Criticism

Seamus Heaney called Han Shan’s poetry “enviable stuff/ unfussy and believable.” Like everything simple, the surface of the poetry is like a calm sea that belies depth and marvels beneath. Heaney writes: “Cold Mountain is a place that can also mean/ a state of mind. Or different states of mind.” Han Shan’s poetry is about the search for home. Though the poems are about travel, they are ultimately about how a mind at home with itself carries home always with it. When I have felt unmoored, Han Shan’s poetry always feels like a small habitation, a small habit of language I can repeat like an incantation or spell. Recite these poems and you can’t help but feel at home.

Gary Snyder’s beautiful translation of Han Shan’s poetry has accompanied me through various life transitions. The fact that the book remains with me is somewhat remarkable. The book made it with me across the Canadian border when my visa expired. It was one of the books I kept in my tent in Kentucky when I spent a few months camped behind a pizza shop. It survived a tornado that tipped over trucks and trailer homes. I kept it next to my surfboards and climbing gear when I lived out of my van, crossing deserts, searching for cold mountains of my own. I took it with me when I moved across the Pacific, landing in Hawai’i.

Han Shan’s Cold Mountain poems travel well.

The book elegantly combines the poetry with simple Zen-like drawings of mountains, leaves, insects, and birds. The simplest things are the most difficult to do well, and Gary Snyder’s translation of Han Shan’s Cold Mountain poetry is done well.

In his introduction to the poems, Snyder explains that when Han Shan: “talks about Cold Mountain, he means himself, his home, his state of mind.”

Who was Han Shan? No one really knows. Some say he looked like a tramp. But it is written that he was a wise man, a man who understood the Tao. In the introduction to Snyder’s translations, Lu Chiu-Yin, the governor of the T’ai prefecture notes that Han Shan’s poems were found written on bamboo, wood, stones, and cliffs, and on the “walls of people’s houses.” Like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Banksy, it appears that Han Shan found his start in the ephemeral and undeniable medium of graffiti.

The poems feel like visitations. They have the force of epiphany, the mystery of koan, and the weight of wisdom. They are deceptively simple, invite re-reading, and open with each reading to new interpretations.

Ultimately, though, the poetry is about home, about the long roads we must take to find our home in this world. “The path to Han-Shan’s place is laughable.” The way to Han Shan’s house is found on “bird paths, but no trails for men.” There is a monastic simplicity to the life Han Shan has chosen. “Go tell families with silverware and cars/ ‘What’s the use of all that noise and money?’” Han Shan’s poetics is a poetics for the seekers. It is a poetics that eschews the material realm. The words are spare because they have been reduced down to almost pure spirit. One gets the feeling of looking at Zen art when reading them.

I found Gary Snyder’s translations of Han Shan’s poems when I was myself very much lost in the world, searching for my home in it. I’d recently gone through a separation, which would later become a divorce, which would mean my visa in Canada would expire and I’d have to say goodbye to the home and friends I’d known for five years in Toronto. Where would my home be? It would become a tent in Kentucky, a car in the woods, an apartment in Park Slope, my parents’ house in Miami, and later their apartment in Portland, Oregon. And eventually it would be Hawai’i. Every stop along the way, I have asked: is this home?

“Men ask the way to Cold Mountain/ Cold Mountain: There’s no through trail,” writes Han Shan. How do we get home? We walk, we live, we breathe. The way home, to our true home, often involves solitude, no person can walk the whole path with us.

I’d find myself returning to these lines:

“My heart’s not the same as yours./ If your heart was like mine/ You’d get it and be right here.”

Gary Snyder’s translation is accompanied by strikingly simple illustrations. They are spare. They make room for white space. They breathe, like the poetry.

A great deal of time passes when you are on the path, when you are traveling the way. When you return, everything has changed. I think of my family and friends on the mainland. They were once an airplane flight away. Now, in this world of pandemic and disease, I’m not so sure.

I live on an island.

Han Shan tried many things as a seeker. “In my first thirty years of life/ I roamed hundreds and thousands of miles…Tried drugs, but couldn’t make immortal;/ read books and wrote poems…Today I’m back at Cold Mountain.”

I brought Gary Snyder’s translation of Han Shan’s Cold Mountain poems with me to Hawai’i. Even in Hawai’i, the ocean can sometimes feel cold, especially on days when the waves loom on the horizon like mountains just barely glimpsed. I thought I’d be scared in the ocean swells. Instead I felt calm. Calm, and awe. Sometimes the waves catch you off guard and you get sunk down into the depths of the sea, where there’s no breath, only dark silence. Those moments are the most peaceful. In the ocean, there are times where there’s nothing to do but calmly resign yourself to your fate. The wave will crush you, or it will carry you to shore. Either way, it’s not your choice. There’s a simplicity to being in the ocean. It’s at once a state of meditation and survival.

