Rafe Furst is a World Series of Poker champion, an angel investor, a mentor for groups like the Unreasonable Institute and All Day Buffet, and an advisor for the Decision Education Foundation. By his account he simply “connects ideas, people and resources and makes things happen faster."

With his degrees in computer science, symbolic systems, and a deep understanding of poker our conversations with Rafe kept coming back to how to make decisions. Considering how many decisions we make every day, and how directly connected our ability to make good decisions is to accomplishing anything, it's surprising how little attention the subject gets.

So, thanks to Rafe, we now offer three tangible rules that you can use not only to pick up your poker game, but also to help you get wherever you want to go—faster.

Rule #1: Use The Small Edge

Says Rafe: "Let's say there are 10,000 decisions that you make in the course of winning a poker tournament, each with different odds of a positive outcome. The key is taking very small edges (55/45 here, 60/40 there) over and over and over again. If you keep waiting for the perfect hand, you'll lose all your money in antes. Most people’s perceptions of how much of an edge they need to make a ‘correct’ play is totally off."

The daily decisions we make follow a similar pattern. We can either wait for the odds to be obviously in our favor before making a move or we can take hundreds of smaller chances where we have a small edge. So ask yourself: Are the odds of this particular job, conference, or opportunity going well better than flipping a coin? Yes? Then do it again and again and again.

Rule #2: Decisions are Different From Outcomes

We've been raised to think that good decisions always lead to good outcomes. Problem is, they don’t. If you follow the small edge rule, any decision you make that has a better than 50 percent chance is a good decision. You both win and lose, but over a long period of time, you eventually make it big. 

Learning to trust that you made a good decision even when you get that bad outcome is what enables you to keep making those hundreds of small-edged decisions that lead you to win over the long haul. If you see decisions and outcomes as the same, then slowly you begin to make decisions only when you have a close-to-guaranteed chance of success, you miss out on opportunities.

As Rafe told us: "Making a good decision most of the time in poker and in life is dependent on being able to decide based on the expected value as opposed to the particular outcome." So embrace those decisions, and realize that if you have that small edge, it was a good decision regardless of the outcome.

Rule #3: It’s All One Big Game.

Sitting at a card table, dealer in front of you, can make one feel like this hand and this opportunity is going to be your last chance to make money, to play, to win. But as Rafe explains, “It’s not like this session or this game has any more importance than the one I have tomorrow or the one I had yesterday. A lot of times what happens in poker is people have the wrong mindset. They make decisions in the game as though it’s their last.” 

It is this mindset of the immediate that affects the kinds of decisions we make. The feeling of a lack of time, or of limited opportunity changes the ways we make decisions subconsciously and makes it hard to determine what the correct small edge decision is

In poker, as in life, there is never just one opportunity and taking the long term view knowing that the perfect opportunity is still ahead will help you become more in tune with yourself and your ability to know what that correct small edge decision truly is.

 

The world is filled with conferences, open houses, receptions, galas, industry nights, summits—in short, networking events. With a finite amount of time, money and energy how do you know which to attend? How do you decide? Which one will pay off? Which event will enable you to meet that one person who is going to give you your break, your first round of funding, or the job you want? Is it the prestigious conference on the West Coast that is going to cost you five thousand dollars or will it be a free local arts event? It is actually hard to tell and the truth is we cannot know. But there is a way to decide. Culled from years of experience attending events and interviews with venture capitalists (of all things), here are the top three points that can help you invest in yourself and take risks like a pro.

 
1. Don’t just make one bet

There just may be that one event where all the people you need to meet are attending, that has incredible access, and that you have heard great things about: however, if it demands that you spend all your resources for the year on one event, don’t do it. The key to meeting the right people is about going to as many events as possible, not going to the one perfect event. It’s a numbers game and by betting once decreases your chances of winning drop significantly. 

2. Expect to fail

When a venture capitalists invest in ten companies, they expect to lose their money on half of their investments, to break even on two, to make a modest sum on one or two and, hopefully, to have runaway successes on the others. Apply this principal to all the events you attend. By doing so, you will expect less from each event, be more relaxed, build real relationships, and eventually find that one win you need.

3. Pay More and Play Less

If you are going to events every night and still not meeting the people you need, then it is time to pay a little more (be it in energy, time, or money) and play a little less. A good way of thinking about this concept is by adding up all the money and time you are prepared to commit and divide it between six or eight events. Aim to spend all your resources that year across only those events. Paying a little more for one or a little less for another enables you, no matter how you divide it up, to find that elusive balance.

So how do you do it? What are your secrets and how do you decide where to go with a limited amount money, time and energy to invest? I am eager to hear and learn.

