How playing cards taught me to focus better
Playing cards are pieces of paper with numbers on them.
Throw in 4 different symbols — adding a dimension of complexity — and you get an “intellectual toy” you can use to invent games.
When you look at it this way, you realize that well-known card games are genius inventions. Practically, they’re just a set of rules and a goal post. The equipment is simple…
…yet they accomplish so much: a good card game fosters competition, tests problem solving metal, and nurtures social connection.
Amazing as they may be, card games played with a traditional deck — with exception to Texas Hold’em — seem to drifting out of popularity. This is probably because today there are so many stimulating alternatives.
Now people play card games with special decks, board games, console games, and mobile phone games. And maybe there’s some intellectual benefits to some of those — I don’t have enough experience with them.
But I reckon, if they never pick up a traditional deck, they’re missing out on something special. In fact, I’m going to argue that…
Traditional card games are a great way to train your brain to think like an entrepreneur.
Read on and I’ll explain.
Play these games, and watch your “hustle muscles” pop
My aunt and uncle live on the outskirts of Sydney.
Every time I visit, we follow dinner with a few hands of cards.
Now, I grew up playing cards. I played Go Fish and Crazy 8. But it wasn’t until I aged that the joys of competition and intellectual challenge set in, and I started playing cards at a higher level.
And, my aunt and uncle are sharks.
These games are dead-serious-as-hell. There’s no table talk when hands are in play. If someone flashes a card… RE-DEAL IT!
Perhaps the best part is the fact that there’s no drinking or gambling. They never play for money. As much as I love playing for money (and drinking) these games are simpler, purer, more visceral. We play for bragging rights alone.
My uncle is a competitive Englishman and, he will take you down at all costs.
It’s a great experience.
As I explored this new perspective towards traditional card games, something interesting gradually came into view. I started to see a connection between two seemingly unrelated things:
The way you must think to play cards at a high level…
…is the way entrepreneurs must think to succeed.
Card players & entrepreneurs are “dangerous” if they can do this one thing
Entrepreneurs weather a ton of intellectual and strenuous activity on the road to success. To progress, they MUST act in the face of their own internal resistance — often presenting as fears and limiting beliefs.
That means they often fight against internal distractions.
And with that in mind, what I’ve noticed is, the most successful entrepreneurs I’ve met shared one subtle-yet-profound trait:
The ability to think about the task at hand,
and ONLY the task at hand.
Consider this: when doing a task, your brain is some combination of (1) focused on the task and (2) thinking about god-knows-what-unrelated-shit.
For instance, imagine you’re reading a book in a quiet library. Suddenly someone starts yammering loudly on their phone about how Starbucks got their coffee order wrong that morning.
And your focus is shattered.
Let’s call this an extreme scenario. I’d wager that anyone would lose concentration for at least a moment. But there are also more common, trivial “triggers” that can break focus (like a notification *ping* on your own phone).
And more importantly, this can happen with no trigger at all. All it takes is a nervous feeling, neurotic thought, or inner monologue.
As I’ll discuss below, mindfulness practice is a boon here. Because we can learn to be productive in spite of these inner distractions.
But first, I’m going to give you some examples of great entrepreneurs I’ve met that have this kind of surgical focus.
The carpenter
In my late teens and early twenties I worked for a carpenter.
He was called Jeff. He was a one-man house-building machine. And he was unbelievably quick to know what to do in every situation.
He used to hammer every nail in with exactly the same cadence…
Set, one, TWO! Set, one, TWO!
This was amazing to watch. Even more amazing, he could hammer framing nails in flush with just one shot. But you’d never see him do that. He always used that steady set-one-two rhythm: the most efficient technique.
His efficient state of mind bled into his emotions: he seemed to have none.
If I messed up and cut a piece of wood too short, he’d know as soon as he saw it. “That’s not three feet” he’d say, throwing the piece over his shoulder without even looking at me.