Cold Mountain poems are poems about the simple life. They’re poems about the simple walk home. When my life gets too complicated (or when I make my life overly complicated) Han Shan’s poetry reminds me that sometimes, all you need to do, is walk, jump in the sea, follow the birds where they go.

For Han Shan, the trappings of society are prisons we build for ourselves: the mortgage, the car, the possessions… “He just sets up a prison for himself./ Once in he can’t get out. Think it over–/ You know it might happen to you.”

The only way out is to live simply, “off mountain plants and berries.” What is there to worry about in this simple place? “Go ahead and let the world change.”

Ultimately, Han Shan taunts and dares his readers to go out and live a bigger life, by which he means—a simpler life. The poems are a message across time and space, delivered to the city and to the lost. “All I can say to those I meet:/ ‘Try and make it to Cold Mountain.’” Can we all make it to Cold Mountain?

All my life I have been trying to get to Cold Mountain, Han Shan. When I’m out in the ocean with the waves, sometimes I feel like I’ve made it at last.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

I just got a puppy. Pali is just as likely to cuddle at my feet as she is to try to consume my power cord. She chases pigeons and growls at her food bowl. Bottles of water fall from the desk and she barks at them. She seems to hate music. She yelps whenever I play the ukulele. When my boyfriend, Sergio, plays the recorder, she cowers. The world is new to her. She sighs when I pick her up. She’s so small, so fragile, so new to the world. She shits everywhere. My puppy needs training. There are many books on dog training and many websites, as well as YouTube videos. In the weeks after Pali entered our lives, I made it my mission to find the best puppy training resources. While I have found the American Kennel Club and the ASPCA helpful for answering health and behavioral questions, the two most important resources that have helped me potty train my dog and teach essential commands are the following:

• The book: The Art of Raising a Puppy by the Monks of New Skete
• Brandon McMillan’s MasterClass on Dog Training

While I recommend The Art of Raising a Puppy by the Monks of New Skete for its practical wisdom (within three days, my puppy was peeing where I wanted her to pee, with the more than occasional mistake), I recommend it just as much for its metaphorical wisdom. I know from my travels in Europe that monks are often bound to produce the best of all things, be it honey, Mendelian genetics, mead, or wine. So, when I learned that monks had written a book on puppy training, I was sold.

The monks write: “Too often we take this journey for granted, carelessly letting it pass unacknowledged. With our busy lives, we can easily grow insensitive to the basic wonder of life, leaving us spiritually impoverished and unhappy.” To connect with nature, to live in the moment, or to be in awe of the unfolding of the universe and a life is what it means to bring a puppy into your life. I have found myself exhausted and also so full of love at times I think I might explode and send that love everywhere in all directions.

To guide another creature new to the world is to allow oneself to be guided as well. I recommend this book to anyone with a dog or a soul. The Art of Raising a Puppy isn’t just a book about dog training, it is a metaphor for how, in relationship with another being and animal we can learn the virtues of patience, kindness, compassion, joy, discipline, and observation.

For the monks of New Skete, puppy training and breeding isn’t just a livelihood, it is a spiritual practice. Puppy training, I learned, is less about getting another creature to do what you want it to do than it is a process of paying attention to another being, to listen and observe its needs, and to follow where those signs lead.

All beings live in the seclusion of their own minds. I can only know the mind of my dog through a mirror darkly, through the signs she gives me with her body, her cries, her looks. Training a dog is as much a process of observing another being as it is learning how to master yourself, learning how to be patient. Training a dog is learning how to be a good leader. No dog will do what you want it to do to please you. The monks remind me that my puppy only wants to please herself. The art of training a puppy is really about compromise: it means asking “how can I give my puppy what she wants and needs so that I can also get what she wants and needs?”. It is relationship 101.

And yet, dogs are not humans, nor are they creatures on which we can project our fantasies and illusions. They are wholly other, distinct in themselves. Art of Raising a Puppy takes many moments to reflect on the mystery and awe of the animal world.

Do not be mistaken, though. This is a practical book. My puppy is coming along in her training. Pali is (mostly) potty trained. She sits. She knows “down.” She drops things. She (mostly) listens.

When we are young, we are blank slates, ready to be shaped or ruined by our parents. Puppies are no different. The monks make the immense responsibility clear. A puppy’s humans are responsible for her life. “The remarkable little puppy so filled with the capacity for life and companionship one week can easily become an incontinent, destructive, and hyperactive annoyance the next.” According to the monks, the first 16 weeks of a puppy’s life are crucial to its formation as an adult dog. No pressure. I found myself searching for answers and reading as if my dog’s life depended on it–because it did.

The book also taught me a great deal about puppies. Before reading the book, whenever my puppy seemed to be having an epileptic seizure in her sleep, I’d wake her, worried. I learned that this is “activated sleep” and is essential to the development of the puppy’s neuromuscular system. I have stopped waking her which has resulted in peace of mind for the both of us.

