I would never be a professional gambler but one of the things you find about professional gamblers — they may play poker at night but what they do during the day is they hang out together and they make side bets for large amounts of money. And it’s literally a side bet of sitting in a diner and betting on whether there are going to be more red cars than blue cars passing by. What they’re doing is “steeling” their own psychology to be able to pull the trigger on bets like that with a purely mathematical lens and with no emotion whatsoever. They’re trying to steel themselves to be able to be completely clinical.And so as contrast, what they then hope for that night when they sit across the table from someone is to hope they’re dealing with somebody who’s super emotional. Because the clinical person is going to just slaughter the emotional person. It’s this weird thing where it’s the kind of activity that should result in these wild highs and lows but the true pros are just indifferent. They don’t care because it’s a probabilistic outcome. That’s just part of the game and they’ll come back and they’ll probably be better the next day.
by Marc Andreessen and Sriram Krishnan
