Jeannette Goon, Yahoo Blogger Network

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Poker as life

There are a lot of ways for a person to approach life, to ride the ups and downs, to embrace (or not) the minutiae of everyday life. It’s a fact that we have limited control over other people, the situations around us and the world at large.

In life, just like in poker, we don’t always get a good hand. What we need to learn how to do is play the hand that we’re dealt.

In Poker as Life: 101 Lessons from the World’s Greatest Game, Lee Robert Schreiber provides lessons that he’s learnt from sitting at the poker table and tells us how we can apply those lessons in life.

“It’s over in the blink of a one-eyed jack” is Lesson #100, a reminder that life is short. “Play each game as it it’s your last.” Every day counts.

The 231-page book is chockfull of astute one-liners, which I’m guessing are good advice for poker (I’ve never really played the game) and definitely valuable advice for life.

Lesson #64 reminds the reader that “poker is a marathon, not a sprint”.

“Each session is an incremental step in a vast, incredible process. You never stop moving forward. You never stop learning. Each time out, your job is to maximise winnings, minimise losses. You don’t look back other than to savour your triumph (briefly) and/or figure out how to improve your play."

I think this is a pretty good approach to have towards life.

While the lessons make sense, Schreiber makes it obvious that they aren’t a fixed set of rules for life. Lesson #39, for example, is “play by the book” but the very next point is “know when to go against the book”, which is a great way to say that there isn’t one fixed way to live life.

On the surface, poker may seem like a simple card game. But it isn’t. It’s a game the way life is a game. You win some, you lose some and you live to fight another day.

Life isn’t simple. At times we need to accept that “shit happens” (Lesson #12), “make the necessary adjustments” (Lesson #83) and “be fearless (or at least pretend to be)” (Lesson #76).

Besides providing these little pieces of advice on how to life life according to poker tips, Poker as Life also contains a sort of poker glossary, highlighting common poker phrases and providing their meanings.

At some point, Schreiber even manages to slip in a book list of some of the best poker books for those who might want to pick the game up.

I’d say that this book has piqued my interest.

I don’t gamble, I’ve said to people who ask if I play cards. But it turns out that poker isn’t gambling. At least, that’s what people who play poker say.

A player has no control over the cards that the dealer hands them. They have no control over their fellow players and all the good cards that they may/may not have. However, what a player can definitely control, is himself.

He can decide how he wants to play. He can scrutinise his fellow players for little tells that will give away how good (or bad) their hand is. He can play the best he can with whatever cards has been placed in front of him.

So the question here is: How do you play the hands you’ve been dealt?

*Jeannette also writes at http://jeannettegoon.com

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Saving the World from Sudden Death

Last week, I came across an article that examined the possibility that the apocalypse had already happened and that we, humans, were not aware of it.  

While the article itself wasn’t actually about any kind of apocalypse, but rather, a commentary on the way dystopias and “end of the world”-type narratives have been represented differently over the years (from Brave New World to The Matrix), it made me think about superhero and other action movies, where the protagonists have to SAVE THE WORLD.   

While they’re running around punching out bad guys, solving puzzles and preventing the UTTER DESTRUCTION of the world, the rest of humankind go about their daily lives, totally unaware that they were inches away from annihilation.

In Seven Ancient Wonders by Matthew Reilly, the protagonist who has to save the world is Jack West Jr, who was once part of the Australian Armed Forces and is now the leader of the Alliance of Minnows (made up of representatives from a group of nations including Canada, Australia, Ireland, UAE, Spain, Jamaica, New Zealand and Israel). 

This Alliance, whose main motivation is to save humans, is up against two other teams — the Europeans (who represent the Catholic Church) and the Americans (who represent the Freemasons), who have less noble motivations.   

What Jack West Jr has to save the world from is a massive sunspot that occurs every 4,000 - 4,500 years, which releases enough energy to cause major flooding and cataclysmic weather on Earth. 

In the book, humans from a prior era had managed to evade this by planting a capstone on the summit of the Great Pyramid of Giza. This capstone absorbed all the energy that the sunspot (known as the Tartarus Rotation) released and saved the Earth.

Because of its power and what it could do for the nation that possessed it, Alexander the Great divided the capstone into pieces and hid them in different booby-trapped locations, which humans have come to know as the Seven Wonders of the World.   

The story takes place in 2006, seven days before the sunspot is due to come around again. The pieces are still divided and the three teams, each with their respective motives, are on the search for them.   

In order to solve the puzzles required to disable the booby traps at each location, the team has to understand the “Word of Thoth”. In the book, this is a special hieroglyphics system that only two people in the world can read and understand.   

Jack’s team has one of these two people — a little girl named Lily, whom he had raised with help from his team. The other is Lily’s twin brother, Alexander, who had been raised and brainwashed by the Vatican.   

Adventure ensues. And in typical military thriller pulp fiction fashion, the whole book consists of all the teams running around, trying to best each other at solving puzzles or forcing their way through the booby traps, all with the aim of being the one to plant the capstone.   

