How To Be Lucky In Life with Maria Konnikova

Welcome to Let It Be Easy with Susie Moore.

Susie Moore:

Maria Konnikova is the author of New York Times bestselling book, the Biggest Bluff, how I Learned To Pay Attention, master Myself, and Win. Maria is a regular contributing writer for the New Yorker, whose writing has won numerous awards, and she graduated from Harvard University and received her PhD in Psychology from Columbia University. While researching the biggest bluff, Maria became an international poker champion in just one year, and the winner of over $300,000 in tournament earnings and inadvertently turned into a professional poker player under the tutelage of Eric Seidel, master player who resides in the Poker Hall of Fame. You are going to love this conversation,

Susie Moore:

Maria Konnikova. I have to start by telling you the truth from my heart, which is I love you.

Maria Konnikova:

Susie. I love you too.

Susie Moore:

This is how friendships are made with love upfront. Maria, this book, could you see all this?

Maria Konnikova:

Oh, that warms my heart. I do the exact same thing.

Susie Moore:

I was actually even a little worried preparing for this interview like, well, is she going to give me four hours or what? Because I have a lot of questions, but we're going to dive straight in and there's so much I want to ask you because this book, Maria, it is about poker, right? It is about the biggest fluff. It's about you spending a year dedicating yourself to poker to win a championship or a tender, a championship, and you achieved it. And this is a very male field. This is a male field, not many women. It's very complicated, a lot of rules. But you did this because you wanted to truly understand the distinction between what's luck, what's skill, what we have control over, what we don't. Could you tell us a bit about what motivated this for anyone who hasn't yet read the book?

Maria Konnikova:

Yeah, absolutely. So for people who've heard me talk about this in the past, you know that I'm not a poker player and I did not grow up playing poker, playing games, playing card games at all. One of those people who actually dreads playing games. So I love my niece and nephew with all my heart, and the scariest thing they can do is take out a big board game and put it on the table. And I'm like, uhoh, okay, I love you. I will play this with you, but only because I love you so much. So I'm not someone who's in that world. And as you said, my entry into poker was from a totally different perspective. I went through a year in my life where just everything went wrong. I got really sick. My grandmother died just in a freak accident. She was totally healthy.

My mom lost her job, my husband lost his job. It was just the spiral of one thing after another happening that made me just stop and reflect and think, wow, you buy into this idea of the American dream, Protestant work ethic. You're from England, you guys have it too. If you just work hard enough and you're just skilled enough, then everything will work out. And that's bullshit at the end of the day because you do have to work hard. That's necessary, but it's absolutely not sufficient. You also have to get very, very lucky. And those moments when you are very, very lucky, it's so easy to just dismiss it and to forget about the luck and to think, yeah, look at this. I'm working hard and I'm doing well and I deserve this and it's all wonderful. And so I really wanted to figure out a way to explore this and to try to find out how do you draw the distinction?

Because life is so messy and it's so noisy. You can always make excuses when things go wrong. You can always blame the weather, blame this, blame that. When things go well, it's so easy to take credit and to say, yeah, I knew this was going to happen. I knew this was going to work out. And it's so hard to disentangle the two. And one of the things that I'd studied when I was in grad school and psychology was the illusion of control, which is this idea that we think we're in control when we're in situations where we're not, we attribute way too much skill to ourselves. And so how do you get past that? How do you not just explore that but actually become a better decision maker? How do you actually learn to understand what you do control and how to maximize your skill, but at the same time, figure out what those limits are and where chance and variance take over and where you just need to learn to let go because that's also part of it. You need to control the things you can, but then when you can't control it, got to just take a deep breath and let go and let the cards come as they will.

Susie Moore:

Maria, I'm like, can Maria be my life coach? I'm a life coach. I'm like, can Maria be my life coach? I swear this is a book about coaching because it's about the brain. It's about what our interpretation, what we assign meaning to what we've never assigned meaning to. One thing that I thought was so interesting in the book is how you explain that when it's good luck, we're like, oh yeah, I kind of earned this. I'm on a roll when it's bad luck. We're like, oh, a good break is coming. There has to be a reason to this. I mean, I haven't heard that recently. I think extra because I was tuned into your book and the message I heard someone say on a flight, oh, I've had a couple bad weeks, something good's got to come my way. And it's so funny how we make these differences and we believe I'm lucky, this is my reward or I'm on, there's a streak here, or things haven't been going so great. Something good has to come my way.

