THE PRACTICING MIND
Recently I was able to squeeze out a bit of free time and get through The Practicing Mind: Bringing Discipline and Focus Into Your Life by Thomas Sterner. The main theme of the book is to provide theory and exercises to assist us with becoming more process oriented and less product oriented.

Overall this was an exceptional book that does a solid job of walking us through how to improve in relationship to becoming and staying process oriented. I believe that we as poker players do a better job than non-poker players of staying process oriented on the short term (e.g., not being resulted oriented for single hands), but we tend to fall into the same traps as the rest of the world when it comes to our processes for learning, improvement, and long term progress. So based upon this, I believe that it would be a beneficial read for most.

The key element to Sterner's methods is remaining in the present moment, rather than dwelling on that which has already happened (past mindedness) or futilely pursuing some unrealistic image of perfection (future mindedness). He uses consistent logic coupled with a few examples to get his points across. The book is extremely short with little to no filler; it is structured very well and flows through the idea of process to theory of being process oriented to exercises to assist us with becoming more process oriented and finishes with a nice summary of all of the content in a single chapter (this chapter can be read for an easy review of the material).

There are a couple of minor issues with the text:

Due to the subject matter there is no real scientific data to back up a lot of Sterner's conclusions. This is to be understood and really cannot be pointed to as a "flaw" or "fault", but we do need to analyze what the author is telling us and really think critically about whether or not we believe it to be true. As an example, Sterner mentions in a couple of different chapters the fact that when we look back on our lives we do not think about the things that we have, but rather the hard work that it took to achieve them. The issue that I have with this line of thinking is that it is not a universal truth. A personal example would be that I have a very nice home that my family and I enjoy very much. We are able to live in this home due to the many successful projects that I worked on in my day job. However, when my kids are swimming in the pool I think "I am enjoying my family enjoying our home" and not "I remember all of those wonderful projects that I worked on in order to be able to afford this house."

About the only other minor issue is a chapter Sterner included on teaching children to be process oriented and how it will help us. I think that this concept is great, but a chapter is far too little space to devote to such a topic and the content would not have suffered had it been left out. If he really wanted to push this idea, he would have been better off discussing the idea of mentoring directly and not just limiting it to children.

But the above issues are of little significance in relationship to the rest of the material and I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is looking to improve how they practice/learn and has time to read 100'ish pages.

I will most likely highlight some of the areas of discussion from this text in future blogs (giving credit to the author of course) as I believe that they can assist greatly with our overall development as poker players.


TILT - EPISODE 6 UPDATE
It was pointed out that I was remiss in providing an update on Ep 6 in my last post. I apologize for this and thank both of you that are reading for shooting me PM's.

Ep 6 is coming along well. The content is complete and I have started storyboarding the slides. We are probably looking at another week or so before it is recorded, rendered and shipped to Vitas barring any non-poker impacts.