To be corrected is to be trained. I find that my puppy also corrects me—when I lose my patience, when I get frustrated and pass that frustration on to her, when she whines to let me know that I’ve been boring all day sitting in front of the computer and it’s time to go for a walk. When I’m not well, she reflects my anxiety; when I’m happy, she reflects that joy, too. Overall, The Art of Raising a Puppy has taught me to be observant, to honor the process, and to be patient myself.

Brandon McMillan Teaches Dog Training, MasterClass

I recommend supplementing The Art of Raising a Puppy with Brandon McMillan’s MasterClass on dog training. In his class he shows you the most essential commands every dog needs to know for safety and for life. These commands include sit, stay, down, no, off, come, and heel. He also includes practical advice on how to get your dog to stop barking and how to prevent your puppy from dashing through the door when you come home or leave, a potentially life-saving command. He presents the material in a simple way and offers strategies that result in a foolproof teaching experience. In just a couple of weeks, Pali has learned all the commands, except heel. Though she is only four months old, she’s already beginning to do leash work. While MasterClass can be a little pricey, I found McMillan’s strategies fairly fool proof. For the price of a single dog training class, McMillan takes you through the essentials.

When it comes to dog training, the journey is the most important thing. I hope to keep learning and as I find new resources, I’ll add them here.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Several years ago I found myself lying on a gurney talking about Jen Sincero’s You Are a Badass with the paramedic. I had dislocated my elbow. The paramedic had just given me my second dose of painkillers for the day. For those of you with the good fortune to not know, a dislocated elbow is one of the most painful injuries a person can sustain. You know the feeling you get when you hit your funny bone? Now imagine that times a thousand and imagine your arm turned backwards. I did this to myself while rock climbing in a gym. I didn’t fall (I rarely fall). Instead, I’d misjudged how high the top of the climb was from the floor and when I let go, my left arm caught my fall, and my elbow absorbed the force of gravity. There aren’t words to describe the pain, but I do recall putting myself into a meditative trance while I waited for the paramedics to arrive. I’d been told that when they arrived they would pop my arm back into place and alleviate the pain. That wasn’t true. A dislocated elbow is much worse than a dislocated shoulder, and I’d have to wait until a professional at the emergency room could assess the situation. The whole thing reminds me of a moment in Stephen Levine’s A Year to Live, where he writes about letting the pain in: “Whatever limits the entrance of awareness limits healing…If you bang your elbow, notice how that first moment of pain spirals out into space like a skyrocket, then fizzles and falls to earth as a full dull sparks. Let it float. Send loving kindness into the elbow.”  

I don’t really recall the gist of the conversation with the paramedic, other than that I told him that my pain was about a 5 or so, and then proceeded to scream when he tried to move me into the ambulance. Pain medication was administered in short order and I was given a lecture on my failure to understand the pain scale.

“Is this the worst pain you’ve ever had?” he asked me.

“Yes.”

“Then you say it’s a 10,” he explained.

I didn’t have the mental acuity to argue about my epistemological qualms with his pain scale. I had imagined that I was being asked to interpret my pain on a more impersonal level. For example, I imagined what it would feel like to be dying, or actively dying. I figured that wasn’t happening, so 5 (halfway toward death) sounded fairly reasonable. I suppose if I had told him I was feeling half-dead, he might have administered the painkillers sooner…

Anyway, at some point I think I told him I was a writer and the conversation drifted to the books I was reading. I told him I was reading You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero. I don’t remember the whole conversation. I was on a lot of drugs on account of the elbow. I do recall telling the paramedic that while I enjoyed the idea of You are a Badass I found some parts wanting. Needless to say, during the course of this conversation, I didn’t feel at all like a badass.

Sincero writes “…it’s not your fault that you’re fucked up. It’s your fault if you stay fucked up…” Which would be all well and good, except I was sitting on a gurney hopped up on a rockstar-killing drug cocktail, and yet somehow cognizant enough to ask the orthopedic surgeon how much this whole thing was going to cost me. He stressed how fortunate I was I hadn’t broken anything.

“You would have needed surgery,” he explained. I was asked to sign a bunch of papers before they gave me morphine and did what they began to refer to as “the procedure.” It’s not like I had any choice anyway. I was going to pay whatever they were going to charge; I needed my arm bones put back into their respective sockets. But yes, I guess it would have been my fault if I’d had walked out with a backwards arm, so I agreed to “the procedure.” (I only finally paid off the several thousand-dollar bill off a few months ago).