Maria Konnikova:

Yep. Gamblers fallacy.

Susie Moore:

And with gambling, with poker specifically, there's statistics, there's observation, which pay attention. We're going to speak about that in a moment. The superstition, there are so many kind of facets at play, so many moving parts, and you had such a concentrated timeframe to learn this game. And of course you want to win playing with real money, right? Your money there is risk here and there are so many kind of moving factors. When I read your subtitle, how I learned to pay Attention, master Myself and Win, I know your coach, Eric Sidal, told you always to pay attention. Can you tell us a bit about that and the role that played with your success?

Maria Konnikova:

Yeah, it was the first thing he told me when I was dumb enough, naive enough to ask what's the one thing I need to do

Susie Moore:

One thing now?

Maria Konnikova:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. Tell me the one thing. Yeah, one thing. And rather than say, are you insane? He said something, which I still go back to all the time because it's so deceptively simple, those two words, right? Pay attention. And yet it's one of the hardest things in the world. It's so hard to pay attention because the way that, so you mentioned that the book does kind of dive into the brain, and my training originally was in psychology and what from psychology and from how the brain works, is that our default state is to mind wander. So the brain actually by default isn't paying attention. It's constantly scanning the environment to see what it should pay attention to. Because back when we were evolving all these threats all over the place, and you have to kind of let your attention drift to figure out who's going to kill me, what's going to kill me, what do I have to focus on?

And these days, it's not that it's notifications on your iPhone or whatever it is, but it's always diverting our attention in that same way. And so when we want to actually pay concentrated attention, it's really hard. That is what takes resources, effort, cognitive effort, emotional effort, because you have to make a conscious choice to be present, to be mindful, to be in the moment, to focus on what's going on in front of you and to not let your attention drift. So you make a conscious choice to put your phone away. You make a conscious choice when you're sitting at the poker table to actually follow what's going on. Always, even when you yourself are not actively involved in a hand, that's your time to observe, to see what's everyone else doing, to try to pick up on all of the cues on what they're saying, but not saying on the dynamics.

And that takes such a lot of energy. And it's funny because I am someone who's been doing yoga for over a decade. I start each morning with yoga, practice, meditation, all this stuff. I've written about mindfulness many times. My first book Mastermind was actually about mindfulness. And yet until I started playing poker and having real money on the line, having all of these things there, it's something that I'm still struggling with. And poker really forced me to kind of distill what it was I needed to do. So as I think I write about at some point in the book, it's one of the most zen things I've ever done because it kind of forces you to be in the flow and in the zone if you want to do well. And you can actually tell the difference. You can tell when your mind is there, when it's present, when you're actually in the zone and when you're not. And you can see a difference between the two because either your money is growing or it's not.

Susie Moore:

And I mean, what's so interesting is there a stamina? It's not like, oh, here's a 30 minute game, pay attention. This goes for hours and hours and hours watching. I remember at one point there's what you're observing Eric, and he's playing your coach and he's playing, and you notice that other players are checking their phone, looking at the tv that's always there looking for the waitress for a drink, and he's just so focused. I mean, isn't focus a bit of a lost art?

Maria Konnikova:

It is. I absolutely think it is. But I will caveat this by saying we've always thought focus is a lost art. It's always been hard for people to do. So when I was researching mindfulness for the first time, really diving into it for my first book, I learned that medieval monks had written about their inability to focus, and they had a name for it, a Sadia, the Noonday Demon. And it was about, man, my mind's all over the place. I'm supposed to be focused on my prayers and all I can think about is lunch and sleep and this and that, and it's horrible. And so I think it's a uniquely human thing where it's just deeply ingrained in who we are. But that said, so technology isn't completely to blame and the modern world isn't completely to blame, but it's gotten harder because technology, as I've kind of suggested in my last answer to you when I was talking about the brain constantly scanning the environment, the technology is crack for our default mode network because there's so many things going on and we never have to be by ourselves.