If fumbled nervously trying to measure something with my tape, he’d watch quietly. If I took too long (4 seconds) he’d whip out his own tape and take the measurement. No emotion. No look of disappointment. He also didn’t stop to teach me any better.
He was set on one thing: get the measurement and move to the next task.
He was an old-school productivity machine. A rugged player with a killer carpentry game. If you visited his home, you’d see how rewarding that focus has been for him.
The digital nomad
Here’s another character from my past that taught me how a successful entrepreneur thinks. His name was Rob and he was the first digital nomad I ever met.
He finished my sentences a few times and I realized how busy his brain was. Like me, he sucked up useful information like a wet vac, but he’d been doing it for a lot longer.
Rob was a successful marketing consultant and ran a fitness website that generated cashflow. This was a guy I wanted to learn from.
He made a point to optimize and leverage everything. I once met up with him in Vietnam and mentioned how I‘d started learning Vietnamese. He told me he thought about it during his first week and let it go: “I didn’t come here to optimize for culture — I came here to optimize for my business.”
I remember that moment as clear as day. I felt like I was doing 70 miles an hour in my brown Honda Accord and a flash of white Ferrari exploded past me doing 150.
Focus is a leverage point. It doesn’t mean you can’t learn a language and improve your business during the same period of your life. But the more stuff going on in your head, the less you’re hitting your potential in one thing.
The key isn’t what you’re doing on an external level…
…the key is cutting the bull on the internal level.
It’s not personal: it’s focus
If you’ve ever said something vain or trivial to someone, they clearly heard you, and they simply didn’t respond… you may have been talking to one of these “focus elites.”
That’s something that they do. And it’s like having a mirror held up to you. Their radio silence leaves only your words hanging in the ether, forcing you to examine what you said and why you said it.
It’s easy to take these moments personal. But you shouldn’t.
Often, there’s a lot to learn from the people who put you in those awkward little situations. Especially if you want to learn about something that they’re good at.
Here’s a story to put this into perspective…
Imagine a guy who worked on cars in high school and, used to be known as someone who knew his way around the bonnet. He has always felt a sense of pride when it comes to working on cars, even though he hasn’t turned a wrench in 20 years.
Now imagine he’s talking to another guy who runs the most successful “pimp my ride” automotive shop in town. This second guy has invested everything — his money, his time, his attention, his lifestyle — into doing what he does at the top level. He turns the wrench every day, and he gets paid tens of thousands per job to do it.
These two are standing there with a hood popped, checking out some of pimp-my-ride’s fine work. Our high school mechanic friend feels a little out of the game, but he wants to show that he’s a car man too — so he points at a section under the hood and says: “You did a great job wiring in the ignition coil.”
There’s a moment of quiet. In some kind of stoic, emotionless, tactful way, pimp-my-ride points over and he says…
“That’s my flashlight.”
The point here being, the guy who identifies himself with being a mechanic has his head in a different game. You could say it’s up his rear end. But I actually don’t think that’s fair — there’s no shame in a little misguided pride.
Yet the game he’s playing is a game of status. A game of validation.
It’s the wrong game to play if you need to perform…
…and if you’re trying to reach a high level of success as an entrepreneur, you damn sure need to perform.
You must be wondering…
What on earth does a game of cards have to do with this?
Can card games teach you to focus?
Card games are logical and require a certain sequence of thought and behavior. It’s a “mental landscape” for practicing your ability to focus on the task at hand and ONLY the task at hand.
Think about the following:
Imagine you get dealt a pile of cards and you pick them up. You start to organize them so that the colors alternate red, black, red, black, because it looks cool in your hand. This is, if you didn’t guess, a total waste of mental energy!
What could you do instead?
Here’s what you could do: You could identify the most important cards in your hand (like trump cards) and isolate them at one end. Then you could separate them by suit. Then you immediately identify the important cards in the deck that you don’t have… because that means someone else has them.
What you do depends on the game, but that’s the point. You take the rules of the game and try to focus your mind on the highest priority.
