“The whole philosophy of my gambling was really betting on a lot of value opportunities. You're chipping along, you're treading along for 30, 40 weeks of the season, and you don't know when you're gonna make the money. But there'll be five or six weekends, or five or six weeks that everything goes your way. And those are the weekends. It's not like you're making five grand every week, and it's how it works. It's like you'll go 0, 0, 0, 0, and then you make 50 grand, right? So if you missed that weekend or you missed opportunity, or you are not there, then you won't get that. So you'll have loads of weekends where you're getting three outta four, you're getting two outta, three things are not going well.
You'll have bad weekends and good weekends, but all you're doing is you're trying to stay in the game long enough until you have one of those weekends. And it's a bit like that with the philosophy with the psychology is that you might have these little improvements.
Now if the rest of the time you can just stay where you are and not go backwards, it means every improvement, you're going a little bit forward. You know it's not a straight line. It might be a lot of staying still. And that's why I always say to people, if you can stay still for 40 weeks of the year and just go back for two of them and go forward for 10 of them, that is a great year. You will make such progress in that year.
Staying still is underrated. Staying still is actually really important. Not getting worse, just staying still and then taking advantage of those moves forward or those big leaps forward in the weekends. So I take like analogies like that from my betting, from my approach to performance and to people looking at it in the lives more applicable to what they're doing.”
Episode #122 of The Hope Initiative with Mike Knowles.