We never have to be alone with our thoughts. We never have to be bored. We never have to learn how to entertain ourselves because there's constant connectivity and there's constantly something we could be doing. One of the things that I actually teach when I teach writing to my writing students is I make them spend a day without their cell phones. And they usually hate me for it. They have to write about it after, but they hate me and then they don't hate me because it's actually a very powerful exercise to try to figure out who am I, what's going on in my mind? What are my thoughts? What are my hopes? What are my fears? What goes on in my head? And we never take the time to focus on that because we're always distracted by something else. And so we lose the art of engagement. We lose the art of focus, of presence. And so I think it is an increasingly lost art, but I'm optimistic that it's one that everyone can reclaim if they choose to.

Susie Moore:

And you say in the book that you say this more than once, the importance of being reflective versus reactive. And this is actually truly, this is coaching on so many levels. Like someone said something, I'm going to get her. He said he did something, I want to straighten him out. There's really a breath or a, and you actually show one of my favorite stories in this book too, towards the end, the story about the village farmer,

You guys, I'll link to that story too, but it's an excellent story, which is really not making assumptions about what's good and bad. And you have so many delicious quotes in this book too, from so many great writers in history, but not making a snap judgment, this is good, that's bad. And what I learned from you, Maria, which completely fascinated me, was in poker, it's not the best cards that win most of the time. There really is this human element. It is the dance between the cards and then your own decision making. But I feel as learning from you, this ability to be reflective, to pause, to choose, and to keep choosing. And I have to say this is I've never heard this before, ever in anyone, and I've also with athletes, I mean truly, I've never seen this. You've had a spreadsheet working with a coach yourself to monitor, measure, track your emotions. Can you tell us about that? Because I wish everyone including me did this.

Maria Konnikova:

Yeah, so I ended up working with a mental coach as well, Jared Ler, who was great and who really helped me identify a lot of the emotional issues that I had that I didn't think I had because I'm a psychologist, I know this, I'm good. I've studied this. I'm not supposed to have, not supposed to have any weaknesses in my mental game, but one of the things he asked me to do at the very beginning, which I didn't do right away because I thought it was stupid and took me a while to actually do it, and then I realized, damn, he knew what he was talking about physically doing this was very important, was to make a spreadsheet and it had different columns, and it was one of these things where I had to learn to figure out, okay, how am I feeling at this moment at different moments in the poker tournament?

I'd have to monitor it. What happened? What's the trigger? Why am I feeling this way? Okay, let's dig down even deeper. Let's figure out why this is a trigger and this is really important. What am I going to do next time? What am I going to do next time this happens? To avoid getting into this emotional state so that I can keep making good clearheaded decisions? Because the truth is that once you're emotional, once you're in that hot state, it all goes out the window. If you haven't prepared and you don't have a game plan and you don't know exactly how you're going to act, you're going to break down and you're not actually going to be able to execute it. And oftentimes you even see yourself, this has happened to me so many times going through this emotional state in poker, it's called tilt, and I think that that's a great term for every, tell us about tilt.

Tilt, it's exactly that. It's letting emotions get into your decision process, and the emotions are incidental. They're not integral, so that's important. They're not actually part of the decision. It's just how you happen to be feeling, and that's incidental to what you're thinking about, and yet it's influencing you to act in a certain way, and you can use tilt as any part of speech. I'm tilted, I'm on tilt. That person's so tilting, do whatever you want with it. But the idea is when you're on tilt, when you're in that moment, you can't do anything about it and can't. You're no longer clearheaded. The only moment where you can figure out what to do is when you're calm out of the hotspot, not in that situation when you have time to reflect. And so what this spreadsheet system forced me to do was kind of isolate all of these different things.

