The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 371: Maria Konnikova - How To Pay Attention, Master Yourself, & Win

Episode Date: June 21, 2020

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk Text LEARNERS to 44222 Full show notes are at www.LearningLeader.com #371: Maria Konnikova - Maria Konnikova is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, The Confidence Game, winner of the 2016 Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking, and Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, an Anthony and Agatha Award finalist. Her new book, The Biggest Bluff, will be out from Penguin Press on June 23, 2020. She is a regularly contributing writer for The New Yorker whose writing has won numerous awards, including the 2019 Excellence in Science Journalism Award from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. While researching The Biggest Bluff, Maria became an international poker champion and the winner of over $300,000 in tournament earnings—and inadvertently turned into a professional poker player. Maria's writing has been featured in Best American Science and Nature Writing and has been translated into over twenty languages. Notes: Sustaining excellence = Genuine interest in what they do for a living They follow their curiosity - "It's not about wanting to make a shit load of money." Passionate "They work their asses off" - They work a lot. It doesn't just happen. "Follow your curiosity and obsessions with great rigor." - Brian Koppelman Why write a book about poker when you've never played before? "I wanted to write about chance and the role luck plays in our life." Game theory stemmed from poker Poker is about strategic decision making Why poker? "Poker is a powerful tool to metabolize the luck that surrounds us, and a way to become comfortable with something that is not only all too applicable to our current situation, but extremely difficult for the human mind to process: uncertainty." Erik Seidel became Maria's personal coach/mentor "There's no one like him." He's stood the test of time. He's been successful at poker for decades... He's evolved with the changes of the game, made adjustments and has won. He's kind and humble. Tips on asking for someone to mentor you: Do your homework - Read everything there is to know about the person before contacting them Be specific with your ask  Make sure you know why this person should be your mentor Figure out what's in it for them Find someone who can help amplify your strengths Don't write a novel in the first email or DM - Get to the point quickly If you can get an in person meeting, do it NEVER say: "Can I pick your brain?" Why playing poker is comparable to writing: Both are deceptively simple on the surface. Anyone can do either, but to do either well in the long term, a certain mastery is needed. Both are subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect, which means that the more someone knows, the more they realize how much they don't know on a topic, while someone with little knowledge tends to be falsely confident about their understanding of a topic Meta-cognitive process - "I great more aware of my thinking."  You must reflect before reacting. Poker helps you to practice this valuable skill. Make decisions after going through a process of reflection List the things you need to be attentive to What are the relevant factors? What should I be paying attention to? Write it down In order to make better decisions, you must be able to identify your process The ultimate goal of poker and life is to make the optimal decision in that moment The best poker players work incredibly hard: They study hands, they talk hands over with other bros, they watch video, they dissect hands. They build up their self control and their emotional regulation What Maria learned from playing a lot of tournament poker? "It is an extreme sport. You can't take breaks. You're put in a pressure cooker for hours and must make the right decision." "I had internalized gender stereotypes. I was letting myself be bullied. I'd take less active lines because I was scared. I had to overcome that and still need to work on it." Advice: "Work hard. Life gives you nothing. Everything is earned. Life isn't fair. You must work for it. Saying life isn't fair isn't good for you. Think: 'What can I do about it? What can I control?'" Follow your curiosity Read, Read, Read. Read poetry and read fiction

That's the goal. The goal is to keep improving, to find your mistakes and to keep getting better at this process of making decisions. Knowing once again that sometimes you're wrong, that making mistakes is okay, that it's okay to fail, it's actually okay to make the wrong decision. Because that's how you learn. You learn from those failures, but you can only learn from them if you can identify it and can then work at it. If you think you're just perfect and brilliant and a genius and everything is going against you, well, then you're, going to be making those mistakes over and over and over and you're not going to be learning. Are you looking to go beyond simply passively learning via podcast and books? Are you looking to level up your leadership and take a more proactive approach? If so, the Learning Leader Academy may be for you. It's been designed to not only provide you with online training videos.

In fact, I filmed 30 of them sitting side by side with my dad covering a wide variety of leadership topics. In addition to that, we created a playbook, a manual to put into practice to help you becoming more effective leader. But the Learning Leader Academy also gives you the opportunity to interact with an active community of leaders with growth-oriented mindsets. The video lessons serve as a framework to stimulate discussion amongst our community. of thoughtful and intentional leaders helping each other grow into the kind of leader that inspires others to follow. If this sounds interesting to you, go to Ryanhawk.me. That's Ryanhawk.

Dot me for more details about the Learning Leader Academy. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show presented by Brixie and Meyer. I am Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text, learners to 44222. In order to join tens of thousands of learning leaders from all over the world. Receive Mindful Monday updates what I'm reading, writing, watching, thinking about. Also give you more details about how my book, Welcome to Management,

will help you become a more effective leader. Text, learners to 44222.2. Now on tonight's featured leader, the great Maria, Kanokova, New York Times bestselling author, contributing writer for the New Yorker. Her writing has won numerous awards, including the 2019 Excellence in Science Journalism Award from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. While researching her latest book, which is titled The Biggest Bluff, Maria became an international poker champion and the winner of over $300,000 in tournament earnings.

She earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard and received her PhD in psychology from Columbia. A few of the topics we discussed how to properly cold email a potential mentor. And then Maria shares how we learn the difference between what we can control and what we can't. And then how to make better decisions in the face of uncertainty. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Maria Konnikova. All right, Maria, it's really good to see you and talk to you again. It's been four and a half years since we last recorded. I can't believe that time flies.

