlines did. Instead,
they imagined their service as something that could potentially serve all the
people who traveled by Greyhound bus or by train, and they designed their
business around that. They offered short flights at cheap prices, instead of
going with the more prevalent “hub and spoke” model that other airlines
were using. They made it easy for customers to change flights without
paying huge penalties. And they turned their planes around at airports as
fast as possible. They succeeded because they decided to play at a different
table than the one that all the other airlines were playing at.

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O
ver a period of several months, I learned a lot about poker, but toward
the end I started getting bored with playing in the California card rooms.