I’ve been on both sides of this fence. I’ve wasted my focus on trivial stuff right in the middle of a hand, and I’ve also intentionally kept my mind on the most important thing I can come up with. The latter results in more wins, more growth, and more enjoyment.
Ultimately, you can use a card game to practice mindful performance. You’re teaching your brain to think about what you want it to think about. Which is the way great entrepreneurs think.
What is it about games that gets our attention?
Psychologists say that humans are attracted to games because they offer (1) constraints to follow and (2) opportunities to innovate (i.e. be creative).
Think about the last time you discovered a new game and felt really excited about it…
You sit down at the table and learn the rules. You start obeying the rules and exploring the space. Then you start innovating within the rules you’ve been given.
Next thing you know, you are competing with the other players to have the best innovative ideas.
But this requires a balance of constraints to creative opportunities.
If you have too many constraints it will snuff the player’s ability to be creative. War is a good example of this… it’s pretty boring.
On the flip side, if you have too few constraints the strategies will get really complex. It becomes a nuanced game that’s only fun if you spend 100 hours figuring it out… fundamental skills of logic and accounting aren’t powerful enough to make it interesting.
On another note: usually as constraints increase, winning relies more on luck and less on skill.
What about non-card games?
I think that games with simpler equipment are better for intellectual growth.
Card games are better for this than say, video games, because the ‘equipment’ is less distracting. Obviously not all of them, but many video games present a large array of stimulus through images and stories… which reduces your ability to focus on problem solving and keeping priorities.
With traditional cards, the constraints to creative opportunities ratio is also ideal — compared to many other games like chess (too much creative opportunity) or checkers (too much constraint).
When it comes to tight-focused, competitive games, that can be easily be played fast — standard deck games are the go to.
So next time you’re sitting down at the card table, make a concerted effort to be aware of your thoughts while you play. As your mind wanders, observe how it affects your potency and then intentionally return your focus to the game.
Next I want to share a few card games that are excellent for this.
Good card games to train your ability to focus
You now know that good card games strike a balance between constraints and creative opportunities.
I like having one good card game up my sleeve for any situation. How many players do you have? How strategy intensive will these players be? Do you have chips?
One thing to keep in mind is that many people don’t enjoy intellectual games, or they can’t be bothered to learn a complex game. This happens at parties a lot. They’re not dumb at all, they just don’t care for it. I call this intellectual tolerance, and there are some good alternatives for these folks.
Here is a table of situations that come up, and the card games I like to propose for each:
There are other good ones, but finding them is up to you. I’ll briefly discuss three of these below so you have an idea about how to think about them.
Solitaire
The game for one player. I try to keep track of the whole board and play fast.
You learn to try and stack numbers by alternating color. But… that’s not the REAL leverage point. The real point is to flip all the facedown cards. If you play with a desire to win, you’ll find out pretty quickly that you get stuck and can’t finish a game. It’s always because you can’t get the facedown cards.
If you have a deck and decide to give this a go, notice where your mental goal posts should be.
Sixty-six
This is a German two-player card game that has been called “one of the best two-handers ever devised.”
It’s a trick-winning game that only uses about half the deck and the best strategy is hard to pin down. It gives tons of creative opportunity.
While most two-player games seem to be a bit boring, this one is red hot!!
Golf
Yessir. You can play golf with your cards.
Everyone lays nine facedown cards in front of them and gradually replaces them by drawing cards from a pile. When one player turns over their ninth card, everyone gets one final chance to get the lowest score.
This is the most versatile option I’ve come across which still give you some room to innovate. People who can’t be bothered to play “thinking games” still seem to LOVE this one. Plus, you can play with 2–6 people… although you need two decks.
Never mind the social benefits of card games.
Never mind the joy of playing.
Never mind the gratifying competition.
If you train yourself to play well — you might also be training yourself to work well.
So go find a deck and get cracking.
Peace.