What are the things that make me tilt? What are the things that affect me? How do they affect me? What do they do to my decision making? How am I going to counteract that so that I had a very concrete plan of action? Then we talked through it. Of course we refined it, but only after I wrote them all down did I think through them. It's one of the reasons that I think it's actually such an effective learning tool to teach someone else what you're doing, because that way you have to truly understand it because if you explain it to someone, then you start seeing, oh, wait, I actually don't understand there's this gap and this gap because so often you just think you understand it in your own head, but you don't really, and so this spreadsheet was the same thing for yourself without talking to someone else, because you can be like, oh, yeah, yeah, I know exactly what makes me tilted. I know what my triggers are. No, you don't. Not unless you actually take the time to stop, write them down, think through it and do that deep self-analysis. It's not pleasant. It's not something that I think is a joy to do. It's probably why I avoided it and why we avoid it in general. I don't want to look inside the deep psyche of my mind. Leave that alone.

Susie Moore:

I mean, but this is the ultimate immersion in self-awareness, right? Which I always think, oh, I'm software. I know it'll trigger me. But to the extent that you had to do it to stay so calm and consistent, it wasn't just like a one-off. It is something that you just keep coming back to. You also speak in the book about the importance of asking, why am I doing something? Why is someone else doing something? And you say something funny. Imagine all the therapy all the time and money. We'd say, if we just kind of said, well, why am I doing this? Or maybe what is that person's motivation? Maybe it's a good one, just the agony that we sometimes feel when we don't question. You also say less assumption, more inquiry throughout. Would you say that poker is just really a game to succeed in it? Just really understanding yourself and being willing and having almost the generosity to observe and pay attention to others. I

Maria Konnikova:

Think that's a huge, huge part of it, and I'm so glad that you saw it that way because so many people, they look at poker, they look at poker players and they say, oh, vicious, cruel, zero sum, awful war. You're out to kill each other. And sure, in one sense there are winners and losers. Some people will walk away with money, others the game. But the way that you understood it is actually what draws me to it because I think it actually has made me a much more empathetic person, much better able to see the world from others' points of view, because that's what you're constantly doing. You're constantly trying to figure out what are people saying? What are they telling me? What are these dynamics? You become more observant. You become more attuned to nonverbal cues, which are really important outside of poker, just to be a good listener, to be a good friend, to be a good person.

And they've made me, I think, a much mentally stronger, better version of myself, which is also good for everyone because I have done so much of that analysis for poker. Then I take it from poker into my everyday life, and it improves how I'm able to deal with stress, how I'm able to approach different situations, how I'm able to think through different situations. And so yes, to me, that's the beauty of the game, and that's interesting about it. And there's always something to learn there because at the end of the day, it is a game of people. It's also one of the reasons why I far prefer playing live poker to online poker because there's something about sitting in front of a computer screen where all of these skills don't translate quite as much,

Susie Moore:

Right? And you have these amazing stories too, about different people who bluffed you, like one lady who's showing you a picture of her kid and you have this female solidarity or so you think and she clean,

Maria Konnikova:

Oh God,

Susie Moore:

I'm just outraged for you. And then I'm like, wow, but this is it, right? This is when we don't pay attention. We instantly trust. And then to say, because you studied con artists too and how you really can never tell.

Maria Konnikova:

That's humanity in a nutshell though, right? All of these interactions at the poker table, it's just the play of life. You see it all playing out during the day. You see people at their highs, you see them at their lows, you see what they're willing to do. Everything kind of comes out and everything's fair game. Now. What that woman did to me, and for people who haven't read the book, she invoked female solidarity and oh, it's us against all the boys and against the world, and then proceeded to just completely bluff me and take all my money and it's on me, right? She didn't do anything wrong. I've never done something like that because it's just not something that it would occur to me to do, but I'm not judging her for doing it smart that if she can get what she wants that way, that's great. Just understanding all of those dynamics and yeah, our default is to trust. And even in a game like poker, when you know that the game is based on bluffing and deception, it's part of the rules. You're playing a game. This is not real life. The rules of the game are such that you're allowed to lie. You're supposed to lie.

