– Regardless of whether we are a successful business leader, a middle ranking manager or an apprentice learning the ropes, we all want to make good decisions and deliver good results at work. To achieve that we need the right knowledge, skills and attitude. And we do not just need those things once, we need them throughout the course of our lives and careers. We all need continual development if we are to grow and perform at our best. But when our existing options for improving our performance run dry, who can we turn to? Looking more deeply into how someone else improved their performance, and achieved their goals, can be a source of inspiration and practical ideas. Outliers are the obvious first choice. Their extreme level of success is likely by design, not by accident. Take the world’s most successful poker players as an example. Believe it or not, their skills and attitude are worth serious consideration. Just like any successful person there is a reason they got to where they are: they have something the rest of us do not, or if we do have it then it is less well developed. There is much more to their success than meets the eye! The paper aims to discuss these issues.
– The author reviewed Greg Dinkin’s work and summarised the principles and results in the form of a useful article describing the skills shared between the most successful poker players and entrepreneurs.
– The best poker players and entrepreneurs share 13 skills, although this is not to imply these are the only common skills between these two groups. There could be more and the ones identified could also evolve over time.
– The value of Greg’s work is that it not only reveals the connections and common skill set shared between these two groups, but also that these skills are not difficult to understand or exclusive to those two groups: they could be learned by anyone with the determination and desire to.