A lot has happened in that time. I've been following closely because I've been fascinated by what you've gotten into over the past four and a half years, and that's what we'll spend the bulk of our time talking about today. But I do, now that some time has passed since we talked, I am curious at a more broader perspective, Maria, if you think about you're someone who is a researcher, you're a writer, you're a thinker, you've sustained excellence in your own right in multiple disciplines. I'm curious from your perspective, when you think about the behaviors of people who have sustained excellence over an extended period of time, what have you found to be some of those

commonalities among those people? I think that, I mean, first of all, there are obviously a lot of differences. And I think that, you know, you do have to realize that everyone is different and that there's no one path to success. And so I sometimes get frustrated when, you know, you have things like, oh, the morning routines of successful people. Because you know what? My routine might not work for you. But so putting that aside, I do think that there are certain characteristics that I've encountered in people who are consistently excelling at what they do. I don't know if I'm one of them, but in others that I've met. And I think it's a few things.

One, it's genuine interest. It's people who follow their curiosities, people who are truly interested in what they're doing and learning, and who aren't doing it for an ulterior purpose. Honestly, I have never met kind of a successful person who is satisfied whose motivation was, I just want to make a shitload of money. You know, it just doesn't happen. Normally, they end up making that money because they were motivated by something else, because they wanted to learn the skill.

They had kind of more, I hate to say the word pure, but more kind of intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation. So I think these are people who are curious. passionate, not necessarily people who, you know, are super focused on any one thing, but people who are focused on life, who are interested in exploring a lot of different elements, and who don't ask questions like, well, how will this be useful to me? And instead say, you know what, this interests me. Let me work on it right now. And we'll see later if it's useful or not. Usefulness is not a good metric. Instead, let me focus on something else. So I think that there's that.

The other thing that I think is incredibly important is that these are all people who work their asses off, who work really, really hard and who know that there are no shortcuts. You have no idea how many times people will come up to me. You're like, oh, you know, I have a great op-ed idea for the New York Times, or can you put me in touch with your editor at the New York or something like that? And I say, yeah, where have you written? Kind of what's your background? And they say, oh, well, nowhere yet, but this is perfect.

And my answer to that is, well, it doesn't quite work that way. You know, you need to work at it. Everything is, everything has to be worked at and you have to work hard. And it doesn't just happen. I mean, sometimes it just happens, but that's very, very rare. So all of these people are people who just work so hard. Before we started recording, you and I were talking about a mutual friend of ours, Brian Copleman, who you've had on the show. I mean, people and people look at him and say, oh, you know, I want to create billions or I want to create rounders.

What do I do? And I mean, Brian works so hard. I mean, he works every single day. He writes every single day. And he wrote for years and years and years and years before he sold his first thing. And he was just passionate about it and wanted to do it. He also had a career in music. I mean, he discovered Tracy Chapman. Like, these are, you know, he's, he's someone who follows his interests and does that and realizes that it's damn hard work. And so I think that that's another character. These are you have to be willing to work hard. You have to be willing to put in the time. You have to be willing to understand that success doesn't come for free. Ryan's one of my favorite quotes ever is he follows his passions and curiosities with great rigor. And he uses. I didn't know he said that, but there you go. He actually just encapsulated some of the things that I exactly. I sat in his office and it was an incredible day, spent a day in New York with him. And I like the word rigor and rigorous. I learned it directly from him. I've used it a million times since that meeting. But I think it makes sense with your passions and curiosities with great rigor because I agree with you. I don't love the advice of like find your passion. You never work a day in your life because that's not true because I feel like I am fortunate to have

created something to where I do follow what I'm most curious and passionate about. But I absolutely work like crazy. In fact, more than any other job I've ever had. And I would imagine, and we can maybe transition to some of the things that you've done recently from a poker perspective, just because you're really smart and really educated and a thoughtful writer does not mean you're going to be a good poker player. Oh, absolutely not. And so I'm curious, can you start, I guess first though, maybe we can set the stage. What inspired you to take on this project of becoming a poker player, because I believe you've never played prior to this starting, correct? Yes. Yeah. So what was it about poker and why did you want to go down this route?

Yeah, that's, I mean, that's a very good question and one that is not at all obvious because I was never a poker fan. I mean, I knew nothing about the game at all, like literally zero. never watched poker. The only poker game I'd ever seen was Rounders. That was my, that was the extent of my poker games. So I thought that, you know, everyone looked like Teddy KGB and had an underground club and that, and that's what poker was. And that was, that was my limited experience. And I had no interest in it. You know, I'm not a games player. I actually don't love games. I, you know, I dread, I love my nieces and nephews, but I actually dread when they ask me to play board games. You know, it's not, I don't find it fun. I would much rather do something else. So it's

not something that is like a natural affinity of mine. And I think that's actually an exception. Most poker players are people who've loved the game for a long time, who played it as children, who grew up in households where games were a big thing. Oftentimes they came to it from, you know, from chess or from Magic the Gathering. That's a huge one, you know, from other games where they were, they were people who really enjoyed playing games. And so I think I'm actually quite different in that regard. I wanted to write a book about chance and the role that luck plays in our lives. And I was looking for a way into that topic because, you know, chance is not a book.

You need a story. You need some way to look at these big philosophical questions of, you know, how much of our lives do we control? and all of that. And so I was reading because whenever I'm embarking on something new, whenever I'm doing a new project, anything like that, I always will read a lot, just days and days and weeks, in this case months. You have no idea how many ideas I had to go through. And at some point, my agent could probably tell how much I hated her. I actually love her. She's wonderful because she kept saying, no, no, no, no, no. very good and she's very harsh when an idea is clearly not going to work, which is why I love

her. But it was just, it was just this countless back and forth. I had so many different ideas for the book as I was reading. I was like, ooh, this is good. This is good. And then I came across poker when I was reading about game theory because it ends up that poker was the inspiration for game theory, John von Neumann, who created, who's the father of game theory was a poker player. and game theory was actually his attempt to solve poker because he thought that poker was the best model for strategic decision-making in life, because it's a game of incomplete information, just like life. You have to make decisions based on information that's never going to be complete, no matter how hard you try and how much you look. And you have to be okay with that.

