I'll get there when I get there

Editor’s Note: This post is from an old blog I started over a decade ago. Many of my thoughts and opinions may have changed since it was originally posted, but I am a bit of a data hoarder and don’t like getting rid of old things. I also like to maintain the integrity of my things. Therefore, the blog has been left in its original form. The original blog was located at http://maxweiss.blogspot.com/

About a year before I graduated college, I did something which I didn’t think too profound at the time, but which has helped me a lot since then. I had arrived at school in my car, and I was stressed about potentially being late. I sat for a moment in my car, breathing consciously and attempting to relax my worrisome and useless thoughts. Then I held the ‘Clock’ button down for a few seconds until the time display was blinking, placed my fingers on the hour and on the minute buttons, closed my eyes, and pressed repeatedly, fast enough so that I lost count of how many times I had pressed each. I then went to class without looking at the result. For a few weeks after that, I would continually glance at my car’s clock and get negative reenforcement.

Now, I only look at it when I am tuning the radio. I don’t know if I’m going to be 5 minutes early or 10 minutes late. After a while, I stopped caring. Sure I might have been able to speed up a bit, run a “yellow” light, or otherwise get myself to Point B two minutes sooner, but the necessity of doing so is virtually non-existent, and the stress I inflicted upon myself by worrying about it was higher than I had known. It was extremely liberating to simply accept that I would get there when I got there. Most places have a clock, and the cell phone in my pocket has one too. I would find out what time it was soon enough.

There is a statistic listed in Poker Tracker with which I am constantly concerning myself. I worry about it and look at it constantly during my sessions. I am pretty good at getting a rough estimate of what it is and what it should be on average, but I want to know the exact details of it, to two decimals. My friend Edals told me not to concern myself with it—it is after all one of the most useless statistics there is, and it takes hundreds of thousands of hands to even begin to approximate what it’s true average value should be. But I can’t seem to stop worrying about it, so I took a lesson from all of my car rides over the past few years…

This morning, I configured Poker Tracker to not show me how much money I won or lost.