While I agree that we are often the architects of our own stagnation, failure, and loss due to our self-limiting beliefs and self-sabotage, I think it’s also important to acknowledge that some of us suffer some real circumstances that cannot be overcome by thinking alone. Changing my self-limiting beliefs isn’t going to end poverty, or police officers shooting people in the street, or injustice, and thought alone wasn’t going to get my arm put on right (signing that paper with my good hand was). We think we’re in control when we’re not, and we sometimes think we’re not in control when we are. The key is knowing the difference.

Like Sincero, I do believe that mindset does play a role in life, and while I couldn’t afford the physical therapist I was told I should see in the weeks that followed the injury, I did spend quite a bit of time on YouTube Googling the videos of other injured people like me who shared with the world the exercises their expensive physical therapists had taught them. I couldn’t bend my elbow for weeks, but daily exercises along with daily swimming at a nearby gym eventually got my elbow back to bending again. Sometimes all it takes is the right YouTube channel.

I think the best lesson that self-help books like this one can provide us is the brute fact that if we don’t put ourselves out there and start taking risks, nothing is going to happen for us. And if you’re worried what people think of you or what you’ll look like while putting yourself out there, the first whiff of criticism you get will send you back into your cave. Sometimes you just need to go for it, fucked elbows be damned.

Sincero says it pretty well: “What other people think about you has nothing to do with you and everything to do with them.” I’d add this: find a few people whose feedback you trust and listen to them. Everyone else—ignore. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself chasing your own tail trying to please everyone else.

When we are clear about our truth, we are unstoppable, even with a dislocated elbow that can’t bend….which brings me to the glorious end to my pitiful tale.

I have to say that there’s something mysterious about Sincero’s book, something that rippled through my own life, that helped me see that dislocating my elbow was a sign I was on the right path.

Sincero writes: “When taking great leaps forward, life often turns to shit before it turns to Shinola.” She then goes on to talk about one of her clients who quits his high-paying job to start his own business only to experience three flat tires, a car accident, a broken water main, and if all that wasn’t enough—before his first big deal—he got hit by a bus. I’ve seen this phenomenon happen with friends, too. Right before they change their lives, right before something big and important is about to happen to them, the shit hits the fan. The car battery dies, or they break a leg, literally. The mystery of life is that I feel like we are sometimes guided by a force that moves the sun and other stars, a mysterious gravity, just like the kind that pulled me to the ground and almost broke my arm in two.

In honor of that great mystery, I think it’s important to note that I dislocated my elbow exactly one week before I was going to get on a plane to fly to Hawaii. I had decided to move to Oahu for beauty, to live more in tune with nature, to maybe someday learn to grow my own food, catch my own fish, catch bigger waves. Many people told me I was nuts for getting on the airplane. “Maybe wait a few months…” “Heal a bit…”

But I got on the airplane. My elbow was fucked up; I couldn’t bend it for shit, I had just taken my last painkiller while waiting to board the flight, and when I landed and stared out at the star-jeweled Pacific, half-drugged on the scent of plumeria, all I could feel was a sense of overwhelming dread and fear and pain. I’m not sure how much of that was real and how much of that was the withdrawal from the pain medicine, but I do know that I didn’t give up. I moved to Hawaii. My reasons for moving were honest and good and it was the best decision I ever made. Maybe I am a badass after all.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Finding the right mentor can often mean the difference between success and failure. You’re just more likely to become the best in your field when you are mentored by the best in your field. I’ve been lucky, at various points in my life, to meet the right people at the right time, people who have, one way or another, pointed me in the right direction. I recently finished reading Maria Konnikova’s The Biggest Bluff, and one of the most insightful moments in the book was when she revealed how she managed to get Erik Seidel, a world-champion poker player, to mentor her. How did she manage to convince the best of the best in the field to help her out? I think her story is instructive.

Konnikova had something to offer, an “ace in the hole,” as it were. Konnikova knew she wanted to write a book about psychology and poker and she wanted Seidel to help her. She used her experience as a journalist to get an interview. But she needed more than that. Konnikova happened to have an unpublished study “on poker tells.” She gave Seidel the paper, promised him she wouldn’t show it to anyone else, and “a partnership” was “born.” Most importantly, Konnikova doesn’t get all her learning from Seidel alone, despite his excellent pedigree. Rather, she taps into Seidel’s extensive network and learns from the people she encounters along the way.

In The Biggest Bluff, Konnikova keeps returning to the importance of paying attention. She explains that people often fail to take into account the changing information the world provides, opting instead to keep doing things the way they did before, even if it’s not working anymore. Research in decision-making reveals that we overestimate how much control we have over events over which we have no control and we often base our decisions on our first snap-judgement assessment of a situation rather than take into account the changing information the world provides. In study after study, in poker and in life “people failed to see what the world was telling them when the message wasn’t one they wanted to hear.” The most important lessons Seidel teaches Konnikova involves trusting her own intuition, learning how to think critically, and learning how to ask “why.”