So I was like, oh, this sounds really interesting. What is this poker thing? And I started reading about poker, and it just something coalesced in my, mind. You know, I'd been seeped in this world now for months, this world of chance. And I thought, hey, this might be a way in. What about if I got someone to teach me poker, someone really good, and spent some time learning the game. Originally, it was supposed to be a year. It was supposed to have, you know, a very nice and neat start point and end point. Obviously, that didn't happen. You know, best played less, best laid plans of mice and men did not go the way it was supposed to.

But that was the original intent. And I thought, well, why don't I use that as a, you know, the backbone of the book, use that journey as a way of exploring chance. And that's how I got into poker. And you mentioned the role of a coach. And the coach that you chose, and he chose you, was Eric Seidel for those Rounders fans listening. Eric was made famous or infamous as a part of Rounders because they show a scene when he makes a poor play and loses. But Eric is world class, one of the best players ever. And so I'm curious about initially the role of a coach and how Eric helped you. And there's follow-ups to this, but let's first start with that part about the role of him as your coach and how that benefited you so much. Absolutely. Absolutely. Before I answer

a question, I'm going to defend Eric's reputation. He was not made infamous. That was his first major tournament and he came in second in the main event of the World Series of poker. He'd never played a major poker tournament before. So to come in second in the main event is kind of insane. And he freely admits that he was outplayed. He didn't, that Johnny Chan was much better than he was. I mean, he was a kid, right? In the movie, I say, always call him Eric Seidel. The kid doesn't know what hit him. So that's exactly right. Anyway, that aside, one of the things I've learned because I have as you mentioned, and you don't even know the half of it, switch directions many times and done many things in my life. In my first year out of college, I went through five different jobs.

You know, I worked in advertising as a copywriter for two different agencies. I was a bartender. You know, just all of these different things. I briefly worked in consulting for like one week. It was entertainment consulting, and I started and I left. I basically walked in and then walked straight out. So that didn't work very well. I worked in television. So all of these different, all of these different things. And one of the things that I learned, and I think I learned this earlier, it's one of the reasons why I actually had a really good undergraduate experience where some people who went to undergrad with me felt lost. They felt like there weren't enough, you know, support resources because I knew the importance of finding good mentors, of finding people who

could guide you, who could help you to whom you could go. And I was one of the things that I think I'm very good at is asking for help and telling people, look, I don't know, but this is why I'm really interested in you, why I love what you do, why I want to work with you, why I'd like to learn from you. As an undergraduate, I got incredibly lucky. I approached Stephen Pinker, who had just come to Harvard, and I'd read all of his books. I mean, at the time, he's written many more. So by the way, this was not your question, but if you're going to approach someone to be a mentor, a coach, whatever it is, do your homework and really, really learn about them and make sure you know exactly why it's this person. And the reason of, oh, this person's really famous in my field is not enough because why are they famous? Are they going to be a good fit for you? Are they going to be someone from whom you personally can learn? That's actually, you know, that's how I ended up at Columbia for graduate school because I specifically wanted to work with Walter Michelle. I picked the person before I picked the school. So that's just a little, a little caveat.

Real quick, Maria, I don't, I think it's, it's, it's, it's really important because you're probably asked to now mentor people as you are asking others to mentor you. This comes up. There are leaders listening who are running billion dollar companies. People are asking them and they're asking others, I think it might be worth it for us to briefly unpack the, the, the, I have some ideas around this too, but the ideal or the, the proper way to seek out mentorship. Because for me, the one word that I would use that's important is specificity. Yes. Meaning the, can I pick your brain, take you out to coffee emails. Oh my God.

Yes. Are they, it's like the fingers on the chalkboard. Can I tell you if some If someone sends me an email about picking my brain, I just want to, I just want to shout. No, that's not going to happen. That feels that the thought of that is weird. But when somebody says, you know, I listened to this episode and at minute 24, you had this six-minute's little monologue about this specific thing that applies to my life. And this is what I would love to talk to you about. I'm basically in 100% of the time. They've done their work.

They're very specific. Is there flattery, I guess? But it doesn't even matter. It's really about the specificity behind the ask as opposed to just broadly. And so, yeah, I would love to hear your take this. Yeah. No, I think specificity is really important. That's why I said do your homework.

Because there are so many people who are famous and good and, you know, high profile. And they'd make horrible mentors for you. Maybe they'd be a good mentor for someone else. But you need to know, this is, you know, this actually goes back to the beginning of our conversation when you asked me about excellence in different fields. And I said you have to have intrinsic, not extrinsic motivations. You can't do something because you think it's going to be useful. You can't do something because you think you're going to make a lot of money.

You have to do it because you have a genuine interest in it. And that's how you will eventually, it will become useful somehow. You can't predict the future. You don't know how things are going to be useful. And I actually hate, you can almost always smell it. Not always, I've made mistakes. You can almost always smell it when someone approaches you because they think you're going to be useful. You know, a lot of people want me to be their quote-unquote mentor, but really they want to write for the New Yorker.

They want me to be a gatekeeper and to open the gates and to say, oh, you know, you are so brilliant. I'm going to give you all of the editorial contacts and I'm going to tell them how brilliant you are. and that's all they want. And that's, that kind of feels icky. That feels like they're using me because they are. They're using me as a, this, you know, this can be useful. And I think the much better approaches are, okay, you know, why, why do I really want, what do I want to learn from this person? Because it's a mentorship. And that means to mentor. That doesn't mean to be, you know, a therapist or a career coach or any of those things. You pay those people. mentorship you don't pay. And it's something where it has to be a mutual relationship. And there has to be something in it for the mentor too. You know, it can't just be, I'm brilliant. Come work with, you know.

I think I'll be a great mentee. And so I get, you know, as you say, specificity is really important. That's why I said, do your homework. Because sometimes I've had people approach me and it's clear that they have read nothing I've written. They don't know anything about me. They've just looked up a few different things, and they'll say something that makes it clear that they really don't know. And that's right away, I'm going to say no.

