In poker, when you have a favorable hand only to get beaten by an underdog, you’ve experienced a “bad beat.” It wasn’t supposed to work out like that; only it did. 

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.”