Steve wrote in his blog:
On the one hand, you may want more money, but on the other hand, you may feel disinclined to make too much, since you know that the more money you get, the more someone else has to pay for it. For example, if you make a living as a professional poker player, then you know that the more you earn, the more money others have to lose… not the best motivation for a highly conscious person to achieve financial abundance.
Couldn't it be that earning money sometimes is a side effect of something else?
I'm in the process of learning to be a professional poker player. I've been at it for about a year and I'm expecting that it will take an other 6 to 12 month before I reach the level where I can earn $5 to $10 a day. (Currently I'm only playing games with practice money.)
After finding that I'm pretty good at poker I started out with the idear that I would like to have an independed sourch of income (just like Steve).
When I first read this blog entry I became some what angry. I thought "who are you to say what is and isn't a good way to earn some money?".
But after thinking some time about I find that you're right.
Earning money is the goal, but it isn't the reason why I'm doing it.
There are several reasons:
One is that's just fun to learn something new. Just like life the game of poker is constantly moving. There are miljoens of situations that can happen and you have to find strategies to deal with all those situations.
An other reason is that there is no fun in learning something easy.
But the main reason is that in learning how to play poker I'm learning things about my self.
For most of my live I've been bugged by the problem that I start out being somewhat good in something and then after a while it seems like I've forgotten how it's done. Then I loose intrest and stop.
Poker was the first thing ever where I went on trying when the losing started:
I won a lot of games in the first month. The next 5 month I only lost games (luckely I wasn't playing for real money
)
Then I won for a few weeks and again lost for a few weeks.
At the moment I'm winning, but I'm expecting I will start losing again soon.
Two month ago I was told that I have autism (I'm 45 years old).
Autism has a lot of strange symtoms so it's quit possible that forgetting all my skills while I'm learning a new skill has something to do with it.
Hopefully some day I will actually earn some money with poker but in the mean time I'm learning about myself and I'm learning how to deal with myself.
regards.