Success Is Determined By Effort

Had a really ordinary day today. Still sleeping on the floor at the moment - our bed and bedroom furniture still hasn't turned up ... delivery was scheduled for 4-6 weeks and now its been 14. The company promises it will be here this week - but that's another story. Anyway, woke up and just felt crap right off the bat, tired and irritable. Struggled to find focus all day at work - then compounded my mood by managing to spill 3/4 of my lunch over the kitchen at work - I overheated it in the microwave then dropped it when the steam burned my finger :p

So I'm riding home from work on the bus, trip takes about an hour. I'm almost home then the bus goes past the local school ... I look out the window and the school has a billboard out the front. Normally it has term dates or other important info on there, but today it had a single statement ... "Success is Determined By Effort". Despite my bad mood, this simple sentence really hit me. I thought thats so simple right there, yet so true and effective. Right away I felt better for some reason - and I thought this statement really also applies to poker. Long term, success is derived by the effort you put in to learning the theory, playing with discipline, and applying all the factors like the right mindset, and continually striving to approve.

It was also timely because I've had a sensational month results wise. But I'm not going to judge myself on that yardstick - a successful month is not whether I have made money (which could be short term luck on bad play) but an honest assessment of whether I put in the required effort this month. So what is my assessment for my performance in July? I give myself seven out of ten. My application has been much better this month ... I've focused on good table selection, and regular session reviews. In this sense, I think my effort was great and I'm happy with progress on this front. But there are other areas I need to improve. One is finding the right balance between study and play - I think at the moment I play too much and study too little. So I am setting this as my effort and improvement goal for August - finding the right balance between effective study and time at the tables. I'll report back at the end of the month to see whether I have put in the required effort on my goal for August.