Susie Moore:

Maria, my favorite chapter in this book, I mean, it's hard to say because they're all brilliant, but my favorite was the one entitled No Bad Beats. Can you explain what a bad beat is? And then we'll talk about why there aren't any. Yes. I actually want to read something from the No Bad Beats too. So if you explain what it is, I'm going to get to my quote. Great, and then I've got a couple questions. Sounds

Maria Konnikova:

Good. So bad beats are a situation that comes up in poker when you get your money in as a favorite. And what that means is, statistically speaking, you should win most of the time, 65% of the time, 75% of the time, sometimes 98% of the time you're supposed to win, and then the money goes in and your opponent hits the Miracle card and you lose. So you end up on the quote, wrong side of variance. You're a statistical favorite, and yet you end up losing bad beats happen all the time. They're supposed to. One of the things that I say over and over is that statistics are statistics. They don't care if you're on what side of variance you are. They don't care about what happened before. It's kind of what you were saying at the beginning with people feeling like they're overdue or like, yes, this lucky streak will continue.

No probability doesn't care. Probability is just probability. It just exists and it doesn't care what happened before, and it certainly doesn't care about you personally. And so sometimes you're going to get bad beat after bad beat, and you'll feel like, oh my God, am I doing something wrong? And if you do the analysis, you say, no, I've gotten my money in as an overwhelming favorite every time. Okay, fine. I should keep doing the exact same thing. But it's so easy to get dragged down and to focus on the bad beat and to complain about it and to say, oh, this is awful. Woe is me. And I will explain why there are no bad beats, but first I will let you read what you want to read.

Susie Moore:

If you can see this, I mean, my underlining is crazy. I've got, I've exclamation points and say, obsessed, this is what I love. If you suffer a bad beat in life, it may set you back considerably more and last a lot longer than in poker. All of a sudden, your framing matters significantly. A victim of the cruel cards. This may serve as something I think of as a luck dampener effect, because you're wallowing in your misfortune. You failed to see the things you could be doing to overcome it. Potential opportunities pass you by. People get tired of hearing, you complain. Oh, so your social network of support and community also dwindles. You also don't even attempt certain activities because you think I'll lose any way. Why trying? Your mental health suffers and the spiral continues. I mean, are we talking about poker or are we talking about every single thing that happens in this world, didn't get the apartment, didn't get the job, didn't get the man or the woman truly. So the complaining about the bad beats, because the reason this came up in the book is because you wanted to go to your coach and explain what happened and why it was wrong. And he was like, stop right there.

Maria Konnikova:

Yeah, he actually shut me up, which is if you ever meet Eric, he's just the nicest, most soft spoken, sweetest guy ever. Just an absolute teddy bear of a human being. And for him to shut me up is jaw dropping. And he said something that really stayed with me. He said, do you have a question about how you played the hand? And that made me stop and think and say, well, no, I guess not. I had top set, which is a great hand in poker on a board where nothing else was possible. I had definitely literally no other hand could beat me. We got our money in, and then this person ended up winning with a draw, and he said, okay, fine. That's it. Then I don't care how the hand ended because the outcome, that's variance. That's just the cards, that's chance. That's what you don't control.

All I care about is how you played your decision process, the skill, the decisions that you made and why you made them. If you have a question, it let's talk. If not, move on. Forget about it. Then he went on to say that telling a bad beat story is like taking your trash and dumping it on someone else's lawn, which is really, really true because it's toxic and it's toxic to you. While you're carrying that bad beat with you, instead of thinking about other things and letting your mind analyze other decisions and move on, you're just dwelling in it, letting it poison you. Probably reaching the wrong conclusions, I guess. I should have never gotten my money in with top set. I should have just waited and seen what happens just in case. No wrong conclusion, absolutely wrong conclusion. You made the right decision, but the outcome wasn't good. That's fine. The decision is not the outcome. The outcome is not the decision, and then it's obviously toxic to other people, which is what you just read because you're taking that trash and you're dumping it on someone else. So now not only have you carried it around with you, but you're polluting their brain with it as well. Why do they need to hear that? What purpose does it solve? Nothing. It doesn't solve anything.