Photo (cc) by Flickr user                   San Jose          Library

There’s a totally unevenly sliced pie when it comes to rewards. In wonkier terms, you’d call that a resource allocation problem: While CEOs represent the smallest part of our labor pyramid, a disproportionate amount of time and money is spent grooming them, charting who’s about to join their ranks, and celebrating “their” achievements…The working world would be a happier place if more of us aspired to roles that were just right – if we valued job fit and performance at every level and stopped overemphasizing the very top.

Her second point is that today a "crazy redundancy" exists. She writes:

You can see it in the not-for-profit sector, which has a gazillion little organizations replicating one another. We all want to run our own thing, so not-for-profits never die. As a result, we have huge inefficiency and ridiculous amounts of overlap in the sector.

As people who have led and consulted for nonprofits for almost 10 years each, we can attest to these inefficiencies and the resulting morale-draining effects. The cult of leadership stifles mutual learning and collaboration, diminishes power, and interestingly, rarely ends up being in the leaders' self-interest either. These factors collectively lead to feelings of isolation, both within and across organizations, and an unhealthy competition for resources and media attention. We've both been there, and it can get ugly.

Lublin's column doesn't point to any specific solutions other than a general exhortation that we must honor the doers, but there are likely many good specific ideas for how to do this. However, there’s another approach that relies less on breaking the obsession on leadership and more on expanding the notion of leadership to include, centrally, deep skills around collaboration.

Leadership gurus from Lao Tzu to John C. Maxwell have long recognized the importance of collaboration, but when you look across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, dysfunctional collaboration is rampant. From poorly facilitated meetings to poorly structured coalitions, many leaders lack a basic literacy in the principles of good collaboration or network theory, much less today's new tools and best practices that make collaboration even easier.

Greater collaboration doesn't mean collapsing many smaller groups into large, monolithic institutions (although some degree of consolidation is probably useful). It just means learning to work together better, which, given the 30 million businesses and 1.5 million registered nonprofits in the United States, is probably a more realistic solution than mass consolidation. In fact, there are many good reason to maintain our institutional diversity.

For one thing, diversity equals resiliency. Consider monoculture farming, which is much more susceptible to disease and pests than growing a mix of crops together. In economic terms, the arguments about breaking up the “Too Big To Fail” banks are built on roughly similar lines. More small players reduces the damage to the whole system that can result from a single failure.

But diversity also drives innovation. There’s a growing body of economic research, sometimes traced back to Robert Solow’s Nobel Prize-winning growth models of the 1950s, that suggests innovation is the single most important variable that drives economic growth. This is fairly intuitive: Innovation generates productivity dividends that result in job and wealth creation. Slightly less intuitive, perhaps, is the fact that small firms develop innovative technology (as measured by patents per capita) at substantially higher rates than large companies. Given the global need for radical innovation to solve a myriad of problems and heal the global economy, it’s probably to our benefit to have so many small, innovative companies and non-profits around.

So, perhaps much greater collaboration among many diverse players is the best of both worlds: you get the resiliency and innovation from many diverse players, and the efficiency and improved morale from collaboration. The only question is how do we best leverage all of the tools and platforms available today to enable this kind of diversity and collaboration to flourish? This will have to be the topic of a future column. Which, naturally, we’d love to get all of your thoughts on. Ahhhh, crowdsourcing.
 

In this new series, Dev Aujla and Billy Parish explore opportunities for making money and changing the world-at the same time.

1. The non-linear career path: No one currently making money and changing the world has a linear career path. Understanding what a non-linear career path looks like and how to embrace the non-linearity leads to the understanding that you can gain both stability and earn a good living without following a traditional path.



2. Career trade-off illusion: Our research showed that the generation now entering the work force clearly wants to do good but they are unwilling to compromise on the amount of money they want to make. It was easy for people to name the steps in order to either do good or to make money, but when asked about doing both, people had a lack of role models and were unclear on the steps they would need to take.



3. A space to talk: It is important to surround yourself with like-minded, understanding people with whom to discuss this new career direction. In fact, the interviews and focus groups that we held had this effect for hundreds of people. They helped people realize they were not alone, helped them feel comfortable with their career choices, and allowed them to talk about and defend their path to families, colleagues and even themselves.



4. Green-collar jobs: ?Green jobs, the related training programs and the public stimulus money that has been set aside to enable them are opening up opportunities across lines of race, class and privilege. No longer are the jobs of the "do good" economy just accessible to those with post-graduate degrees and international work experience. Today a wide spectrum of jobs exist in green manufacturing, retrofits and clean technology and they are becoming more available and accessible by the week.



5. Nontrepreneurs: Social enterprise, the go-to response to the proclamation that you want to make money and change the world, still requires one thing: an entrepreneur. But what about all the people who don't identify that way, who don't want the risk and uncertainty which that path demands? Fortunately, opportunity can be found working to make change from within large institutions ("intrapreneurs") or working for social entrepreneurs. Often overlooked by the media spotlight, these career pathways offer the chance for meaningful work without the stress of a start-up.