What does all this have to do with mentorship? A good mentor doesn’t always give you all the answers, but shows you how to live, act, and work, often through example. Paying close attention to the successful people around us can teach us a great deal, even if we are not being actively “mentored.” Those people doing what you want to be doing, living the life you want to live? Find out what they are doing. Pay attention. Copy them.

Active mentorship can provide us with much needed feedback. Konnikova writes: “you need a way of testing your thought process.” Feedback is essential. “It’s easy to have an illusion of skill when you’re not immediately called out on it through feedback.” Dan Harrington, another poker expert tells Konnikova, “Until you go through a month of everything going wrong, you won’t know whether you have what it takes.” But sometimes, the failure that comes from being lost without a mentor can also be your best teacher. Failure is the best feedback. “The benefit of failure is an objectivity that success simply cannot offer.” Learning to “lose with grace” is the difference between the person who has a shot of success and the person who quits. The successful person doesn’t take failure personally. Perhaps the people who find mentors fail at finding mentors for a long time first.

The learning process requires incremental gains. If you try to move too far too fast you’ll fail miserably without gaining the lessons required, to work at a level that pushes you, but doesn’t annihilate you. And all along the way, critical thinking is the most important skill you have. Algorithms can only get you so far in games and situations that involve degrees of uncertainty and the vagaries of human life. Life is less about applying a series of steps to a given problem, but having a process of critical thinking to respond flexibly to the change and uncertainty life throws your way. Creativity is an essential skill. “The point is winning over the long term—and winning as much… as you possibly can with your best hands, all the whole losing as little as possible with your worst.” This is true in everything.

Here are a few more things to keep in mind when embarking on the learning process, whether alone or with a mentor:

• There are three levels of knowledge. There is the novice level, when you know nothing. Knowing nothing can be an advantage; you haven’t developed any ingrained bad habits, and don’t have the bias of thinking you know more than you do. You have beginner’s mind. You know you know nothing. Then, there’s proficiency, where you’re decently good, but sometimes you can forget how complicated the whole thing is. You might think you know more than you know. The key to anything in life is knowing what you don’t know. When I was a rock climber, the most dangerous climbers weren’t the beginners nor the experts. They were the proficient climbers who knew just enough to push themselves to make dangerous decisions. This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect: “the more incompetent you are, the less you aware of your incompetence.” And then there’s expertise. The expert knows what she doesn’t know, knows the depths and the nuances of mastery. The expert isn’t deluded about the sheer skill required for true mastery.  Konnikova writes: “True skill is knowing your own limits.” This means that the novice has an advantage when dealing with people who are proficient. It can be summed up like this: take no shit.
• Facing a problem? Reframe the problem. The way you think about something changes the way you talk about it. The way you talk about something frames the way you think about it. The way you talk and think about something frames the actions you take. The actions you take frame your life. “If you think of yourself instead as an almost-victor who thought correctly and did everything possible but was foiled by crap variance? No matter—you’ll have other opportunities…” So what can you do? You can’t control the cards, but you can control the decision, Konnikova explains.
• Don’t settle. When Konnikova starts winning small cash prizes at the tournaments, her mentors tell her she can do better. They want her to go for the win, not for the consolation cash prize. This kind of thinking forces her to re-evaluate her approach to other things in life. “Do I go for the min cash in my life decisions, holding on for the safer sure thing rather than taking more risk for the more uncertain but ultimately more attractive option? Do I lack gamble in my life?” Konnikova ultimately doesn’t settle. When she plays the World Series of Poker, she doesn’t opt in to the women’s tournament (a much smaller field, with a lower cash bar for entry); she goes all in to the game with the $10,000 entry. How many times have I held myself back, not going all in for the big time out of fear?
• Ask why. The trick to winning, Konnikova finds, is to make sure that the other players’ stories add up. She’s a writer. Each game of poker is a story. If the story doesn’t add up; if a player’s actions somehow don’t accord with reality, something must be amiss. There’s a narrative in everything. The trick is finding it, analyzing it, and mastering it.
• “Know what brought you to the table to begin with.” Is it glory? Attention? Curiosity? Konnikova explains: “As you dive into a new undertaking, it’s easy to lose perspective and, in the process, lose part of yourself and part of your reason for doing what you’re doing.” 
• Bird by bird. Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a beautiful book about the writing process, is based on a story Lamott tells about her little brother. After procrastinating to write a big project about birds, he finds himself overwhelmed the night before, crying. Lamott’s dad told her brother to remain calm, and just take it bird by bird. This strategy can be applied to anything we do. Want to write a book? Take it chapter by chapter, section by section, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence. Want to train your dog? Start with small tricks, like sit. Bird by bird.
• Luck exists. Sometimes people work really hard, and nothing happens (and sometimes people who don’t work at all find success). Sometimes you spend a decade writing the book and no one wants to read it. Sometimes you try to climb the mountain and the week you set aside to do it, an avalanche destroys the route, or a storm hits, ruining your bid for the summit. Agency can only take us so far. Luck plays a role. Skill isn’t sufficient for success. Every great success story can go the other way. How many great authors wrote the Great American Novel that ended up in a drawer? You can only acknowledge that you tried your best. Konnikova writes: “The most we can do is learn to control what we can—our thinking, our decision process, our reactions.” She quotes Epictetus: “Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.”
• Take care of yourself. In striving to be your best, you cannot be your best if you don’t rest. It is important to take time for self-care and reflection.
• Miracles Happen; Disasters Do Too. Konnikova writes: “The ‘one chance in a million’ takes place every second…If bizarre coincidences and one-off events didn’t happen—well, that would be the truly remarkable thing.” Is there even a word for the “one chance in a million”? In fact, there is a term. I looked it up. Littlewood’s Law holds that once every month we can expect to see an event with a chance of one in a million. Play enough games of poker, and you’ll see a royal flush. Live long enough, and you’ll experience more than a few miracles. You’ll also experience a few disasters. The micromort is the unit of measurement that measures the chances of dying in a given endeavor. Getting eaten by a shark while surfing has a micromort of 0.3. When it comes to surfing, the micromorts balance out the miracles. This helps, somehow.

