For context, no team losing by that much has ever come back to win in the finals. They were leading the series by 2-1. 

I wondered if the coach would just sit their star players and let their opponents, the San Antonio Spurs, have it. Rest and focus on the next win.

Nope. The Knicks played another two consistent quarters, and ended up winning by a point. It was the greatest comeback in NBA finals history.

Play the whole game. Give yourself a chance to snap out of the funk, and for your opponents to make mistakes. Don’t quit at the half.

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“Instead of focusing on being sure, they try to figure out how unsure they are, making their best guess at the chances that different outcomes will occur,” she writes. “The accuracy of those guesses will depend on how much information they have and how experienced they are at making such guesses. This is part of the basis of all bets.”

From this perspective, Annie suggests taking a more considered approach to when outcomes don’t unfold as we predicted or would have preferred. You’re not 100% wrong.

One key is to learn from the experience, and to examine the outcome to see if there are any insights or factors you can learn that might improve your reasoning the next time you need to make a decision.

The other is to accept that no matter how good your decision is—or how bad—sometimes factors that are out of your control have a greater effect on the outcome. “Luck” is just a word we use to describe these factors. 

Perhaps it’s assuring to remember that life is probabilistic; if you get to make enough decisions, and you learn from each outcome and improve your decision quality, your outcomes should also improve. At the same time, any given decision could turn out in a way you don’t expect.

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In The Biggest Bluff, author Maria Konnikova writes about her journey to becoming a professional poker player. She meets champion Erik Seidel, who takes her on as his student.

After narrowly losing a tournament, Maria finds Erik to vent about a bad beat. The odds had been in her favor. Erik, who is usually a good listener, uncharacteristically interrupts her. He tells her, “Bad beats are a really bad mental habit. You don’t want to ever dwell on them. It doesn’t help you become a better player.”

Instead, Erik tells Maria, “Focus on the process, not the luck. Did I play correctly? Everything else is just BS in our heads. Thinking that way won’t get you anywhere. You know about the randomness of it but it doesn’t help to think about it.”

Focusing on luck—randomness, uncertainty, chaos—encourages you to abdicate control over the situation. You feel like a victim. Instead, as Maria reflects, if you made the best decision possible, you want to say something more like this to yourself: “I made the correct decision. Sure, the outcome didn’t go my way, but I thought correctly under pressure. And that’s the skill I can control.” Things don’t just happen to you, you can take responsibility for your actions. If you’re learning, then you focus on the process, and the lesson you learned, and make sure to apply it to the next decision.

This attitude amplifies luck, in a sense; it leads you to focus on factors that you can control, to learn from the outcomes, which in turn energizes other people and encourages them to keep you at the top of their minds. 

I’m not a poker player, and I’ve gotten complimented on my ability to take feedback, but I’ve still often fallen into the vicious habit of framing outcomes as bad beats. As I reflect, I think about the times I’ve blamed circumstances or other people when I should have been deconstructing the outcome (by myself or with a peer/teacher), learning from it, and making a better decision and effort next time. 

Moving forward, I’ll take the advice from Maria and Erik: “No bad beats. Forget they ever happened.”

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I used to hope that I could figure this out before I wrote it. This happens sometimes, too. 

But more often than not, if I practice that way, I get stuck in a mindset where I can’t figure out how to land any idea. The solution there is to just start writing, and trust you’ll figure it out along the way. 

It’s easy to recover from writing a couple of hundred words that need more incubation. Usually, something clicks after a couple of days. Other times, it makes for nothing more than good raw material, and I start a new post like this one. It’s not as tragic as writing a novel or series that is all but impossible to land; one which you basically need to scrap and start over.

That’s one of the more useful lessons I’ve picked up as a writer. Make small bets, and work with what you’ve got.

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Work works itself to work

Work is happy each and every day

There’s nothing work can’t do

Work does anything and everything

Even work work doesn’t want to do

Work only knows to move forward

Work surprises everyone with its unstoppable energy

There is nothing work doesn’t know

It answers all if you ask

If you ask to do it work will do it

What work likes the most

Is to struggle with hard work

All the hard work work would do

Let us now work work work

It reminds me that work is a condition of life; it’s not meant to be escaped. 

A proper respect for your own work also makes sure you’re not exploited.

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The incentive for them is to have lots of steady customers; if you can come and go at any point, then that business isn’t as steady as it could be. 

(The prevalence of the subscription pricing model is an example of this. And there are many businesses who are fighting back by offering a pay once model, which used to be the convention.)

These businesses and technologies alienate us not only from each other but also our inner selves.

For example, let’s say you’re writing with AI. The AI has improved to the degree that you can’t tell if you wrote something or the AI wrote it. What can you do to trust that you wrote a piece? (The simple answer: don’t use AI to write. That’s why I don’t use AI to write on this blog.)

When you trust yourself, you don’t need to trust a business. When you can rely on yourself, you don’t need to rely on a business. 

You have a choice, and some businesses don’t trust you to choose them. So they are invested in getting you to rely on them, subscribe, and perhaps not reminding you that you have a choice to walk away.

