Tag Archives: vision

Holdem, vision, perception, and groceries

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Here I am writing about something that I thought I would never be doing again. Playing poker…. I wrote a few months ago that Holdem had become too serious and the players were playing at least as well I do. What this did was turn Holdem into a matter of luck, who was going to be the luckiest in the next few hours. When I wrote that post I was absolutely certain  I was not going to be playing Holdem again.

As life would have it, some things never really change, even though most things do. Some weeks ago the weather was terrible for longer than I can sit in the house and do nothing. I had been using Holdem simulator software for fun, and I had changed the way I was playing. It was making a difference even though it did not seem correct for the table conditions I thought I was playing against at the poker room.

Poker is like chess, or any other game of skill, where the players are evenly matched at the beginning. For every strategy there is an equally effective counter strategy. My problem with my game was the game had changed and my strategy did not. For those of you who play Holdem, I started out again at $2-4, and now have a bankroll to move up to $4-8. I am showing a win in most sessions, although that is all relative, and means little other than I can play a little bigger when I wish.

It is always easier to see what is going on from the outside, when we are not personally involved in the situation. I think this is a lot like our eyesight. Over our whole development as human beings it was important for men to see a long distance and not close up. For women it was more important to have fine detail vision for close up tasks. I imagine this was because of the division of the tasks that were done. The men hunted, and the women gathered, made clothes and such.

My thinking is my little hiatus from Holdem gave me a chance to step back an look at the situation from a distance. What I had been doing was using my fine vision and expecting different results from doing the same things. The results over time may not have been that bad, but they were not have been optimal.

The same is true in our work. If you look around with a detached manner at the people in almost any work place, you find people using their fine vision performing their activities. Because they are looking at a very small picture of their work, they are missing out on the bigger rewards that they should be working towards.

For example, if you there are two similar stores of any type in your vicinity that both have the same products, say a grocery store, you usually have a favorite. Using our fine vision, reasons why we prefer one store over the other are varied. The prices are cheaper, the store is newer, parking is easier, and the list goes on and on.

This is usually the reason people feel they like one business better than another, but it is not always the truth. It may well be that if on the same day, if I walked into one grocery store and bought twenty items, and then drove to the store I did not like as well, and bought the same twenty items, the second store may have the same or cheaper prices.  So there goes any arguments for why we prefer one grocery store over another.

What really goes on is with our fine vision we enjoy the way the stock people or cashiers talk to us when we interact with them. Using our distance vision, and distancing ourselves from the situation it is easy to see the only real difference is service. If our favorite cashiers leave the store, we may find we do not like our favorite store as much anymore. In fact, the prices (really the way we are being treated) are getting higher, and the competitions prices start to look better to us. What a difference a little distance makes in how we perceive our world.

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Vision, one for you, one for me

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Everywhere I look, I see someone who I know doesn’t have it going on like I think I do, yet they are doing it. They have arrived at a place I can not imagine, but I can see what they have once they get there. What is so odd is they are not brilliant, they are mostly average people. But they are at a point in their life when everything is going their way.

Like the woman who started making those trinkets that go on those nice spongy shoes, and later sold what became her company for an amazing amount of money. The immigrant families in the poorest part of my city, who now own their own business. They probably started selling in public places, struggling to keep their dream going.

Tunnel vision is my problem. It is tunnel vision that keeps me from seeing everything these people went through before success arrived at their doorstep. I never saw the times when they cried in frustration, or were harassed by the police, or slept in the cold because all their money was going into making their future. I never saw that part of their life back then, I just see where they are now.

I can not see what they saw a long time before. I never had that burning desire to run my own business no matter what obstacle got in my way. I was never interested in seeing if I could take something, add some value to it, and sell it to someone else who thinks they were getting a deal.

I was in Korea a number of years ago. There was a young couple there who made very pretty wooden boxes. They were not the most elegant, but they were made with care. They wanted fifty dollars for the one I wanted. I have no doubt it was worth fifty dollars, but it was not worth that much to me. I told the couple I would pay twenty dollars. I saw them at least once a week in the month I in Korea. Every time I saw them, they said fifty dollars. I said twenty, and they scoffed and spit as they said no. As I was getting on the bus for the last time before I left their country, they said twenty five. I said no, twenty was my offer, I would pay no more.

They cursed at me, spit, made faces at me, and sold me the box I had wanted for a month, for a mere twenty dollars. I almost felt guilty, because I knew the profit they would be making was not very large, perhaps only a dollar or two at most, and that would not cover their time in making it, polishing it, and making it look so pretty. Yet they sold that box to me. They knew if they did not sell it to me, they would have a very hard time finding another buyer with cash money. We only showed up in Korea in those numbers for one month out of the year.

That is a big difference between people who have their own business, and myself. I never would have sold that box to me. They knew they had too, to keep their business going another day. I would have lost my business to my ego, my pride, or my business ignorance. I bet they are wealthy store keepers by now. They are wealthy, savvy, and hard to do business with sort of people. They deserve it too, because all those years ago, they knew what they had to do to be survive another business day, and even though they hated me, and what they were forced into, they did it anyway.

They have business vision, and I have business myopia. If I met them again today, I would gladly give them the thirty more dollars they asked for all those years back. I understand now, and they helped me to understand that day at the bus stop. I really enjoy the homemade burritos, and specialties I come across now and then. I hope they are all successful with their vision, and I remain satisfied with mine.

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