And maybe they are smart, but they just don't, you know, they haven't done their research, and they don't really know how I personally can help. But I've been approached by some incredible people. I mentored a girl a few years ago who was in a totally different area, and she was in graphic art design. and she just, she loved, and I can't help with that. I know nothing about art design, but she loved my books, and she kind of loved the, and I came to speak to her class at some point, and she really enjoyed kind of some of that, the philosophical stuff that I talked about.

And she asked me just to kind of help her as she was graduating, and we met over, you know, multiple months, and she ended up making a very different career choice because of, because of our conversations and it was clear that she just valued my you know my approach and my thought and I and it was just a pure joy you know to to work with her and that's I think the that's the ideal relationship how about now for Eric you're your you've made a call like what you've had a million ideas you had to get through a lot of the bad ones your agent helped you out your lawyer helped you out and you you you find poker now you're thinking okay like a lot of things you're a lot of things I need a mentor. I need a coach. I need someone to help me. And you go to Eric. So how did this

relationship come about? Why? What was in it for him? Because you mentioned that it was a real relationship, but mutually beneficial relationship. Absolutely. And, you know, to, once again, to caveat because there are caveats and everything. I tried to do as much research as I could before I met him. But Eric's insanely private. I mean, there is nothing about Eric's out on the internet. All you can, you can find his poker results and some videos and that's about it. So it was hard. It's not like, you know, approaching writers or people who give interviews or people who share a lot. So I did my best. Why him though versus like, there's a bunch of great poker players out there, probably good teachers that are very public out there, Daniel McGrano or Johnny Chan or I don't

know, there are plenty of people out there. Annie Duke's been on the show. Livbo Rie's been on the show, right? These are some players. What, what, what? What? What? it about him? First of all, there's no one like him because there's no one who's been around since the 80s and has been crushing for every single decade. There's just none of those other names match. And don't get me wrong, live is brilliant. I love Liv, but Liv no longer plays poker. She is focused on another part of her life and I, you know, I'm so excited for her. She's doing these amazing science videos. Brilliant, brilliant girl, woman. But, and was, and was a wonderful poker player. But she was young. She's someone who knew, you know, one specific

approach. I wanted someone who had stood the test of time, someone who showed an ability to change and to keep excelling throughout different environments, throughout different situations, as the game changed, who could change and grow with it. I wanted someone with a more psychological approach. So I didn't want any young players because they were going to be probably more focused on the mathematics, the statistics, those types of elements. And when you find, when you're looking for a mentor, it's very, it's good to find someone on your wavelength who can, especially if you're looking to get good quickly, someone who shares your approach to the world, someone who will be able to amplify your strengths. My strengths are psychology. They ain't math. The last

time I took a math class was in high school. I bow down to Livbury, but I'm no Libreiberi. You know, I did not, I do not know astrophysics and I can't do those calculations. So I needed someone who had a more psychological approach. And then the final thing, I actually liked that Eric wasn't out there. I wanted someone who was just nice and humble because I think that those are really important characteristics. Very underrated characteristics. Like being, it's one of the funny things like when working in a client service type of a business here, being pleasant and easy to work with is very underrated. Just be like, yeah, you know, he's pretty easy to work with. Like she's easy to work with.

It's amazing how that is an underrated shows up on time. I remember compliments that to me. He's like one of the kind of things that we do, Dave and I, his partner, writing partner, we show up on time. You know, like little things like that were easy to work with. It's funny that that's coming up again, but like he's kind, he's humble, these qualities that these are choices. You choose to be kind. You choose to have a humble approach about you that I believe you can make these choices.

So anyway, go ahead. Keep going. No. So, but that about wraps up the answer to why I chose Eric. Yeah. So these were the things. And it's funny, the way that what actually clinched it, for me so that I didn't have to make up a list.

There was no number two on the list. So I'm very lucky that Eric said yes. And what clinched it was there was a sports analytics conference that was happening in New York around the same time I was doing this. And one of my friends had sent me information about it, someone who I don't know if you've had on the show, but if not, you absolutely should, David Epstein, who's the author of Range in the sports chain. And he's just, he's brilliant.

and talk about nice. He is one of the just nicest, most incredible people I know. I've known him for a long time. And he is just, he exudes goodness. He is one of the best people I know. Anyway, plug for David Epstein. So he invited me. He said, oh, you know, I think you might be interested in some of the events at this conference.

So he sent me the agenda. And I was looking through it, like looking at the different events. And there on a panel about decision making was Eric Seidel. It was poker and decision making. And it just seemed like a sign. But really, it seemed like, oh, my God. And he was on with actually someone else I know, who's also a wonderful writer and psychologist, Adam Alter.

So they were going to be in conversation. The event never ended up happening. So Eric had a conflict and wasn't able to appear. So the panel never actually took place. But when I saw the schedule, I just thought, wow, this is someone who is interested in psychology and in kind of those elements of it and is willing to appear, you know,

with a psychologist from NYU on a panel at this conference, that's cool. That's really interesting. That tells me something about him. And so when I saw that, that just kind of clinched it. And I, luckily, I'm a journalist and used to approaching a lot of people who don't want to be approached. So I basically cold called Eric. Okay, so I'm asked a lot about cold calls, cold emails. I've done it over the years.

I mean, it wasn't an actual call. Yes. I find that actual cold calls are very, very bad. these days people find it very interesting. I'm curious about this part. How did you ask? What happened? What did you say? I'm sure you did your homework, right? You were prepared. But what are some of the things you said that were convinced? I mean, it helps that you've got a track record, I would imagine. But what did you say? Well, when I first reached out, I said, hey, I'm a writer for the New Yorker. I'm working on my next project. And I think it's something that you might be interested in. I'd love to talk to you about it. Would you have a few minutes?

