Life is poker, not chess Four years ago I walked away from a guaranteed promotion at McKinsey and a $300K PE offer to work in gaming for a third of the salary. Many thought I was insane. They were playing chess: calculating the optimal move with perfect information. https://t.co/g5VHm1a12b

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

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.

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.