And we are co-conspirators in this, because choosing to trust yourself also requires change and learning. It’s hard work. It’s much easier to outsource the responsibility. We are glad to pay an ignorance premium.

My suggestion is to always remember that you have a choice. In that spirit, there’s a saying, “Entrepreneurs are willing to work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week.” You may need to work harder to be independent; in some cases, it’s worth it.

Thanks first to Rachel for writing this great post on AI and alienation, as well as Matt and August for their posts.

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He is also a successful chef, cutting his teeth at one of the best restaurants in the city. A couple of times, I had his pasta for dinner. I made this realization the other day, though I haven’t asked him about it:

Burgers are his products, and cooking is his art. 

In building a burger restaurant, he still retains his craft through cooking. 

Another example: while I offer business services like business writing and speaking, writing at this blog, and my book, remain my art. I have a new product coming out, The Consistency Journal, that started off as an art project, and is quickly becoming a product.

When you’ve got a skill and you’re finding a place in the market for it, you’re offering a product or service. When you’ve got a skill and you’re focused on expressing it the way you want, you’re making art.

Making a product meet your standards for art will only cause you frustration. Similarly, so will making art with the expectations that it will make money like a product.

Another way of distinguishing: what projects are livestock, and which are pets? 

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If your life experiences have been anything like mine (e.g., growing up in collectivist culture, a formal education in business, working in professional services), they may have conditioned you to understand what other people wanted. Your own inclinations may appear less clearly to you because you haven’t paid attention to them in a while.

Maybe you compromise, twisting yourself into fitting the opportunities in front of you that you see; you want to start a new independent project—maybe a business—but you’re looking for new jobs instead. 

Or you chase whatever’s exciting to you in the present moment, because the feeling of validation is very rewarding. 

Or you decide to simply want whatever other people want; either in the mimetic sense of copying other people’s desires and adhering to convention, or simply supporting them to achieve their goals. If they’re happy, you’re happy. 

But, you tell yourself, not everybody gets to do what they want.

As a result, you’ve fallen out of tune with yourself; you’re not sure what you want. You trust other people more than you trust yourself.

If any of this sounds familiar, I want to suggest a moment of mindfulness. If you’re used to talking yourself out of what you want, or not even considering it, you may find yourself waking up one day to find yourself living a life you didn’t imagine for yourself. (The phenomenon of a mid-life crisis comes to mind.) One way to step off of this default path, and in pursuit of a meaningful life, is to build self trust.

The latest edition of my newsletter, Three Thought Starters, explores this topic and asks the following three questions:

What does freedom mean to you?

What did you leave too early?

Where can you show up as yourself? How can you sustain it?

You may read the edition here, and subscribe here.

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Jay-Z was the owner of an NBA team, the Brooklyn Nets. He was proud of this, and bragged about it constantly. Eventually, the news came out that he owned a fraction of 1% of the Nets (1/15th of 1%). A writer in the New York Times called it, “A tiny share of the team.” Another writer, in VICE, “He benefits from being able to pretend to own the Nets in some pretty obvious ways….” The NBA eventually updated the minimum to 1%. 

Still, when he’s asked about it, he says:

“It’s all wins. If I had 0.001% of the Nets, I won.”

And, in addressing the writers at the time, he says, “That’s their way of diminishing our accomplishments. Don’t let anyone diminish your accomplishments.”

Whenever someone tries to talk you out of your momentum—and sometimes, if you’re like me, you’re a willing collaborator or even instigator—this is always a useful story to remember.

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A pet is essentially part of a person’s family. Dogs and cats don’t need to help make money in order to earn their spot; they just need to be loved. When one passes away, it can feel as painful as losing a family member. It’s personal.

These two classifications—livestock and pets—tell entirely different stories about animals. It’s why the idea of eating dogs can seem disgusting, and the idea of having a pet cow seems so whimsical. It’s also a useful metaphor for thinking about your creative projects.

For example, if you’re an author working on your book with a publisher, don’t be surprised if they treat it like livestock. It’s just another book to them, and it’s how they make a living.

If you want to make a business out of your own creative projects, it may be more useful for you to learn how to treat them more like livestock than pets. And vice versa if you want to get more fulfillment from your creative projects; you want to treat them more like pets than livestock.

From this perspective, it’s easier to understand disagreements in perspective. Some people vehemently disagree with using AI in creative work, because to them, creative work is like a pet. Other people think it’s silly to not tap into such a powerful technology because it’s livestock. Nobody’s wrong; they each have different goals and purposes for their creative work.

This contrast is also useful for being flexible. For example, I treat every blog post like a pet, so I type everything by hand. That’s the point. However, if there’s a project I’m working on to promote my work, or to support a client, I will use AI as a tool if it helps make the work better; it’s livestock.

A good way to balance this could be to treat one project like livestock—e.g., purely commercial interests, etc.—and then to treat the next one like a pet—e.g., as a passion project. You can keep alternating and build a balanced portfolio of projects, with a half sustaining profit and the other sustaining passion. The old Hollywood saying goes, “One for them, and one for you.”

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