It was a super fun read that I managed to get through within just a few days (despite being extremely busy). Jack West Jr is the type of brooding, intensely male and macho character that I always find terribly attractive — a lot like James Bond but Australian, less polished, with a lot more rough edges.   

With it’s straightforward language and fast-paced story, it’s not the kind of book that you have to process too much. This makes it perfect for reading while commuting, or in bite-sized amounts in between appointments.   

Definitely follow it up with the two other books about Jack West Jr, The Six Sacred Stones and The Five Greatest Warriors.   

Although I was in the middle of expanding my wholesale vape service, I still managed to finish those two books within three days. They were amazingly fun reads, and gripping enough so that I couldn’t put it down until I was done. 

The good guys are superbly good and the bad guys are horrifyingly evil. There’s no need to think while enjoying these books.

If you’re looking for something to read while travelling or for something to take your mind off your stressful job, this series by Matthew Reilly is perfect! My only complaint is that there are only three books…

*Jeannette also writes at http://jeannettegoon.com/

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The Largest Coffee Company in the World was Built One Cup at a Time

If you live in the city, throw a stone and you’ll find a cafe — the kind that serves coffee that’s been pulled through freshly-ground beans in stainless steel. Some of these cafes serve decent lattes and cappuccinos and americanos, while others serve swill that’s trying to pass off as those. 

Ask any young urban professional and you’ll learn that Starbucks falls into the latter category. “If you want a frappuccino, you’re in the wrong cafe,” implies the writing on the wall in one of the cafes I sometimes visit (only with friends).

But what most young people now might not know, is that when it was first founded, Starbucks' pride was its pursuit of high quality coffee and later, high quality coffee products.

In Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and co-writer Doris Yang tell the story of how Starbucks Coffee Company began "as a single store on Seattle’s waterfront” and eventually grew into a conglomerate. 

The original Starbucks was named "Starbucks Coffee, Tea and Spice”, was 10 years old and had only four small retail stores — not cafes — when it was first discovered by Schultz. 

At the time, he was working for a Swedish company selling houseware and he thought it was interesting that this little company had been placing unusually large orders for a drip coffeemaker.   

He went to check them out, sampled their coffee and fell in love.

At the time, coffee in the United States was sold in cans that contained cheap and low quality ground beans that would be left for months on supermarket shelves before consumer use.   

Starbucks, on the other hand, sold high quality, whole Arabica beans that they roasted themselves. 

Schultz joined the Starbucks team soon after as the Director of Marketing and during a trip to Italy, he discovered espresso and all the other espresso beverages like latte, cappuccino and americano (which has a similar strength to but different flavour from drip coffee). 

Upon his return, he convinced the Starbucks owners to allow him a small portion of the retail store to serve as a cafe, where customers could stop and drink these beverages. 

However, he was unable to do this company-wide as the owners wanted to maintain their business as retail, rather than develop a restaurant business. Frustrated, he left to start up his own cafe venture — Il Giornale.   

Il Giornale’s first store opened in 1986 and two years later, the original Starbucks owners (who wanted to focus on another business) sold Starbucks to Il Giornale for $3.8mil. Schulz renamed Il Giornale to Starbucks and the rest, we say, is history.   

Starbucks began expanding aggressively nationwide and went public in 1992. Later, they continued to innovate on other products and created bottled coffee beverages, instant coffee, coffee ice cream and more. 

Pour Your Heart into It details the ups and downs of the business, with Schultz even sharing some of his personal struggles, lessons he learned and insights into some of the decisions he made as CEO of Starbucks. 

Since the book was published in 1992, it doesn’t touch on Starbucks international expansion (which began with Japan and Singapore in 1996) but I enjoyed almost all of it. 

As a coffee lover and a business owner, I could identify with Schultz’s love for coffee and gained a greater understanding of the grind (accidental pun) involved in running a business. 

For the most part, I could feel passion wafting out of the book pages, especially when Schultz describes how the company ensured that anyone walking into any of its cafes would be greeted with the smell of deliciously roasted coffee and feel a sense of welcome. 

However, the final chapter was a let-down as it read more like a report on corporate responsibility, rather than an actual story.   

But it’s definitely one of the more engaging business books I’ve read, likely because it is also a personal story, and is definitely a book that I would keep on my shelves and flip through again for inspiration. 

Now knowing more about its origins, I think it's ironic that in some countries, Starbucks is compared to swill, which it once replaced. One reason I can think of for this is the influence of the coffee culture from Australia, which features much stronger flavoured coffee.   

While I think that sometimes, Starbucks cafes (in Malaysia) doesn’t always provide the kind of flavours that artisanal cafes might provide, there’s still a sense of comfort in every store.     

As someone who often works out of cafes, Starbucks is very often my cafe of choice. The baristas are always friendly and if you’re ever unsure about what beverage to order, you never get the feeling that they’re secretly rolling their eyes and tapping their sneakers.

*Jeannette also writes at http://jeannettegoon.com/

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