And so just very, very quick, I think that initial approaches should never be essays. If I open an email and it's five paragraphs long, I close it right back up because I know that I'm not going to be able to respond to it quickly. And normally it ends up sitting in my mailbox for a year because I've never actually read it and never go back to it. And then I feel really guilty and delete it. Gotcha. And that's just my own failing, but I, length is not your friend. Good piece of advice for people. I mean, I get hundreds of emails.

People think, and people get really upset. They take it personally when you don't write back. But when you send me a book in email form, I just, it's overwhelming. And it's hard to read and it's hard to figure out what you want. Right. You know, it's really good to just have a very short message up front. And then maybe send me the book afterwards if I express interest. And I don't mean actual book, although people have sent me actual books by email.

I just mean long emails. Right. So he responded to this little Twitter direct message. And he said, sure, you know, I love the New Yorker like your work. So that was good right away. When he said, I love the New Yorker, it was kind of this guy also likes the New Yorker. This is good. I didn't yet know how rare that was among poker players.

but it's rare. And then he said, I actually happen to be in New York. So if you want to meet in person, we can do that. And I said, yes, please. Because another tip, you know, if you can get an in person meeting, when there's no, when you're not in lockdown and it's not COVID, and we can once again do this. So be safe. Do not take in person meetings right now. But in general, if you can do it in person, do it in person. And that's a really good tip just for anything. for journalists. A lot of young journalists want to do everything over email, and I try to discourage them from doing it.

When I mentor people, I say try to meet with this person, if you can, you know, if they are actually in some sort of a reasonable area, then do that. If you can't do video, and if you can't do video, do a phone call, and email is your last resort. Because as communication becomes more and more removed, you learn less and less, because you don't pick up on the cues, you don't pick up on the body language, you don't pick up on the story, they're telling you in their other gestures and not in the words. And so you actually miss a lot. And when you're writing a story, you want to try to get people in their natural habitat too, because they show you more than they tell you. You know, when I was, whenever I write stories for the New Yorker about scientists, I always ask to go to their lab and actually watch them work and observe them. And I think that that's,

Just so telling. Sorry, I keep getting into these asides, but I think they're, I think they're important for learning. So, so I was thrilled that he wanted to meet in person. Gotcha. Okay. I want to get into some of his stuff too, but I also, I want to bounce around for a second. So part of what this, what you've written about is the role of luck in our lives. And I think something you've written about when it comes to poker, you said poker is a powerful tool to metabolize the luck that surrounds us and the way to become comfortable with something that is not only all too applicable to our current situation, but extremely difficult for the human mind to process uncertainty. And I wanted to grab that quote and have you expand on that because that is something

certainly happening for everybody right now. And I like these to be timeless though. And from a timeless perspective, uncertainty in leadership is a sense. is a certainty. It will always be part of being a leader is having to make decisions with 50% of the information or less or a little bit more. And so you're always going to face some sort of uncertainty. What have you taken from what you learned? And we could get deep into now some of your work that's published in the book that you've learned from a poker perspective to help make you make better decisions in life and understand the role of luck in our lives as it pertains to that.

Well, good question to get me to start reading the book from beginning to end in order to not quite answer it because I think at the end of the day you learn that you'll never be able to answer that question completely because that's the thing about uncertainty. It's always going to exist and you cannot eliminate it. But what poker is really, really good at teaching you is to, first of all, realize that everything is a game of incompleteness. information. So for those people listening who aren't poker players, poker, it's defining characteristics as a game is that it's a game of incomplete information. So there's information that I have. There's information that you have. There's information we have in common, but nobody has all of the information. It's not like chess where everyone sees the entire board. Everyone sees all of the pieces. No one knows my cards except for me. And no one knows your cards except for you. But what do they

know. Well, they know how you're acting, the signals that you are throwing off, how you're playing, what you're doing. And you have to try to make the best decision you can, integrating all of those factors, integrating what you're doing now, what you've done before, what I know about you, what's on the board, what cards I have, because that tells me what you can't have. So just using all of this information to make the best decision possible, knowing that you're never going to be able to know anything, everything, that your information inherently is going to be incomplete. And so you're only going to be able to make as good a decision as the information you have, the way that you've interpreted that information in this particular moment.

And then there are these elements in poker that are just so, it's such a wonderful way of looking at life because it's so clear, it's a game, it's clean, it's not noisy, you know exactly what you control and what you don't control. And there are two moments where you don't control anything. One, the initial deal, what cards everyone gets. And two, the runout of the deck. You don't control the cards on the board. You don't know what cards coming next. And so as more information comes in, as the decision environment changes, you have to be willing to change and to change your perceptions, to change your decisions to realize, oh, now I have more information. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe now I actually have to act in a different direction. I need to be flexible about it.

And ultimately, my goal is to make the best decision I possibly can with limited information, knowing I can't control the cards, and knowing that the cards might go against me. Your goal is to get your money in as a favorite. And you know what? If you get your money in as a 75% favorite, you know what's going to happen 25% of the time? You're going to lose. And you have to learn to separate the decision from that outcome because you don't control the outcome. That's the uncertainty. But if your decision was sound, if you made the decision to the best of your abilities using all the information you had available, well, then you have to make that decision over and over and over, even if you lose. Because variance only evens out in the long term. In the short term,

it doesn't care that you already lost three times and it was only supposed to be 25%. So what? Yeah. So you're talking about the numbers and the math. You're not necessarily a math person. So I'm wondering, how does that play a role? Because Maria, what I'd like to do is relate this off the felt, off the poker table to somebody. Let's say somebody is a mid-level manager at a big company and they're trying to build a great team of culture and they have to make these tough decisions, whether it's hiring or