There’s more to Konnikova’s The Biggest Bluff than just poker. Read this book. Sometimes books can be good mentors, too.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

I have never written this one before, but some books should come with a warning label. Maria Konnikova’s The Biggest Bluff is dangerous; I may have developed a small poker habit over the weekend while reading it. Konnikova documents her journey from being a complete poker novice to poker champ. But this isn’t a story of just anyone taking up poker. Konnikova decided to learn poker not for the money nor for the glory, but for the lessons the game could reveal to her about human nature. Konnikova has a PhD in psychology. She wanted to use poker as a way to explore her own psychological reactions to good luck and bad, delve into the uncertain realm of decision-making, and explore life in general. In the book, she recounts her journey from novice to champion, from amateur to pro. She takes the lessons she learns in poker and applies them to her daily life. The book is inspiring. It reveals the power of grit and determination, reveals the sheer joy of learning something new, and is full of insight about human nature and folly.

I’m a curious reader and I get lost in good books. To say I got lost in this one would be an understatement. The more Konnikova described the game of poker, the more curious I became. And so, halfway through reading the book, around noon on Sunday (I read the book in a day; it is that good), I started playing poker. Granted, it was the no-stakes, video-game style of No Limit Texas Hold’em poker on offer through the World Series of Poker phone app (thank goodness I live in Hawaii where money poker is illegal), but there I was, on a Sunday morning, playing poker in bed. I was a little ashamed of myself for enjoying it so much, a little thrilled, and a little frightened. I could see how poker could become addictive.

I also could see how poker could reveal weaknesses in my own decision-making. I understood what Konnikova meant when she wrote about poker as a lens through which she could view luck, but more precisely, a lens through which she could see with greater clarity how the human mind reacts to luck, both good and bad. As I passed from winning streaks to losing streaks, I could observe my own mind getting cocky, or getting desperate to win back the “money” I’d lost. I got so ambitious at times, I had to make it a habit to log out of the app when I won big, lest I get overconfident and go all in on a shitty hand. When my luck was good, there was a sense of invincibility that overcame me, the illusion that the luck would hold indefinitely. I knew this was an illusion, but the feeling was hard to break. And when my luck was bad, I couldn’t help but feel that I could somehow game the system in my favor, break it, crack it, so strongly did I think I was in control of Fortuna’s wheel.

The truth is that Fortuna’s wheel turns to no one’s will. The only real control I had was my choice to play or not play, to fold or raise. And while these choices might sound impotent to the uninitiated, these choices make all the difference.

In life there are similar parameters. We know we will die. Good things happen. Bad things happen. Despite this, we have choice. We can choose how we will react to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Life might throw arrows at us, but we have the power of thought, the power of choice. In the Consolation of Philosophy, a medieval exploration of the nature of bad luck and man’s choice in the face of chance, Boethius puts this dilemma into poetry:

“…when storms of life

Inflate the weight of earthly care,

The mind forgets its inward light

And turns in trust to the dark without”

Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy

We cannot control the motion of the stars that determine our fate. True freedom comes when we turn inward, to the power of the mind. It is not the outward effects that make us who we are, but the thoughts we hold about them. In the Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius laments his bad fortune, (he has good reason, when he wrote the Consolation he was imprisoned, awaiting his execution; a long fall for a man who was once a great political leader of his day). But Philosophy, “my nurse in whose house I had been cared for since my youth,” comes to his jail cell to help him understand his true nature. She explains:

“…You are wrong to think Fortune has changed towards you. Change is her normal behavior, her true nature. In the very act of changing she has preserved her own particular kind of constancy towards you. She was exactly the same when she was flattering you and luring you on with enticements of a false kind of happiness.”

Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy

Philosophy urges Boethius to bear with equanimity his loss of fortune, because the wealth she gave him was never his own to begin with. “I can say with confidence that if the things whose loss you are bemoaning were really yours, you could never have lost them.” In the face of changing fortune, what is it that we truly possess? Philosophy has a beautiful answer:

“…If you are in possession of yourself you will possess something you would never wish to lose and something Fortune could never take away.”

Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy

Neither fame, nor fortune, nor skill, nor wealth, nor pleasures of the body can make a person truly happy, because these things are subject to fate. Self-possession is the only way out. Ultimately, Philosophy takes Boethius through a technical breakdown of metaphysics, delves into the nature of God, and the true nature of the mind, existing in timeless infinity… light reading for a Sunday afternoon. But for now, our takeaway from Boethius is this: self-possession, and knowing your own mind, and placing your value in things that cannot be subject to chance, is the path of happiness.

So, back in the poker room, as I studied my fellow virtual players, I found I could discern the logical ones from the bold, the aggressive bluffers from the more cautious ones, the mathematical players from the emotional ones, and in so doing, I could manipulate the table in my favor. As long as I held myself together, and understood that I was just playing a game, a game I could leave at any moment, I could often maintain enough self-composure and self-control to win. It meant playing the bad hands so I could cut my losses, and playing the good to maximize their goodness. It meant knowing I could leave the application at any time, remembering it was just a game.

I’ve never played Texas Hold’em before, and I’m still a little dizzy with the time clocks and the rules, but I found that by applying some of the insights Konnikova discovered in her book, I could maintain a fairly steady winning streak as a complete novice, and even outsmart some of my opponents in the process. I’m nowhere near being any good (I still lose more than I win), but I can imagine how I could become good at poker. And that scares the shit out of me.

Texas Hold-em is a game of luck, but it is also a game of skill. There’s just enough information provided by the game to introduce the factor of skill, and just enough randomness and chance to create a balance of luck and choice that drew Konnikova to the game. When you’re playing poker, you’re not just playing the cards, you’re “playing the man.” Each player is dealt two cards that only they can see. A round of betting follows. Then, as the game unfolds, three cards are placed face up on the table for everyone to see. Another round of betting, followed by another card reveal, and another round of betting, followed by the revelation of the final card.

For Konnikova and others (including John Von Neumann, the inventor of the computer), the game is the perfect mirror of life—that vaster field where choice plays a role in our outcomes, but at any moment the unexpected misfortune can also occur. Poker is a balance between chance and skill, much like life. What is skill? What is luck? Ultimately, luck, good and bad, will strike. The house might burn down, or you’ll lose your job, or get coronavirus, or any other random serious of events and disasters that might occur can occur at any time. Good things can happen too. You could get your dream job, get the book deal, find your soul mate in a bar. Konnikova argues that mindset, that is, taking control over what can be controlled (Boethius’s self-possession) is the difference between success and failure, between the downward spiral and the slow climb back.

Prior to reading Maria Konnikova’s The Biggest Bluff, I had no interest in poker. In fact, I had an active aversion to it. If you’d have asked me about my interest in the game, I would have asked you why I should care to learn about the actions of a bunch of douchebags gambling in a room. (Konnikova notes that poker is a man’s world, 97% male, and after dealing with several instances of sexual harassment and propositions at the poker table, she takes to wearing noise cancelling headphones to keep her focus.) I have dear friends who have lost thousands of dollars to poker. For the most part, I view the game with aversion and fear. I have seen the best minds of my generation lose their incomes and sanity before the green table.

I never did understand the allure, or how a game could cause my friends to part with their hard-earned money so readily. But now I do. I don’t ever plan on playing for money. It would be my downfall, or my boon—but the truth is that I don’t want to find out. When I become obsessed with gaining mastery over anything, I lose myself, and I don’t have the appetite for losing myself in poker rooms. I’d much rather lose myself in surfing, or rock climbing, or writing, or art, or dog training.

So, with this warning about the perils of the book, I also have to admit that Maria Konnikova’s The Biggest Bluff is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve read in the last five years. Not only did it force me to re-assess my own terrible judgements about poker, it really forced me to re-assess my own terrible judgement—period. Which means, that at the end of the week, I needed to cut my temporal losses and delete my World Series of Poker application. My life has been the better for it.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Good advice is often so obvious that it feels inevitable once you encounter it. Sometimes the act of following it can be a strategy for approaching life in itself. In the early days of the pandemic, I began reading Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy / Bad Strategy and found in it, shall we say, a strategy forward, even though I was mostly confined to my living room at the time.

