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“Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.”
José Ortega y Gasset
Keyshia Cole sold a million copies of an album about love, then used one bridge for a bigger instruction: know your focus. Twenty years on, I still hear that bridge.
“You gotta know your focus in life.
And if love is your focus, then man, pay attention.”Keyshia Cole, “Love, I Thought You Had My Back”
In poker you pick your table by the stakes. At one table the chips are pennies. At the next one over, a single hand can cost a month’s rent.
Same game, same cards, wildly different price to play.
Life seats you at several tables at once: work, love, health, friendship, learning. Each one takes bets from you all day.
The chips at these tables are attention. Money goes up and down. Your attention stack only goes down.
You can’t get an hour back from yesterday.
So the stakes you play at should follow your focus. A relationship you care about is a high-stakes seat: your evenings, your plans and a piece of your pride ride on it. A career that already feels secure can run at small stakes for a season.
A table can even sit empty for a while.
Warren Buffett handed Alice Schroeder unprecedented access for his official biography, The Snowball. She came back with the whole man: the deals, the discipline and a family that got whatever attention the work left over. He reportedly hated how his private life read on the page and pulled away from her after the book shipped.
He knew his focus and paid for it at the family table.
Ed Thorp met Buffett over a game of bridge in 1968. Thorp invented card counting, beat the blackjack tables, then took the same math to the stock market and won there too. He flagged Bernie Madoff’s fund as a fraud in 1991, seventeen years before it collapsed.
David Senra reads founder biographies for a living. Ask him how many of the four hundred founders he’s studied built a balanced life and you get three names.
Three of four hundred.
Under one percent, in a sample picked for obsession. For the other 397 the balanced life stayed a myth.
He puts Thorp closest to mastering it: great businesses and a good father.
Thorp closed his own fund in 2002. The strategy’s returns were thinning and he wanted the time more than the money. Each morning he still writes down his weight.
He kept big stakes on work, family and health at once. He won at all three. And even his balance was chosen table by table: the fund closed the moment time beat money.
What reads as balance from the outside was a series of deliberate bets.
Health is the table you can’t leave. In poker the blinds circle the table and charge each seat in turn, whether you play the hand or fold it. Skip the gym for a year and the charge still lands.
Choose which table you play at the highest stakes, which tables run small or even sit empty for now.
♠️
Which table in your life deserves higher stakes right now?