firing or the tone of their Monday morning meeting, whatever may be, they're making decisions constantly. And there's not necessarily the cut and dry math of like, okay, I have ACEs, you know, you have King, so I'm a whatever favorite to you, four to one or whatever the math turns out to be if we flip them up before the cards come out. How would you relate it to that person, to the person in that role to say, okay, this is how I can just focus on making the best possible decision on a daily basis with incomplete information. I think that that's the crucial lesson of poker because at the end of the day, you know, there are no probabilities like that in life. You actually have no idea if you're getting your money in as a 75% favorite in life because

there's so much out there. There's so much data. There's so much noise. And it's really difficult to figure that out. So what you do, actually, the thing that's transferable is actually two things. One, can I develop that, can I take that metacognitive awareness of my decision process, of the factors that I use, of how I come to decisions, my awareness of my own thinking, can I take that from the poker table to life and actually think through decisions that way? Because in real life, we often, and in poker, actually, a lot of players play this way. we are reactive and we act quickly without reflecting, without thinking through the things, without thinking through the factors that are important. And it's so important to pause and to actually reflect and to be, to not be reactive, to actually think, to be reflective and to make decisions after you follow a certain process. So in poker, you start learning which elements

to pay attention to. What are things that are important? One of the things that Eric would teach me over and over is he would correct me when I was not giving him the accurate information when I was asking him a question about a hand. He would say, no, you need to tell me this. You need to tell me that. You need to pay attention to this and that. And it was very overwhelming at first, but eventually I learned, okay, this is my list of things that I need to relay. These are the things I need to be attentive to. This is where my information is going to come from. And in life, you can actually learn to do the same thing. You can actually learn, okay, you know, for different decisions, what are the relevant factors? What do I need to pay attention to? What things do I need to take into

account? And I've actually found that it's very helpful. And I got this habit from poker to write everything down so that you can actually then go back and you have some sort of objective record of your thought process of the factors that you were using because otherwise you are going to fall prey to hindsight bias. You think you're going to avoid it, but you're not. The outcome is going to influence how you remember making the decision. It's just a quirk of the human mind. And oftentimes you're going to be so sure that you thought about this and you thought about that and, you know, stupid, stupid stock market. I can't believe it did that. Right. And I lost all this money. But I was right. Really, my decision was right. And you really believe that. And then you go back to your actual thought

process and you say, oops, that's not what I was thinking at all. That wasn't even on my list. This was a variable I hadn't even considered. But unless you have some sort of objective thing to go back to, you're never going to be able to tell that. And you're not going to be able to improve your decision quality going forward because that's the goal. The goal is to keep improving, to find your mistakes, and to keep getting better at this process of making decisions. Knowing once again that sometimes you're wrong, that making mistakes is okay, that it's okay to fail, it's actually okay to make the wrong decision, because that's how you learn. You learn from those failures, but you can only learn from them if you can identify it and can then work at it. If you think you're just perfect

and brilliant and a genius and everything is going against you, well, then you're going to be making those mistakes over and over and over, and you're not going to be learning. I read this somewhere. I forget. Marry the process. divorce the results. And I, in leading up to do my research for this conversation, Maria, I saw a quote from Eric where he said he's got a different perspective of the world in general. He has less self-involvement in the results and more focus on the process of making these decisions. And that feels to me exactly kind of in line with what you're talking about. Absolutely. And actually, while one of the things that he told me that's in my book is that the ultimate goal of poker

isn't to make the most money, it's to make the best decisions. And that's how you will eventually make the most money. But if your goal from the onset is I'm going to make the most money, then that actually compromises your decision quality because you might make the wrong decision in the moment because that's what you're motivated to do. And so you might make bad decisions because you're not actually being logical. You're not being rational. Instead, you're saying, I need to win this pot.

I need to win this money. You know, I can't lose this. I can't afford to lose what's in the middle. So I'm going to run this huge bluff. I have nothing, but, you know, I'm all in because you feel the need to kind of get it all and to win it all and to be what I call in my book and I borrowed this term from Michael Lewis, a big swinging dick. And, you know, big swinging dicks are very dangerous. It reminds me this.

I haven't done it much lately, but you play blackjack and you got a, you got a 10 and the dealer showing a six and the person's reluctant to double down. And then you tell them to double down and they do and they lose and like, see, I told you. And it's like, that's one hand. Got unlucky. It was the proper decision when they're showing a 6. You have a 10. It is a double down 100% of the time. It's the proper decision.

Yes, that doesn't mean you're going to win every time, but it is the process. It is the proper choice to make if your goal is to win. And that's the part that is tough at times where it just leaves you to say, I'm just going to keep my mouth shut here and focus on playing because I think that comes up. But one thing you brought up, Maria, that I think is interesting to me that because as someone who published their first book this year, this really stuck with me because I've played poker and I've written a book. and you've compared poker to writing, how both are deceptively simple on the surface. Like anyone can do either, but to do either well in the long term, a certain mastery is needed. And so both are subject to the Dunning Kruger effect, which means that the more someone knows, the more they realize how much they don't know about a topic,

while someone with little knowledge tends to be falsely confident about their understanding of a topic. This spoke to me. Like, that is so accurate when it comes to both writing and poker. As I, after I got a book deal, I'm in there, I'm writing, I'm thinking, oh, my goodness, why did they give me a book deal? I thought I was actually kind of good at this. And now I realize I'm not. And I think it's because I just did it so much more, same way with poker. So I'd love for you to expand on that aspect of the relationship between poker and writing and how the more you know, It's like, oh, there's so much more to know. Absolutely.

