Everything I need to learn I learned playing poker

Just came back from another poker night... won probably $15 or so tonight. Probably started playing like two years ago, with the new No Limit Texas Hold 'Em craze going on. But I'm amazed how much poker has taught me about life. Here's the first part of a list of things that poker has taught me:

The risk of not taking enough risk

So it's your first poker game, and you decide you don't wanna lose money. So you decide you're gonna fold everything except only winning hands. Well, those people are usually the biggest losers. There's this thing called the blind in Texas Hold em... that's money that your are forced to bet when you're sitting 1 or 2 spots from the dealer. The blind sucks all the money out of your stack until you're done. In life, many people forget about the risk of not taking enough risk. Can you imagine a football team, down by 8 points, scoring a touchdown with time running out to be down by two, kicking the extra point instead of going for two because going for two is riskier? At work, we tend to want to make cost estimates high so we don't hafta ever go back for more money. I wonder how much profit we lost out on projects that were killed because the costs were too high?

You can do everything right and still lose

I have a pair of aces. My opponent goes all in with a pair of 2s. The odds are overwhelmingly in my favor. I call. He hits another 2 on the river to give him three of a kind, and beats my aces. Should I have called? Absolutely. And what should I do next time this situation comes up? Call it again. Just because you failed doesn't mean you made the wrong choice. And the real failure is if you don't call it again next time. In life, sometimes you fail. Successful people pick themselves up, figure out if they did the right thing, and then go back out there and do it again. Other people get scarred for life and quit, i.e. fold aces every time they come up.

More to come...