Susie Moore:

And we see all the time in life, right? Everyone wants to say exactly why it went wrong, and you speak about the victim, victor kind of mentality when it comes to having a bad beat, having something unexpected happen. Do you think, Maria, that there is a time for processing any negative emotion and then going straight to okay, decision making, or can you go straight to, okay, I'm back to neutral reset.

Maria Konnikova:

I mean, I think that it's unfair to say don't experience negative emotion, and I think it's also counterproductive because you're human, and you know what? As much as you talk about don't tell bad beat stories, don't do this, don't do that. It sucks when you lose. It sucks to be knocked out of a tournament. That moment hurts when you kind of look at it and you're like, damn it, that should not have happened. Of course, it's always upsetting, but the trick is to not dwell, to acknowledge it, to say, okay, that happened. Did I make the right decision or not? And then think through it and then just move on. And I've gotten to the point, at least in poker, but also in a lot of life situations where I don't even remember my bad beats. I don't remember what happened. I don't remember why I was knocked out.

I don't remember the outcome. All I remember is did I make the right decision or not? And if I did, I'm happy if I didn't, if I actually made a mistake. That's what keeps me up at night, going back and thinking through the things I did wrong and the ways that I actually made decisions that were potentially a little bit off, but it gives me things to work on. It gives me a target instead of dwelling on, oh, I messed up. Okay, this is what I did wrong. Here's how I'm going to work on it for next time. But that's more upsetting to me than making the right decision and then getting very unlucky. That said, like I said, it always sucks.

Susie Moore:

Oh, and the thing is, one thing that I say, or one thing that I coach on is the things will go wrong. You will get rejected, you will fail, especially if you really have lofty dreams. Whatever your ambitions are, there will be things that don't go your way, for sure. But the important thing is you'll bounce back timing. Is it a year of sitting it out or is it three minutes? What's your timing to bounce back? Are you like, I'm back in 15 seconds, or do you need an hour?

Maria Konnikova:

It depends.

Susie Moore:

Yeah.

Maria Konnikova:

For poker, it's usually pretty quick,

Susie Moore:

Just like straight onto the next thing.

Maria Konnikova:

Yep. But it depends on how bad the beat is and how long it takes me to think through it. Because sometimes in life when something really doesn't go well, it takes a long time to try to disentangle, did I do something wrong? Did other things go wrong? What was the process and what should I be focused on for next time? And that's a processing time that isn't necessarily dwelling on the bad beat as much as trying to analyze the situation and direct that energy in a productive way, but I'm not going to move on until I figure it out. So I guess it's not quite the same thing, but it's still thinking about the situation and trying to see, well, what can I learn from it? Yeah,

Susie Moore:

An expansive energy that you bring to it versus a self-loathing. It's an expansive, curious energy. Maria, this is so, I mean, I can't tell you how much I love this conversation. One thing that I love too from your book was how PO has changed you. So I love this just short story that you share where someone's giving you a speaking opportunity and you say it's not enough. Essentially the fee isn't high enough and your husband's like, Ooh, you've changed, or you're a different woman. And then you say to, well,

Maria Konnikova:

His exact words were, you take a lot less shit from people than you used to.

Susie Moore:

How has poker changed you in that way?

Maria Konnikova:

I mean, I take a lot less shit from people than I used to.

Susie Moore:

What is that? Why is that now? What did poker do to make you more just resilient and assertive?

Maria Konnikova:

Yeah. Well, I think part of it is that poker is anywhere from 97 to 98% male. So just that number in and of itself should just let you pause for a second and say, wow, that's like taking our everyday dynamics and putting them on steroids because we live in a male dominated world that's been built by men for men, but poker just really blows that up, and unless you confront it, you're going to pay the consequences. As I did at the beginning, it actually took me a while to work through all of my issues and to realize how much I'd internalized a lot of what society had always told me about being nice and not putting up a fuss and not being aggressive, and how important it was to smile and be liked. And those are messages that you just have pounded into your head from day one.

