I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive
San Jeronimo, Costa Rica
How do you make money out of the sky falling?
Feeling brain dead. Great time to write.
I’ve stopped drinking a beer at night when I’m blogging because I was noticing it made me tired. I feel a lot more alert just drinking water.
I got a good work out in during the morning and got to hang out with my girlfriend and eat a homecooked meal, but since then I’ve been trying to answer the question. What money can I make from the sky cracking? Where’s the money leak?
Leatherass made a great point. He said that so many American grinders have stopped learning right now. Every step you take educating yourself now can be worth so much more, because the other guy is doing nothing. You can distance yourself now.
Yet I’m not doing that. I’m consulting with a company. It might turn into something. It’s just weird going from poker player to working in the business. Of course that’s where a lot of the money is. The first millionaire in the California Gold Rush was the guy selling the shovels on the side of the road.
I’m thinking of changing how I do lessons. I’m going to cook up some lessons meant specifically for new live players, just pick out hands that come up all the time in a live game. Go through specific live reads/considerations. Maybe I can help my fellow Americans right now.
Jack Welch has some great ideas as well. He’s my head coach. We’re working on a lot of business ideas right now. He’s pretty damn savvy. He keeps your mental in the right place and directs your business toward logical and sustained growth.
I woke up at 7 AM today. It’s midnight now. I’ve been working for most of this day. But hey, I can’t complain. It’s just a weird schedule when you get your free time at the beginning of the day and work till night. It’s the opposite of what most people do.
I’ve been working on my book too lately now that playing poker isn’t as much of an option. I feel like I’m freerolling the rest of the day if I get 2,000 words written in the manuscript. It’s increasingly difficult to use my right-brain for a select period of time each day. The rest of my time right now is spent analyzing the industry and consulting, watching over my investments, looking over my newest abandoned horses, grinding non US networks, working new deals, Pocketfives Training videos, teaching, and the new process of getting set up in Costa Rica. It’s all incredibly left brained.
I’m shooting off 20 pages of business emails a day. My job is get in, get the facts, process, move forward, communicate, get out. I have no idea how I got this job. It’s paying well, even during prohibition, but I was always the kid who would trip on pills and read comics on the bus all day, on my way to Chinatown to play fun card games and do naughty things. I got really bored with everything constantly. I have the worst attention deficit you could imagine. I needed drama, or for my life to resemble something that could be written about. So I built drama. I tried to live crazy ass stories. I succeeded sometimes.
Now I’m just at my desk all day. I’m domesticated.
I’m very happy, don’t get me wrong, but writing has changed. I feel like I am using muscles when I write that never get used. When I go to actually play poker and not just discuss it, I feel every synapse firing. I’ve been analyzing and now I’m continuing. With writing and creativity I just have to stop, breathe, and act like the rest of the world is not going on.
Writing makes me think of the quirky things inherent in day-to-day life I don’t dwell upon. It makes me realize how many little life moments I just let pass by. It makes me feel a little insecure about the path I’m taking. Analysis brings you money, but creativity brings you perspective.
It made me think of a what a Costa Rican professor said here, that the more knowledge you obtain, the less creative you become. How could this be? You must have more subjects to draw upon? Yet it makes more and more sense to me as I battle trying to be creative during a busy work schedule. My thoughts want to align themselves into formulaic patterns. I gloss over or thoroughly understate important moments in the narrative. I have a harder time thinking outside the box.
I was listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers today while I was lifting weights. He brought up how poverty-stricken students in the USA lose so much ground because during summer vacation they are in an environment that teaches them nothing. He referenced a school program in the states known as KIPP which conducts class as if it were an Asian school. Instead of a 180 day school year they approach countries like South Korea (220 days) or Japan (242 days). Their test scores skyrocket. Impoverished children are going onto college more and more often.
It seems like a resounding success, but I read one time that South Korea has the highest number of PhDs per capita and the lowest number of Nobel Prizes. Well, in first world countries or something. If that’s true they’re clearly not striking that balance. They’re not providing free time that allows their right brain to decompress and stretch its legs.
Yet one look at my friends and I’s retarded asses trying to figure out trigonometry in high school is all you need to see our system isn’t that great either.
It’s just so hard to strike that balance. Especially with my obsessive tendencies. Even when I’m walking through the country here my mind is on business. I want to completely let it go and be one with the nature, just to engage my creative side. Maybe a break from the problems will allow me to see things from a new perspective.
Drinking, smoking, or my anti-psychotics do not alleviate the anxiety. My mind races. I’d like to make it stop but I’ve accepted I’ll be like this my whole life. The pills help me maintain and harness it to make me work harder. That’s the best I can hope for. That and to learn from the lessons I’ve been given, and figure out a way to harvest this storm.
+171.JPG)
0 comments:
Post a Comment