The Game Changer

Barbara: You know when you read something and it sticks with you and then you try to quote it back later in conversation and you can’t for the life of you remember what it was? I know we sometimes roll our eyes at people who pluck quotes out of midair and repeat them back verbatim, but I’ve always secretly coveted this trait. Oh, to reference Shakespeare or Sartre or Sontag with perfect recollection. Not for the intellectual kudos, mind you, but for the accuracy. The POINT of what they said.

I was trying to recall a quote for a friend recently and I paraphrased it so badly I may have changed the meaning entirely. And I was so frustrated with myself that I ran up to find the book, flipping maniacally through all the pages, until I found it. The irony was not lost on me that this was AFTER I’D ALREADY QUOTED IT! Still, I needed to see how close I’d gotten. (I was miles off, of course.)

That said, the quote is really so GREAT that I decided to blog it. I would love to know if this idea resonates with you as much as it did with me. I was reading Tony Hsieh’s autobiography, Delivering Happiness––he’s the CEO of Zappos.com––and he talks about all the stuff he learned though years of ups and downs and ups. At one point he makes an analogy between playing poker and running an effective business (aka, living life). He says (and I quote): “I’d realized that whether in poker, in business, or in life, it was easy to get caught up and engrossed in what I was currently doing, and that made it easy to forget that I always had the option to change tables. Psychologically, it’s hard because of all the inertia to overcome.” And here’s the clincher (*caps are mine*): “WITHOUT CONSCIOUS AND DELIBERATE EFFORT, INERTIA ALWAYS WINS.”

Isn’t this true??? I mean, from a very early age, I recognized this. And hated it. Why, if I had so much I wanted to do, felt compelled to do, didn’t I do it? Well, Tony put his finger on it: it’s Inertia’s fault! I’m all, I gotta get out there, conquer the world, and Inertia’s all, Nah, it’s cozy here on the couch with the TV on, fuggedaboudit.

No, kidding aside, I’m a super-hard worker. Pretty much everyone I know is a super-hard worker. There’s ALWAYS more to do than there are hours in the day. I want desperately to get my shit done, to feel a sense of accomplishment. Inertia doesn’t hold me back at all in the “doing” regard. BUT. I like understanding that if I don’t make a deliberate effort against inertia, if I don’t make myself uncomfortable from time to time (and routine, however busy, can also get “comfortable”), then I will get stuck. And that stuckness will echo through every facet of my life.

So, while I capped Tony’s inertia/winning quote, I will also try to remind myself—and any eye-rolling listeners of my fumbled attempts to accurately repeat a quote––that the key is actually in understanding the need to regularly “change tables”.

And how have I changed tables, you might ask. Well, in the last year, certainly blogging and going on Facebook has changed my game significantly.

What’s next? I’ll tell you when I do it :)


Deb: I can certainly quote anything verbatim from a 1960’s Mad Magazine, so there. Take that! 


You can always change tables. How do I love that? And I have the same as you, Barb, Facebook and blogging are huge committments for me. It was very hard to change that table. Writing and developing shows was another table changer but I always looked over at that table and there was never an empty seat and the players were drunk. 


This has soooooooooo resonated with me. I am going to always keep my eyes open for another table, another game. Not blackjack though. I’ve tried it. The other players yell at me.