And it took me a while to realize how often I did let myself be bullied and how often I mistook shows of bluster and confidence for the real thing. Poker really teaches you that someone looking strong and confident is not the same thing as them actually holding good cards. And you realize how often in life the men who've always been on top of the world, they just say, oh, yeah, yeah, I've got that. I know how to do it. All this stuff, all this false confidence, and they get the job over someone who's a female who's like, well, I know this, but I need to learn. This starts caveating and nuancing and actually saying, oh, these are the cards I have in my hand. Look, the man is like, here we go. I've got this.

Susie Moore:

Which leads me actually, because I love how you speak about being a woman and how that's impacted you, because Eric tells you at one point to play more aggressively. And there is a incredible, let me just, I quote you here, Maria. This is page 100 where you talk about playing passively, playing safe, and you say, here, oh, I could weep. There's a false sense of security in passivity. You think that you can't get into too much trouble, but really every passive decision leads to a slow but steady loss of chips, just the visual. And chances are, if I'm choosing these lines at the table, there are deeper issues at play. Who knows how many proverbial chips a default passivity has cost me throughout my life, how many times I've walked away from situations because of someone else's show of strength, when I shouldn't have, how many times I've passively stayed in a situation, letting it get the better of me instead of actively taking control and turning things around. Hanging back only seems like an easy solution. In truth, it can be the seed of far bigger problems. Can we speak about that just for a moment in terms of knowing when to be assertive, knowing when to take more action versus this more female

Maria Konnikova:

Passivity that we think it safe? Well, it's one of these, it's this false sense of security that if I am not seen, if I just kind of coast along, if I'm passive, if I don't do anything to draw attention to me, then everything will be fine and everything will be good. And that's the way to get ahead and succeed. And that's, like I say in poker, absolutely false because your chips are not going to build themselves up. What happens if you're constantly passive in those moments, when you suddenly start to be active, when you suddenly start to be aggressive, all of a sudden people would be like, oh, she has a monster hand. She's super strong because she's just been sitting here quietly for two hours, and all of a sudden she's woken up. I'm going to fold. So are you going to be able to make money with your strong hands?

No, because the moment that you are suddenly in it, people know you are actually strong. You lose your ability to bluff, you lose your ability to navigate these situations, to have these sorts of dynamics where you don't have to have the best hand to win. And as you said before, Susie, in poker, it's usually not the best hand that wins. Most hands don't make it to showdown. It's the best player who convinces everyone else to throw their cards in the muck before they even hit that final card. And that's the beauty of the game, to be able to maneuver like that. And you realize that nobody knows what cards you hold except for you. All they see is how you portray yourself, how you carry yourself, how you act, what you do, how you do it. That's the only information they have. And so you suddenly have the freedom to tell different stories to make your story into something else.

And if you learn how to do that persuasively enough, then you'll become a winner. And the answer isn't be insanely aggressive all the time, bluff all the time. It's not the answer either. It's to try to figure out a successful rhythm for you, but to stop going into the default patterns for your own mind and for your own behavior. For me, the default happened to be passive. And I think that's probably true of a lot of women, but for a lot of players actually who are starting out, they're way too aggressive and they bluff way too much. And you can take advantage of that. And I've actually been the beneficiary of that many times when I see that I can exploit that. And so it goes back to the very beginning of our conversation and self-knowledge and learning to sit down with yourself and figuring out what are the mistakes I'm making in my behavior? What are the defaults? What's my status quo bias? And my status quo bias is to just sit and be passive and wait for stronger hands. And that's what I have to fight against because it's a false sense of security to think that the status quo is fine, the status quo is actually making an active decision to remain in that status quo, and that's not always a good thing.

Susie Moore:

And you also speak about cognitive embodiment, which I think is really powerful and it's fun to test in real life in different situations, even socially speaking. I was speaking to somebody recently who was really nervous to show up at an event, and I said, you walk in slowly, and it doesn't matter how you feel because there is some evidence to this, how if we want to act the way that we want to feel, there is some connection there, but I feel like you've truly mastered this. I mean, knowing how to show up, knowing kind of what's, because in action is action. So when you take action in a way that's kind of supportive of your goal, even if it feels a bit uncomfortable at first or different, it's the game element.

