Hello, TPE Nation. I recently made a blog post reviewing my 2013 performance and setting my goals for 2014 – it’s that time of year again, the time when everyone is full of motivation for whatever it is they want to achieve in the 12 months to come. Full of visions of winning the Sunday Million, making six figures of profit, going professional, or whatever other aims they might have. People charge into a new year of poker the same way they do their other New Year’s Resolutions – they set lofty ambitions and throw themselves headlong into them in the first few weeks of January, but fail to establish the correct processes, lose sight of their true motivations, and give up by March.
So, what can you do to avoid that in 2014? What can you do to ensure you give yourself the best possible chance of achieving what it is you want? Well, the first thing you need to do – and probably the most important thing – is focus exclusively on the things you have direct control over. Not necessarily complete control, because you can’t predict outside events, but direct control. What I mean by that is, under no circumstances should an MTT player set a profit goal of any kind, for any time period. Setting a profit goal is completely contradictory to everything you already know about poker, so much so that it will rewire all of your mental processes and have you focusing on all the wrong things. It will cause you to tear your hair out when you fail to achieve your ultimate goals, and overlook the possibility that you did everything right – not to mention, it’s the most obvious form of results-oriented thinking there is. You might play badly but achieve your goal anyway, which would harm you immeasurably in the long run.
Now that that’s out of the way and we’ve eliminated any thoughts of profit, let’s focus on what we should be thinking about. The things we can control. Processes, repeated actions, areas of focus, behaviours, thought patterns – all of the things that come from within ourselves. All the things over which we have direct control. If we decided we wanted to develop a process of exercising every day, the only thing stopping us from achieving that goal would be a lack of sufficient motivation to exercise – ultimately if we wanted, we could simply sleep 20 minutes fewer at night and run for 20 minutes a day, if we were so inclined. That’s direct control.
So what are some good goals to have? What should your goals be, bearing all this in mind? Well, only you can know that, but a good place to start is to define what a goal is. Before I was a poker player I did some work in youth leadership, mentoring and personal development, and by far the most useful goal setting technique I ever encountered revolved around an acronym that should apply to each of your goals – your goals should be SMART.
S – Specific – Your goals should be as precise as possible. That means that if you weren’t happy with the volume you achieved in 2013, your goal for 2014 isn’t “get more volume”. It’s “play X number of games”. “Get more volume” is just giving yourself a reason to umm and ahh about your future decisions, because at any point you can change the definition of what ‘more volume’ means. Set a number of games you want to play, and play that number of games or more.
M – Measurable – There should be a direct way for you to measure your progress in achieving your goals. That means “improve my game” or “make better decisions” are not goals. They’re general endeavours. Something like “raise my Evbb/100 number by 1bb” is a goal – it’s a measurable way to identify the quality of your decisions and the progress in your game (although it should be noted that while it’s one of the best methods of measuring overall MTT performance that’s available to us, it’s still not a particularly accurate measurement of skill in MTTs).
A – Achievable – Your goals should be of a nature that means you know exactly whether you’ve achieved them or not. If you set a goal of playing 500 MTTs in a month and you play 477 MTTs, you have not achieved your goal. If you set a goal of “around 500 MTTs per month, depending on how busy I am”, does 477 count? You’re going to decide that it does, but what if you played 467? 457? Where’s the line? You need to be able to definitively say to yourself at the end of the year, “I achieved these goals, and didn’t achieve these other ones”, not “I more or less got what I wanted”.
R – Realistic – This is one of the more obvious ones, but your goals should be within your reach. They should test you, but not be so outrageous that you push yourself too hard for 6 months and then give up. This is why smaller goals are useful – if you know how many MTTs you can play in a day, or a week, then you can extrapolate how many you can play in a month, or a year. Don’t just throw up a ridiculous number for the year and hope you hit it, or say to yourself, “I’m going to be a millionaire at the end of the year” without a plan. Set something that’s within your reach, but currently outside your grasp.
T – Time-Bound – Perhaps a little self-explanatory, given that we’re talking about goal-setting for the year 2014 in particular, but your goals should be confined to a specific period of time. Goals for the year, goals for the month, for the week or even the day are the only way to continually progress. A goal that has no specific time period attached to it is one that you will always procrastinate, and will never achieve. There will always be something better to do. Time-bound goals create deadlines, deadlines create pressure, and pressure creates motivation.
These five characteristics should apply to each of the goals you set for the year. I would, however, like to add a couple of extra ones of my own – you could say that I’d like to make your goals even SMARTER, by adding two extra criteria.
E – Exciting – If none of your goals excite you in some way, it’s time to add some that do. It’s a simple fact that many things such as volume goals or learning goals are crucial, but part of the reason why we set them is because these activities can sometimes be less enjoyable than other things on our agenda, and we need goals in order to make ourselves do them. If you don’t have at least some goals that excite you, however, your motivation will never rise high enough to achieve them – maybe you’d be excited by achieving a new PokerStars VIP level, for example, or the prospect of satelliting into your first major live tournament. Put something on your list that’s for your own enjoyment.
R – Re-Evaluated – Your goals should be re-evaluated throughout the year, or else you’ll give up entirely and lose focus. I hate to keep going back to volume goals as an example, but it’s the easiest one – if you set yourself the goal of playing 10k MTTs in a year and you only make it to 3k by the end of June, you’re almost certainly not going to make it to 10k. You have the choice of either breaking your back trying (and probably failing) to make it to 10k, harming your ROI in the process; giving up entirely and settling for 6k or even less; or, if you’re smart, you can re-evaluate. You can figure out how many MTTs you’d stand to play in the remaining 6 months, based on your daily, weekly and monthly numbers, if you added an extra 20-50% of effort to your existing process (depending on how lazy you’ve been), and shoot for that kind of improvement. Perhaps you could scale down your 10k goal to 8k games, a goal that would be entirely appropriate – it’s perfectly reasonable that someone who got lazy between January and June and only played 3k games, could manage 5k more between July and December. This is a much better result than if that person gave up on his goals altogether in July, got distracted and ended the year with 6k.
So that’s my perspective on goal-setting as we enter 2014. A lot of people in poker lose sight of what’s in their control and what’s not – as long as you steer clear of results-orientation, stay motivated, keep learning about yourself and the game, and stay SMARTER than the other guy, you’ll have every chance of achieving what it is you want this year. I wish you all the very best of luck for 2014!