Being Selective and Aggressive

In the real world you do have to pick your battles, just as you must in poker. Sometimes you have to draw your proverbial line in the sand ("You've gotta know when to hold 'em"); other times you have to carefully choose when to retreat ("Know when to fold 'em").
History is replete with examples. General Robert E. Lee, confronting over- whelming supremacy in men, munitions, and technology, was able to keep the Confederacy's cause alive as long as he did because he picked his battles carefully. He did not engage the Union Army at every opportunity; he selected opportunities only when he believed he could negate the Union's inherent advantages and overcome them.

Safety at All Costs Can Be Costly

During the early stages of the U.S. Civil War, Union General George McClellan was unwilling to commit his troops, even when the odds were strongly in his favor. McClellan behaved like a player who is overly weak and overly tight, and General Lee consistently ran him off the best hand. McClellan ultimately suffered the military equivalent of a really bad beat. President Lincoln, who realized that his man held most of the big cards -and wondered why he wouldn't play a hand and therefore couldn't win - sacked him! You can't wait for a royal flush in cards or in life. When you have an over- whelming advantage, it's usually time to engage your opponent.
If you can pick up tells in a poker game - where players take great pains not to broadcast them - think h6w easy reading people away from the table can be. Yet seemingly few of us really take the time to know our opponents. Is your boss in a nasty, irritable mood? Maybe you'd be better off feigning an emergency and postponing your annual performance review until next week. You have a bad hand, and rather than risk losing even more money, the smart move is to fold and wait for a better opportunity.
There's undoubtedly something romantic about the fatalistic approach of marching into the jaws of death or some more civilized equivalent, but it's not a strategy that will help you win at either poker or life. But you needn't take our word for it. General George Patton said much the same thing in his celebrated quote, "The idea of war is not to die for your country; it's to make the other guy die for his."

Timinq Can Be Everything

Is that boss of yours still in a foul mood? Wouldn't you stand a better chance of winning if you held a stronger hand? Tackle a tough project now. Close that sale and make some customer so happy that he calls your boss and tells him how valuable you are. Once you've been able to accomplish that, you're hold- ing strong cards - strong enough to stand up to your annual performance review.
This situation is like so many that occur in poker. Someone bets, another player raises, and you throw your marginal hand away, preferring to wait for a much stronger hand before engaging your opponent.
Timing is important in your social life too. You don't have to be an expert on body language to realize that you're not making a great impression on your date, who has legs crossed, arms folded, and is leaning away from you with a bored, indifferent facial expression. It's time to try a new strategy, or be selec- tive, fold your hand, and wait for some new cards to be dealt.

Oeciding If the Prize Is Worth the Game

Winning poker players usually won't draw to a flush when the odds against making it are 3-to-1 or more, but the pot promises a payoff of only two dollars for each dollar invested. They'll wait until the pot promises a bigger payoff before risking their money.
The analogy is also true away from the table. While real-life payoffs can vary widely, your investments are usually time, money, or both. Is it worth your time to spend half a day trying to make a small sale without the promise of greater rewards down the road, or are you better off courting one of your bigger, better customer$?
Whenever you analyze situations like this, the answers often seem obvious. Still, many people fritter away large amounts of time, not realizing that they are being horribly unproductive in the process. Office workers spend hours dealing with problems and issues that may be urgent, but are often neither significant nor important.
Better time management frees you from dxaling with issues that have small payoffs associated with them. If you aspire to success, you'll look for chances to capitalize on opportunity, rather than spend your kime fighting small, insignificant brush fires.

Reaching for Objectives

If you have no standards to guide you in selecting the hands you choose to play and adopt an any-twocards-can-win philosophy, it probably won't be long until you lose all your poker money. Knowing in advance which cards you're going to play, what position you'll play them from, and how you'll handle different opponents are key factors to success at the poker table. The real world is no different. If you don't plan, you're just a leaf in the wind. While traveling in a random direction does get you somewhere, it's probably not where you hoped to go.
Poker teaches you to plan, to have an agenda, and to pursue it aggressively. In the real world, if you don't have your own agenda, you'll soon be part of someone else's. In fact, it's probably safe to assume that if you examined every person foolish enough to join a cult, you'd find very few of them with a plan or a set of governing values to guide them.

Full chapter only in the printed book