Sublime

One thing we’re incredibly good at is making excuses for ourselves and crafting explanations for why we’re still as good as we thought.

After some further experimentation, Gabriella adopted an optimization to this process: she’s not allowed to watch Netflix alone.fn1

He must be mindful of even those conclusions that he reached mindlessly,

Erik Seidel, for whom the challenge of poker is slightly different. For over three decades, he has led the poker world. He holds eight WSOP bracelets (only five players in the tournament’s history have more) and a World Poker Tour title. He is in the Poker Hall of Fame, one of just thirty-two living members. He boasts the fourth-highest tournament

“To go straight for the jugular: it all comes down to confidence, self-esteem, identity, what some people call ego,” he tells me. This is at the heart of what he needs to identify. Who are you? What’s important to you? “When you sit down to play, you put yourself on the line. What you have to understand is you’re always a person first and a poker

Attention is a powerful mitigator to overconfidence: it forces you to constantly reevaluate your knowledge and your game plan, lest you become too tied to a certain course of action. And if you lose? Well, it allows you to admit when it’s actually your fault and not a bad beat.