In his excellent book about strategy, Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt spends an inordinate amount of time devoted to analyzing bad strategies and why they are so seductive. Bad strategy, Rumelt explains, appeals because it replaces platitudes with the hard work of actually identifying the challenges and barriers we’ll face as we try to achieve our goals. The appeal of bad strategy is that it so often is a mere reiteration of goals without a clear analysis of the challenges that must be overcome to achieve them. Good strategy, Rumelt explains, always includes an honest diagnosis of the challenge and a coherent and coordinated guiding policy for approaching the challenge. Strategy comes about from an understanding of your limitations and also from a keen understanding of your advantages; it is not about platitudes of leadership, but is about understanding the problem, choosing a solution, and following through. Bad strategy, on the other hand, explains Rumelt, “ignores the power of choice and focus, trying instead to accommodate a multitude of conflicting demands and interests.”

But how do we choose which solution is best when we’re trying to find our way out of a problem or toward a goal? How do we choose the areas that will best benefit from our focus? Rumelt offers an interesting solution that is so obvious and yet so obviously the right thing to do that the advice itself is almost inane: make a list.

The Power of the List

One of the most compelling moments in Good Strategy / Bad Strategy is when Rumelt tells a story about the $10,000 business advice a young man once gave Andrew Carnegie. The story goes that a young man, Frederick Taylor, was at a cocktail party in Pittsburgh. Taylor had just begun to gain some recognition in business circles for his consulting work. When Carnegie met Taylor, he challenged him to give him some good advice about management. Carnegie promised that if the advice was effective, he’d give the man $10,000. It’s important to note that in the story, it’s 1890. In 1890, $10,000 would have the same purchasing power of approximately $280,000. So, really Carnegie was offering Taylor $280,000 for a piece of advice.

What was Taylor’s advice?

He told Andrew Carnegie to make a list. Taylor said, list the top ten most important things you can do and begin to take action starting with number one.

Did Carnegie take the advice? Did it work?

Rumelt writes: “The story goes, a week later Taylor received a check for ten thousand dollars.”

Why was this advice so good? Richard Rumelt suggests that “Carnegie’s benefit was not from the list itself. It came from actually constructing the list.”  Strategy involves not just critical thinking about the tasks we need to accomplish to achieve our goals, but a deeper kind of thought that looks further into the reasons why we want to pursue those goals in the first place. Sometimes, we can achieve our goals circuitously.

Spotlights and Blind Spots

Making lists allows us to take the spotlight away from just one thing, and consider our various goals. List-making of this kind also helps us combat the Zeigarnik Effect. This is the psychological phenomenon whereby a person is more likely to remember the tasks that remain unfinished rather than the tasks she has finished. Creating a list not only allows you to write down the things most pressing on your mind (the things that remain unfinished), but a longer list allows your brain the space to explore areas of activity and creativity you might not have visited because the pressing weight of more proximate unfinished tasks were on your mind. Creating a list also affords us the pleasure of checking things off, which allows us to visualize what we have accomplished. Because it is easier to forget all we have accomplished, creating a list allows us to more realistically assess our workload.

This kind of robust list making forces us to look beyond the immediate problem that might be occupying our attention. As we become focused on one problem area in our lives, we may lose track of other important areas that need work. The list is important because it invites us to not just focus on career, but to list the ten most important things we need to do–period. If you analyze what you put on your final list, you can often read between the items on the list and discover your values.

Making a list like the kind Taylor advised Carnegie to do invites us to dig deeper into purpose, values, and deeper goals. It forces us to look beyond the daily mechanical actions and towards the actions that will truly make a difference.

In the process of creating my own list, I found that some of the things that came up as important were things that had nothing to do with my job, or my projects, but had to do more with connecting to people I care about, apologizing to people I had to apologize to, and taking inventory of how my own actions may have been holding me back in achieving all the other goals on my list. When making my list, I was forced to look beyond my immediate professional and creative goals and look more deeply at my underlying reasons for wanting to achieve those goals. Was I doing something to make a difference, or to satisfy my deeper yearnings to love and be loved? Was my attention-seeking helping other people and myself, or stoking the dark soil of the ego? Were there better things I could put on the list that would better reflect my values?

The list forced me to not just think of the work I wanted and needed to do, but to think harder about the reasons why I was doing the work in the first place. Once I had my list clear, I could see the ways in which I had been a barrier to my own success, and could see the ways in which some goals were competing with one another. I could rethink my goals so that they were less contradictory. Ultimately, I could get out of my own way. The fact that I knew I’d have to tackle items on the list in order of importance also forced me to think critically about which tasks I wanted and needed to prioritize.

I’m in the process of tackling that list, but only after spending some good time thinking through my priorities. After all, sometimes the greatest barrier to success is nothing and no one else but our own selves.

The first thing on my list? “Call your little brother; see how he’s doing.” I did that a few days ago and I feel so much better.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.