How to think about failure
Jared Tendler shares some insights into what we get wrong about handling losses in poker.
Past failures, struggles, mistakes can loom large in your mind. Even though you may not have them consciously in your mind while playing poker, your overall emotional temperature is raised.
You react more intensely to bad beats, losses, mistakes, or poor results. You also react more positively to great days, feeling like you’ve finally turned the corner, except you might be fueling overconfidence and can easily get knocked back down.
When that happens, your mind goes into overdrive trying to figure out how to be better and avoid repetitive mistakes that you thought were corrected. You feel compelled to do something special to get to the place you want to be and that makes you gamble, take bigger risks, or get stuck in the “f**k its,” just hoping that you can find your way out.
Learning from failure
Our failures offer us a lot of insights but too often we are so results-oriented that we only focus on the failure itself. We don’t dig into what went wrong, don’t allow our problem-solving abilities to work for us and fail to understand why we failed.
Some of those answers might be technical and beyond the scope of this blog. But when the reasons are mental and emotional, the answers are out there for those who are willing to dig deeper than what’s obvious. This is most needed when you are stuck in a cycle where you keep making the same mistakes again and again.
There’s the classic quote from Einstein, about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
In my experience, it’s less about insanity and more about overconfidence.
Overconfidence
Yes, when you’re in a lot of emotional pain and you think you have an answer but the evidence shows that you don’t, you’re overconfident.
Overconfidence is a common, yet hidden reason why failures of the past continue to loom large. It prevents you from understanding why you’re actually failing or struggling, you just assume you already know why.
The reality is that what you’re currently doing isn’t enough, you don’t have an answer yet. That’s ok. This level of honesty is an important starting point for helping you to turn your failures into an asset that you can use to make you stronger and more capable.
There are many lessons you can learn from your past failures, both technically and mentally. As long as you don’t view failure as permanent, all that information from your past can be converted into an asset by going back through your failures to extract the lessons and learnings left behind.
Accumulated Emotion
For some of you, it’s not about converting a failure into some objective takeaways that can help you progress. The problem is that old emotions from past failures are locked inside and they can very quickly flood your mind today.
Accumulated Emotion is a wild card that can explain why your emotions become intense so quickly, why you can’t adhere to your poker strategy or rules even though you “know better”, and why you can struggle so much to gain command of your emotions.
The reality is, emotions are messy. They build up in both the short term and the long term. And while the brain has a natural digestion process for emotion, sometimes there’s residual emotion left over—this is accumulated emotion.
We often call it emotional baggage, scar tissue, or trauma. Don’t let the trauma word scare you. It’s just a measure of how much the past is ever present. When emotion from the past is unresolved, it remains intact and becomes capable of being triggered. You’re trying to do your absolute best to be successful today, all while dealing with emotions that make it an unfair fight. And past failures can really stick with us.
How to think about failure
Time does not heal all wounds. These emotions may not go away just because you say you’re “letting go” of the past.
Scar tissue in the mind is like scar tissue elsewhere in the body. It builds up to provide protection against injury or pain. Just saying I’m letting go of scar tissue in my quad doesn’t mean it’s gone. I still can’t stretch that muscle fully until I work through it and it’s often painful to do so. But it’s pain with a purpose.
It’s very common that flaws in the past are still active, affecting you today and part of the reason why you’re not able to break through. Revisiting these memories is not about trying to torture yourself and re-experience old pain again. It’s about examining the past to identify the flaws, biases, wishes, and hopes keeping the emotional pain frozen in your mind, preventing you from truly moving on from the past.
It’s about figuring out what you need to learn to be able to use your past as the asset that it really is.
How do you handle failure? Let us know in the comments:
