The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

by Maria Konnikova

One of the most often-cited quotes about luck comes from Louis Pasteur: chance favors the prepared mind. What people often forget, though, is that the full statement is quite different: “Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind.” We tend to focus on that last part, the prepared mind. Work hard, prepare yourself, so that when chance appears, you will notice it. But that first part is equally crucial: if you’re not observing well, observing closely to begin with, no amount of preparation is enough. The one is largely useless without the other.

You’re not lucky because more good things are actually happening; you’re lucky because you’re alert to them when they do.

Like so many things in life, this is a game of people, not hard truths.

WHEN I WAS WORKING with Walter Mischel as a graduate student in psychology, I grew intimately familiar with a specific model for analyzing behavior: CAPS, or the cognitive-affective personality system. For decades, Walter had argued that the Big Five version of personality—that we can all be rated on five major traits, namely openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness—was fundamentally flawed. Instead of embracing the nuance of humanity, it stripped traits from context and gave people global scores on things that made no sense. Maybe I’m conscientious at work but a slob at home, Walter suggested, or agreeable in the face of authority but a sudden bully in the schoolyard. Personality was all about context and all about dynamics, and you couldn’t hope to crack its puzzle unless you were willing to go through the work of regimented analysis. Walter and Yuichi Shoda formalized the idea of CAPS in 1995, writing: In the proposed theory, individuals differ in how they selectively focus on different features of situations, how they categorize and encode them cognitively and emotionally, and how those encodings activate and interact with other cognitions and affects in the personality system. The theory views the person not as reacting passively to situations, nor as generating behavior impervious to their subtle features, but as active and goal-directed, constructing plans and self-generated changes, and in part creating the situations ...

People aren’t a combination of traits. They are a mosaic of reactions to and interactions with situations. If you can get a person’s behavioral profile—a catalogue of those reactions in an if-then relationship, such as “If I feel threatened, then I will lash out”—you have a far better read on who they are or how they will behave in a certain setting than if you have only a set of trait rankings.

Boyd was a fighter pilot in the air force, and he invented OODA to describe a dynamic that he’d learned through his years in combat: to succeed, you need to constantly observe, orient, decide, and act. OODA. The way to outmaneuver your opponent is to get inside their OODA loop. Figure out what they are observing, how they are orienting and deciding, and how they act as a result. That way, you can anticipate them. Because at the end of the day, the fighting, just like the poker table, comes down to information. “You’re getting signals when you play, and you’re giving off signals. Your actions are both actions in the game that lead to the result in this particular hand, and signals for your opponent to interpret, that explain your strategy,” Lantz says. “Someone can look at them and, from them, reverse engineer the strategy book you’re using. It’s a deep, multilayered problem in information processing.”

Walter Mischel often said that he couldn’t keep chocolate in his house. He knew himself too well: if it was there, he would eat it, even though he had spent his life mastering self-control. The chocolate caused positive tilt. A longing so intense it couldn’t be denied. That’s why preventing that emotion in the first place was so essential. You need to learn to anticipate how something will make you feel in the future and act accordingly in the present.

Tilt makes you revert to your worst self. Think of your game as a resting inchworm divided into three sections, A, B, and C, Jared tells me. A is my best game. It is infrequent—I have to be at my peak to achieve it. C is my worst game, which should, at least in theory, also be infrequent. The B game is the bell curve part of the inchworm. It’s the longest and most visible part. To improve my game, I need to move my bell curve the way that an inchworm moves, slowly pushing so that my C game becomes my B game, my A game drifts to B, and an even better A game takes its place. Tilt not only stops the process but reverses it—and unless I work on it, I won’t see the sort of improvement I need.

“The only thing you can truly expect is your worst,” Jared tells me. “Everything else is earned every single day.”

I learn how to sit up and take up space and hold my head to project a confidence I might not be feeling—the techniques of self-deception that are often the first step to making you feel the confidence that was lacking. It’s a process known as embodied cognition: embody the feeling you want to express, and your mind and body will often fall into alignment. Channel your outer warrior and your inner one may not be long in coming out.

Fasting has been shown to affect our delay discounting ability: we start to prefer smaller rewards sooner rather than waiting for larger rewards later.

with the right mindset, the right tools, you can conquer, excel, emerge triumphant—even through the setbacks, even when the original road map proves faulty and needs to be replaced.

You can’t control what will happen, so it makes no sense to try to guess at it. Chance is just chance: it is neither good nor bad nor personal.

Superstitions may be comforting for a while. But, because they avoid rather than confront the world, they are doomed. The future belongs to those able to learn, to change, to accommodate to this exquisite Cosmos that we have been privileged to inhabit for a brief moment.”