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

by Maria Konnikova

People failed to see what the world was telling them when that message wasn’t one they wanted to hear. They liked being the rulers of their environment. When the environment knew more than they did—well, that was no good at all. Here was the cruel truth: we humans too often think ourselves in firm control when we are really playing by the rules of chance.

“less certainty, more inquiry”

How we frame something affects not just our thinking but our emotional state. It may seem a small deal, but the words we select—the ones we filter out and the ones we eventually choose to put forward—are a mirror to our thinking. Clarity of language is clarity of thought—and the expression of a certain sentiment, no matter how innocuous it seems, can change your learning, your thinking, your mindset, your mood, your whole outlook. As W. H. Auden told an interviewer, Webster Schott, in a 1970 conversation, “Language is the mother, not the handmaiden of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.” The language we use becomes our mental habits—and our mental habits determine how we learn, how we grow, what we become. It’s not just a question of semantics: telling bad beat stories matters. Our thinking about luck has real consequences in terms of our emotional well-being, our decisions, and the way we implicitly view the world and our role in it.

They ignore the fact that the most we can do is make the best decision possible with the information we have; the outcome doesn’t matter.

The more you learn, the harder it gets. The better you get, the worse you are—because the flaws that you wouldn’t even think of looking at before are now visible and need to be addressed. If you want to grow, if you want to progress, you need to always dig deeper.

“Before each action, stop, think about what you want to do, and execute,”

sometimes, it’s the hands you don’t play that win you the title. We remember the hero calls. What about the hero folds? What you don’t do rather than what you do—that can be greatness. The art of letting go can be the truly strong one. Acknowledging when you’re behind rather than continuing to put good money after bad. Acknowledging when the landscape has shifted and you need to make a shift yourself as a

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