Make It More Likely

You don’t need a plan, you need a probability bias.

I’ve been playing poker seriously enough to pay my bills for a few years now. I didn’t set out to become a poker player. I started because I liked the game, kept playing because I was fascinated by it enough to get decent at it, and eventually realized I’d stumbled into something more valuable than a paycheck: a framework for making decisions under uncertainty.

Poker forces you to think in probabilities instead of certainties. You never know what your opponent has. You never know what card is coming next. All you can do is make the best decision with the (necessarily incomplete) information you currently have. And you have to make it over and over, hand after hand, session after session, knowing that any individual result tells you almost nothing about whether you played well.

The framework is simple in theory, if sometimes difficult in practice. In the world of probability theory it’s called expected value, or EV.

It’s just a way of asking, if I make this same decision a hundred times, will I come out ahead? Say there’s $100 in the pot and someone bets $50. Now there’s $150 total, and it costs you $50 to call. You’re getting 3-to-1. If you believe your hand will win more than 25% of the time, calling is profitable in the long run. Maybe you lose this specific hand. But over a hundred hands in that spot, you make money. That’s positive expected value, or an EV+ decision.

The hard part isn’t the math. The hard part is emotional. You make the call, you lose, you watch your chips go across the table. Every instinct says that was wrong. Your brain wants the outcome to validate the decision. But it can’t. The decision was correct when you made it, and the fact that you lost this time doesn’t change that.

If you let results override process, if you start folding in +EV spots because losing feels bad, you’re making the actual mistake. You’re letting variance corrupt your judgment.

This is what poker teaches you, to be oriented and optimized for process over results.

Which, paradoxically, leads all but inevitably to the positive results we desire, in the long run. In the short-term the quality of your decision and the outcome can be two separate, and divergent, things. You can make a great decision and lose. You can make a terrible decision and win. What matters isn’t what happened this time. It’s whether the decision was +EV when you made it. If yes, you make it again. If no, you adjust. But you never let a single outcome tell you whether you chose correctly.

I learned this at the table over thousands of hands, through bad beats and downswings and all the ways variance punishes you for thinking short-term. And somewhere along the way, I started realizing how badly I needed it everywhere else.

Because the same principle applies to everything. Going to the gym doesn’t guarantee you’ll have the body you want. You might train for a month and barely see changes. But every session is +EV. Reading a book in your field doesn’t guarantee you’ll get the job. But every book makes it more likely you’ll know something useful, make a connection, say the right thing in an interview. Reaching out to someone doesn’t guarantee they’ll respond. But sending the message is +EV. Not sending it is guaranteed zero.

I’m still learning how to use this in my life outside poker. It’s harder when the feedback loops are longer and the variables are messier. In life, you might not know for years whether a decision mattered. But the logic is the same. All you can control is whether the choice you’re making right now is +EV for the person you’re trying to become.

What “Make It More Likely” Actually Means

Here’s the practical part. Right now, and at basically every moment, you have an array of choices in front of you. Go for a long walk…or stay on the couch watching TV. Read a book…or continue scrolling for another hour. Cook the healthy whole food dinner…or grab the easy processed or prepared food. Email that person in your field…or convince yourself they’re too busy for you. Call your mom…or tell yourself you’ll do it tomorrow.

Most people approach these choices in one of two ways. Either they try to figure out the perfect decision (which is impossible because they don’t have enough information and the variables keep changing) or they just do whatever feels easiest in the moment and tell themselves it doesn’t really matter.

Both are wrong. You don’t need to know the optimal choice. You just need to know which option makes the life you desire more likely.

That’s it. That’s the whole framework. Not “which choice guarantees the outcome I want” or “which perfectly aligns with my goals” or “which I can commit to forever.”

Just: which makes my ideal life more likely?

The walk makes it more likely you’ll be healthy than the couch does. The book makes it more likely you’ll build the mind you want than scrolling does. The salad makes it more likely you’ll have the body and energy you want than the pizza does.

You don’t need certainty. You don’t need a master plan. You just need to consistently choose the option that tilts the odds in your direction.

And here’s what makes this framework so powerful: it removes the pressure of needing to know exactly how your life gets fixed. You don’t have to have it all figured out. You don’t have to know the path from here to there. You just have to know which choice, right now, is +EV. The walk or the couch. The book or the scroll. That’s all you need to know.

The Compounding Part

In poker, a 10% edge doesn’t feel like much in a single hand. You’re barely favored. But over 10,000 hands, that small edge is the difference between a losing player and someone who can play for a living. Small edges compound when you have volume.

Same with life. The individual decisions feel minor. One walk doesn’t transform your health. One book doesn’t make you an expert. One message doesn’t create an opportunity. But you’re not trying to win on any single decision. You’re trying to accumulate edge over time until the math plays itself out.

You go on the walk. Maybe nothing happens. You feel the same. You go on another. Still nothing. You keep going, because regardless of the outcome you know it’s a better decision than to remain on the couch, and at some point—maybe weeks, maybe months—you feel better, you look better, you have more energy, you make better food choices because you’re not trying to compensate for feeling like shit. The system reinforces itself.

You read the book. Maybe it doesn’t profoundly inspire you or make everything click. You read another. You read ten. Then one day you’re in a conversation and you mention something you read, and it leads to an introduction, which leads to an opportunity you couldn’t have predicted. You didn’t know the path. You just made the path more likely by consistently doing +EV things.

What I’m Learning

I’m trying to use this as my organizing principle now. Not because I’ve figured everything out or because I have some master plan. I haven’t and I don’t. But I’m realizing I don’t need that. All I need—all anyone needs—is to keep asking whether the choice in front of me right now is +EV for the person I’m trying to become.

Walk or couch? Book or scroll? Salad or pizza? Reach out or put it off? I don’t have to know how it all adds up. I don’t have to see the whole path. I just have to know which choice makes it more likely. And then I have to make that choice enough times that the outcome stops being luck and starts being inevitable.

You can’t control outcomes. You can only control decisions. So make better decisions. Make them consistently. Make it more likely, over and over, until the result has no choice but to show up.