Maria Konnikova:

It's the game element. And one of the beautiful things about poker, which is one of the reasons why I actually want to bring more women into the game because it's such, I feel like it's a tool that they can use to be stronger versions of themselves, is it is a game. And so you can play around with different elements and different personalities and just different angles of yourself. Not saying become a different person, but it's a game space. It allows you to explore these different personas and to explore what embodied cognition can actually do because it's been embodied. Cognition is something that's been a factor in psychology for years, for decades, and yet people always push back against it because it seems like such a weird thing. But our minds and our bodies are so intimately connected. Our minds have so much power over our bodies, but our bodies also have power over our minds.

It's a feedback loop. And so it does matter what signals you're sending, and people always say cliches are often true to a certain extent, that's why they become cliches. But fake it till you make it. There's actually some truth to that dress for the job you want. There's some truth to that. I remember when I was 21 years old, just out of college, I graduated young, so I had just turned 21, just moved to New York City, just starting out in this huge overwhelming place where I don't really know anyone, have no connections. And I remembered my decision the first time I was at a party where someone asked what I did, and I said I was a writer. And it was just a conscious decision to say that even though I was not yet able to make a living as a writer, I was writing at night, I was writing on weekends. I was working in television during the day and doing something else, but I made that conscious mental choice to identify myself as a writer. And I think that was the first step to actually making it a reality. It's not a moment that I've thought about for a long time, but I think it's very appropriate here.

Susie Moore:

It is appropriate here. Say what you want to be. Say the thing, take the, and one thing that I've learned from you, Maria, is there is risk. I mean, people will think poker, gambling, like your grandmother in the book, you must read this book, my friends. Truly, I know you have to run, Maria, truly. I could keep you forever. Be careful. But there's many stories here about what you had to overcome, even people in your family entering a completely new world, even just the geographical, like the casino style, everything. You just had to, this reads like fiction. When I read a book, when I read a book that's nonfiction and reads like fiction, I'm like, wow. I mean, it's so gripping. You could just read it again and again. And Maria, where can people find you? First of all, two things. I wonder if people can find you so you can direct them there, but also what's next for you? What can we expect from you, Maria?

Maria Konnikova:

Sure, sure. So people can find me. Usually I'm most active on Twitter and also Instagram. So I'm kova on Twitter, on Instagram. I'm girl named Maria, but girl doesn't have an eye because someone else took that handle, and one day I would like someone to please get it back for me.

Susie Moore:

No, I and girl got it.

Maria Konnikova:

And I have a website, maria conno cova.com, but I'm very bad at updating it. It's a little bit out of date, but that's normally where I am. I don't spend much time on Facebook at all, so that's probably the worst place to find me.

Susie Moore:

Next? What can we look at?

Maria Konnikova:

Yeah, so I'm working a bunch of stuff, some of which I unfortunately can't talk about, but other things that I can talk about. I will say that some of it involves screen, so I'm actually moving into new type of writing, and I'm actually in Vegas right now working on a new project for Audible. So yeah, it'll be an Audible original. This is actually my second Audible original. The first one I've already done, but hasn't come out yet, so you guys can expect it out in a few months. So for all of those people who actually enjoyed listening to the Biggest Bluff as opposed to reading it, this one's for you because it's going to be audio first.

Susie Moore:

Maria, thank you so much for the work that you do for being here with us today, showing us how to master ourselves, how to win, how to pay attention. These are truly valuable, permanent life skills, tools that you can use. Just I can't think of a situation where they're not relevant. So thank you, Maria, for your generosity, for being here, showing up and teaching us so much. I've learned so much from you.

Maria Konnikova:

Well, thank you so much, Susie. This has been a wonderful, wonderful, and I too feel like we could speak for hours.

Susie Moore:

Oh, I'm coming. Thank you. I'll be on the next flight to Vegas.

Maria Konnikova:

Be careful. Alright, let's do it.

Susie Moore:

Thank you so much, Maria.

Maria Konnikova:

Thank you, Susie.