In poker, variance is symmetric. You can only win what's in the pot. In life, variance is asymmetric. The right job, right investment, or right relationship can return 1000x. This means you should actually seek more variance in life than in poker, not less. You want to maximize your exposure to positive black swans.

This is the most important lesson from poker: thinking in terms of probabilities rather than outcomes. Many systems are stochastic, not deterministic. You can do everything right and still get crushed by variance.

For finance jobs like VC, poker is directly applicable. You're literally betting on incomplete information. But the real value comes from applying poker thinking to life itself. Chess assumes a controlled environment: perfect information, one opponent, predictable outcomes. Life is much messier. Life is multiple players with hidden cards, changing... See more

It also helps you make peace with the past. You stop playing results-oriented games ("I should have bought Bitcoin in 2013!") and start playing process games ("What's my framework for evaluating asymmetric bets?"). You stop letting bad outcomes invalidate good decisions. Focus on the process by which you made each decision. The outcome is just one

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The hard part about table selection IRL is that choosing easier tables feels like admitting weakness. There's more social status in losing at the hard table than winning at the easy one. How many people stay at McKinsey getting absolutely crushed when they could be the star player at a mid-size company?

Stop playing chess, searching for the "right" move. Start playing poker. Make the best decision you can with incomplete information, size your bets appropriately, and trust the process over enough hands.

once I have enough information to make a decision that's 70% likely to be right, I pull the trigger or fold. Waiting longer is just anxiety management, not risk managemen