Know when you’re on tilt
Poker is a great analogy for life.
Many of the concepts you pick up from poker—e.g. table selection, expected value, “grinding”—show up in surprising ways in business and life, far beyond the confines of the game.
There is one lesson from poker in particular that has proved most helpful to me personally, and that’s knowing when I’m “on tilt.”
“Going on tilt” means you’re playing out of emotional frustration or confusion to the point you start making impulsive and irrational decisions.
What tends to tilt people? When they’ve played their hand perfectly, but still lose (aka “bad beats”). When they lose to clearly worse opponents. When they mentally dwell on a past mistake and let it affect how they play subsequent hands. This scene from Molly’s Game (2017) captures what it feels like, physiologically, to be tilted.
Needless to say, playing on tilt is a very costly mistake.
Outside of poker, we wrestle with tilt in our lives, too. A tilted investor can’t admit he was wrong and instead “puts good money after bad.” In relationships, tilt makes you all the more likely to hurl that one insult with irreparable damage. We underestimate the role of emotional regulation in decision making at our peril.
The good news is that leaders and top-level performers of all disciplines have figured ways to rein in this most basic, human flaw. We just have to learn from them.
Abraham Lincoln, under the pressure cooker of the Civil War, wrote angry letters reprimanding his generals, but had the wisdom to leave them unsent.1
The New Zealand All Blacks—the winningest team in rugby (and perhaps all sports) history—trains their players to recognise when they’re making blunders under pressure and to execute protocols for restoring their mental composure.2
Mental toughness is the ability to focus on the next most important thing.
— Jack Clark, Men’s Rugby Head Coach, University of California, Berkeley
When things repeatedly don’t go your way, it’s only human to feel stressed, frustrated, or embarrassed. What matters is how you respond to it.
You’ll invariably experience tilt at one point or another. The best you can do is to develop the self-awareness to know when you’re on tilt and to set up guardrails that help minimise the damage.