And I think Dunning Kruger, I mean, it applies to those and everywhere else. I mean, it's one of the most applicable effects ever. And, I mean, I found I have seen it in myself. There's no protection from the Dunning Kruger effect. It's very powerful. So I sometimes will reflect and say, oops, I thought that was going to be easy. Shows what I know. But yeah, it's one of these things where I think that poker

and writing have a lot of commonalities. And from the outside, they both look really easy. It looks like it's an easy way to make lots of money. And that's an awful misconception because most writers don't make a lot of money. And most poker players don't make a lot of money. But you see kind of these outlier cases in the media and you think, oh, you know, this is, this is easy. But even someone like, people think that I make tons of money. I don't. It's actually, you know, it's not, I'm never, it's not something I did to become a millionaire and have a very lucrative thing from either writing or poker, actually, even though I had some good years in poker. But that's, you know, it's a, it's a misconception from the outside because you're seeing a very skewed,

kind of version of the world. But it comes from, I think, in fact, that writing is something that everyone can do. Everyone knows language. Everyone knows how to speak. Everyone's taught to write. And so they think, oh, how hard can writing a book be? You know, it's, I already know how to do it. No one comes up to a piano and says, oh, I know the, you know, I know the scale. Let me write a symphony. And yet people do that about music all the time. They say, oh, I know the alphabet and I know how words work. Let me write a book. I'm going to be great. Just give me money. And poker also looks like a very just easy way to you just sit down and break in the cash. And in my book, I talk about how many times people have approached Eric. And by people, I mean Uber drivers, lift drivers, bartenders, waiters, people who recognize him as he's trying

to live his life and tell him that they could be really great poker players and he should stake them. That the only reason that they're not him, because really they can play better than he can, but the only reason they're not him is that they've never gotten that lucky break. And so he should give them that lucky break. And it just happens so much that it's become a running joke. You know, everyone, everyone's a great poker player. And there's so many armchair great poker players who look and say, oh, I can't believe they're making that mistake. You know, this is how you play that hand. Because it just seems like, oh, what do you do? You sit at a table and you and you bluff and you get all the money. So, and it's something everyone can do, right? Everyone can

sit at a table and look at cards and say, I raise, I raise, I raise. And so it seems like, like a very easy way to rake in the cash. And both of those things are complete misperceptions. The best players, just like the best writers, work their asses off. I mean, players at the top of the game, so I, through Eric, met most of the best players in the world right now, and a lot of them became friends. And I've learned that these are just brilliant, wonderful people

who could have done anything they wanted to do in life and decided to pursue this game. They study for hours and hours and hours. They dissect hands. They talk to each other. They run computer simulations. I mean, they work hard. This is, and they are able to work hard on self-control and emotional regulation because

there are going to be years where they lose a lot of money. I mean, Eric has made millions from poker and has had years where he's made millions and he's had years where he's lost millions. and he's had to be able to get through that and to kind of know, okay, you know, this is okay. I've not played above my bankroll. I've not, you know, I'm not running well right now. What can I learn? How can I improve?

Are there things I'm doing wrong? Am I just getting unlucky? And they move on and they learn. But can you imagine for a lot of people, they have a little success and then they go crazy. They start playing well above their limits and they don't realize how lucky they got. They don't appreciate the luck factor. They don't plan ahead. And they go broke.

The book is titled The Biggest Bluff. The subtitle is what I'm particularly curious about for this next question, which is how I learned to pay attention, master myself, and win. And Maria, over the five plus years of doing this show, I found that excellent leaders have developed a skill, a high level skill of self-awareness, understanding themselves very well, where they excel, where they don't, have a humility about them when it comes to that. And so when you say, master myself, what I thought, just from reading the title alone,

is that you developed a higher sense of self-awareness. What are some of the things that you learned about yourself through the course of this project that went on certainly longer than you initially planned, primarily because, by the way, which you haven't mentioned, I should, because of an amazing amount of success. You won tournaments. You won hundreds of thousands, maybe a million, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Hundreds of thousands, not millions. But this is a project where you probably were, you probably were set up to lose a lot of money. Yeah.

To, to, at minimum, the buy-ins for the tournaments. and if you played cash games, whatever you put in front of you, you were probably going to lose. If someone was going to bet on this, even though you're really smart, really well educated, people, if they're a side action, they would have bet on you to come out of this project after a year to be behind. Yes. You in the red. Yeah, you actually win tournaments. Coming second, come in first, you're winning.

So what are some of the things you learn about yourself through the course of this extended project? I learned so much. I mean, I think poker has taught me more about myself than anything else I've ever done. because, you know, poker is especially, and I play tournament poker, tournament poker is extreme. I mean, it's an extreme sport in some ways. I don't want to, I mean, I realize that it's not actually an extreme sport at the end of the day you're sitting at a table,

but you're playing these marathon sessions, and it's not a cash game. You can't get up and take an hour break just because you're tired. If the tournament ends at a certain time, then that's when the tournament ends. And these are multi-day tournaments, so you're often playing 12, 13, 14, hour days. And then you have to wake up and do the exact same thing in the morning.

And some tournaments last for four days, five days. And so the better you do, just the more intensely you're playing. And it takes so much out of you. And so you're depleted on every level. You're emotionally depleted, cognitively depleted, physically depleted. And so just everything comes out. All of your issues, all of your insecurities, who you are as a person, all of it's going to come out at some point at the poker table.

because you're being put in this pressure cooker situation where you're forced to make decisions for a lot of money over a long period of time. And so you end up learning a lot about yourself. I mean, it's therapy. It's kind of this therapy on steroids, except you have to be your own therapist. Otherwise, there's no one else out there

who's going to help you deal with it. And so I learned a lot about myself. Some of the things that I've learned weren't very pleasant. I mean, most of the things weren't very pleasant. because you learn your shortcoming. So one of the things that I write about in the book is learning that I had actually internalized a lot of the gender stereotypes that society lobs at me every day. I had thought that I was above that, that I understood them, that as a psychologist who knows stereotypes and biases and all this stuff, that I would have found a way around them. But it ends up I haven't.

And it came out in my poker. And I was losing money at the beginning because I was too passive. I was letting myself be bullied. I was too afraid to antagonize people. So they're like, oh, that's the bitch who always raises. And so I'd call, you know, I'd try to kind of take less active lines even when I had really good hands. So with my great hands, I didn't make as much money. With my bad hands, I lost the maximum because I was just being very passive, very straightforward.

And I knew at that time, and it's not like I came into poker. with bad habits. I had Eric, one of the best players in the world, telling me what I was doing wrong. I knew I was making mistakes. And that didn't prevent me from making them because there was the psychological blockage. Knowing what you're supposed to do and how you're supposed to play a hand doesn't mean you're going to play the hand that way because all of your psychological stuff is going to get in the way. And so I found that out about myself. And that wasn't great. You know, that wasn't a pleasant realization. It was something I had to work on. It's something I'm still working on, but I think it's made me a much stronger person.

So that's just one example. How have you taken from that example? How have you taken that into your life outside of poker? Yeah. So if you read the book, you'll see a lot of examples of that specifically because that's something that I explore throughout. But something just very concrete is that it's helped me get more money for my writing. I've become a much better negotiator because I,

can stand up for myself. Wow. And so you learned, you learned how to stand up for yourself better because of the, because of being, I guess, forced and coached and helped and seeing the downside of not standing. Yeah, exactly. And seeing it in my bank account. I think this is really important, oh, Maria, because I think from the outside, people looking in would say, well, of course Maria Konakobo will stand up for herself. Look at everything she's done. Look at everything she's accomplished. So you almost become not relatable to people and this this is a relatable moment for not i think for people in general to say wait a second if maria needed to learn how to stand up for herself after all of this wow like i think it makes people feel better about it that that you had to go through this and when i think

from the outside looking in we would think no you're already way past that you don't have to deal with that type of thing only people like me have to deal with that type of thing i thought that i was way past it and I'm not. I mean, my, my, and my imposter syndrome just was on all sorts of high alert. And poker or in life or both? Both. Really? Do you still have like big imposter syndrome? Absolutely. Absolutely. I don't think it ever goes away. Poker has made me better at identifying it and trying to play through it, so to speak. How do you, how do you feel, I know we're not giving speeches right now, but when we are, how do you feel the five or ten minutes before going up on stage? I'm always nervous. I always have butterflies in my stomach every single time. I always get nervous

before a big poker tournament. I always get nervous before any big thing. And I think that's good. I think if you learn to use that as fuel, then it means that, you know, you're still learning and you're not overconfident. I think the moment that I go into a speech thinking, I've got this, you know, I'm going to crush it is probably the moment I'm going to really fail. Yeah. I know we have to run,

but I am curious. One last question. If there's like a, you are getting asked a lot of questions. There's your people want you to mentor them. Is there a general piece of advice that's not specific really to a particular industry or a job or even an age, but a piece of kind of life advice that maybe it's been passed on to you that you pass on to others.

I know this isn't the easiest question always to answer, but sometimes we get gold out of it, which is what is kind of general maxims or ethos that you would pass on to other people when they're looking to make a positive contribution in the world? I mean, I would actually echo some of the things that we've already talked about and add a few. So the things we've already talked about, I would say work hard and know that life owes you nothing. Zero. That is what you're owed. What you deserve is zero. Everything is earned. Everything is worked for. You have to. You have to earn it. You have to get it. And life isn't fair. And there are lots of inequalities and it sucks. But railing, it's not fair is not going to do

anything for you. Instead, you have to try to figure out, okay, how do I make life more fair? You know, how do I try to fix the inequalities? How do I try to kind of make the playing field better for others for myself? But what can I do? What can I control? Don't spend your mental energy railing against things that you can do nothing about. If you don't like something, figure out a way to fix it, figure out a way to change it, figure out what you personally can do. What are the things that you control? What are the things in your power and do that? And the other thing that we talked about, follow your curiosity. Don't do things because you think they're going to be useful. Don't study computer science in college because you know that computer science is the hot new profession in Silicon Valley is hiring. If you want to study English, even though people tell you that English is useless, study English. And read fiction, read literature. Actually, that's the number one piece of advice that I think I would give to people right now because I think that too many people don't do it. Read fiction. Read poetry. Lots of it.

that is what fuels you, makes you a bigger person, a better person, a more emphatic person, a stronger thinker. That's what gives you creative energy and critical thinking abilities. Too many people and so many people that I know, and especially the young people who I've mentored, they only read nonfiction. And they say fiction is stupid, poetry is stupid. I don't need it. It's not useful. I don't learn from it.

Surround yourself with books and read, read, read, read, read. Love it. Well, your book, the biggest. It's nonfiction. It's not fiction, but the biggest bluff, how I learned to pay attention, master myself, and win. Absolutely pick it up. Maria, thank you so much for investing your time with me here today. I'd absolutely want to continue our dialogue as we both progress.

And I'm excited to see what you choose to do next. Thank you so much, Ryan. We can hopefully record about that in the future. That would be wonderful. Thank you. All right. Thanks so much, Maria. Take care.

Bye. Bye. What an insightful and intelligent leader thoroughly enjoyed that conversation with Maria. A few of the key takeaways. Life owes you nothing. Everything must be earned. Life isn't fair. Saying that is not good for you.

I really thought I loved how strongly she ended this conversation. Then follow your curiosity. and obsessions with great rigor. It's interesting that her advice, as well as the commonality between what she's seen from people who have sustained excellence, is very similar to that of our mutual friend, Brian Koppelman,

and how if you look to be excellent over the course of time at anything, you need to be curious and very passionate about that specific topic and then work incredibly hard. And then understand the Dunning-Kroger effect. It means that the more sense, someone knows, the more they realize how much they don't know on a topic. While someone with little

knowledge tends to be falsely confident about their understanding of it, this to me speaks to developing our own self-awareness with a little bit of humility mixed in. Think about that as you progress. Once again, thank you so much for continuing to spread the message to a friend or two at a time. Tell them, this one with Maria Konnikova could be so helpful for you in your leadership journey. Because you continue to do that, you give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.