A Bettor Way of Thinking

By Matt Miller

There have been many great books about playing the horses. Most focus on the analytical side of the game - which horse is going to win and why. This book turns that equation around. It's much less concerned with which&

• Language: English
• Publisher: ITM Players Media
• Release date: Apr 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9798218410797

Matt Miller

Matt Miller is the author of The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America’s Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller. He is a contributing editor at Fortune; a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress; the host of public radio’s popular week-in-review program Left, Right & Center; and a consultant to corporations, governments, and nonprofits. He lives in Los Angeles.

Book preview

Part One

FOCUS ON THE RIGHT THING

While I am hardly a pool shark, it’s fair to say that the judgment I use for my shot-taking renders me a better player than I am. The nine ball is in trouble here.

1

NINE-BALL

Ispent no more than two seconds to line up the final shot of the final game. My opponent had just scratched. I had ball in hand. I walked up to the yellow one ball, placed the cue ball about an inch away from it, and plowed that cue ball into the one ball on a direct path toward the nine-ball. At dizzying speed the nine-ball caromed around the table until suddenly it fell into a random pocket and, thankfully, the cue ball came to rest without also falling into a pocket. Game, set, match . . . and life permanently changed!

I never expected two nights of playing pool approximately 10 years ago to have such an effect on me, but in those two nights (and if I’m being honest, within five minutes of the start of the first night), I came to realize the extent to which I sometimes think differently than other people and the extent to which others are surprised by that. I had no idea what kind of edge I was going to be able to create for myself in life (not just in nine-ball) with this simple understanding.

You can go find the official rules of nine-ball on a multitude of websites. Here’s the upshot: you must hit the lowest number ball on the table with the cue ball before any other ball, and at that point for that shot, anything goes. If you hit the cue ball into the one ball and the one ball goes in, your turn continues. Or if you hit the cue ball into the one ball and that knocks in another ball in a combination shot, that counts too. This isn’t a call your shot game. Whomever legally sinks the nine-ball wins. If your opponent scratches (which can occur for lots of different reasons), you can place the cue ball wherever you want for your next shot.

I know I skipped some details, but that’s the gist of it. Some of you who think you know the game may think there is a very specific rule or two that I have omitted. I assure you—I haven’t. Go check. By the way, the actual rules of the game were irrelevant that night because we agreed within mere seconds on the rules set forth above.

I’m a C+ pool player. I had a pool table in my basement when I was a kid, but it was so warped and damaged from everything that my brother and I did to it that it was virtually useless in terms of providing me with any meaningful edge. I think I’m slightly better than average. If you asked me how many turns it would take me to clear all nine balls in a game of nine-ball (with one turn continuing until I missed), I would estimate maybe ten. That’s not terrible, but it’s certainly not great.

I got an immediate read on my neighbor Giorgio that he was a C+ player as well. We seemed like perfect opponents, but that’s not how it turned out. We played 30 games that night; I won 28 of them. Many of those games were won before Giorgio had taken more than a few turns. Even more fun for me, he had no idea what was happening. His frustration led him to call over another neighbor, Brian, who actually owned the pool table but couldn’t fit it in his basement and therefore stored it at Giorgio’s place.

Brian (who sadly passed away a few years ago) was an incredibly nice person, but he couldn’t help but give off that vibe of one of those arrogant expert pool player show-offs who approached the table while in the process of screwing together his own personal cue that apparently is so special that it isn’t allowed to stay screwed together when it isn’t being used (and in this case, needed to go back and forth between the two houses rather than stay in the house with the table). The way he lined up his opening break looked straight out of The Hustler and made me feel like a lamb being led to slaughter. I couldn’t maneuver a cue stick in that fashion even if I was trying to lead a parade. It looked like the gesticulations of the character Ed Norton from The Honeymooners, but with grace and skill. My immediate sense was that he was a B+ or an A-, but within two minutes, I could discern that our talent gap didn’t matter.

Brian and I played 20 games before he and Giorgio put an end to the madness and asked how it was possible that I had beaten one of them 28-2 and the other 18-2. Before I could even answer, they were sure to tell me that (1) I was incredibly lucky a lot of the time, (2) they were incredibly unlucky with the consequences of what happened when they scratched, (3) they hit in way more balls than I did, and (4) probably lots of other things that were all true and didn’t matter. After allowing the friendly rip-fest to go on for some time, I reminded them that I had just demolished them, and that one of them (i.e., the one with more skill) should be way more embarrassed than the other.

I tried explaining that they had imposed rules and constraints in the game that weren’t really there. I pointed out to them the fact that only on the rarest of rare occasions did I ever intentionally sink a ball numbered one through eight, and in those cases, I only did so because it was easy, and I liked what my next shot was going to be. They, on the other hand, were obsessed with sinking balls one through eight, to the exclusion of the actual object of the game, which is to pocket the nine-ball. I explained that my shots were of strictly two varieties: either extreme offense in which I aggressively tried to slam the lowest number ball on the table into the nine-ball with the intent of sending it flying around at maximum speed until it went in, or careful defense where I connected with the lowest numbered ball on the table with the hope of separating that ball and the cue ball in a calculated way so that the next shot would result in my opponent scratching due to the level of difficulty involved. If/when they scratched, I lined up that cue ball behind the lowest number ball on the table and sent it flying into the nine-ball.

I’ll estimate that this strategy resulted in the nine-ball being sunk every four to five turns (far better than the ten it would have taken me to properly clear the table). Sometimes I would win the game on the second or third shot. Sometimes things got spooky for me, and I actually had to play real pool at the end (and not surprisingly, I won about half of those against Giorgio and maybe 25 percent against Brian). What was equally clear to me—besides my ability to end the game consistently in approximately four or five turns—was that neither Giorgio nor Brian could do better than that playing traditionally (i.e., the right way). They had virtually no chance despite their best efforts, and in fact, they were helping me beat them by continuing to play the right way. They were playing the wrong game against the wrong opponent.

I’ll never forget what they said to me after I explained all that: Who in their right mind would play pool like that?

My response: If you want to win, who wouldn’t?!

Giorgio termed this his first lesson in Millerology—his kind way of describing a highly reasoned thought process that leads to behaviors that are out of the norm.

I had two goals that night: I was focused on winning and having fun. Trust me—it was incredibly fun watching that nine-ball whip around the table and my opponents go bonkers every time I got lucky. That was even fun for them. The problem was their failure to focus on what really mattered. They were focused on making good shots, sinking lots of balls, positioning themselves for their next shots, and all kinds of things typically associated with shooting good pool. What they were not focused on was actually winning the game. Sure, they wanted to win, but they were overcommitted to the way that was supposed to happen. That was all noise to me—superfluous style points that actually hindered their chance of achieving the goal.

I believe deeply that, just as Giorgio and Brian unintentionally complicated the game of nine-ball for themselves by self-imposing a rule that they had to sink every ball on the table in order before sinking the nine-ball, there are examples everywhere of people subscribing to a commonly accepted way or method when in fact there are no rules requiring those unnecessary things to achieve the desired result.

KNOW YOUR PRIORITIES

I recognize that practically no one in the world would argue with the advice to focus on one’s priorities. It seems so incredibly simple. In some ways, it is. In other ways, this will be the hardest concept for a lot of readers to really put into practice. Simply put, I think many people think they are focused on the right thing in a given situation, but in fact they are focused on something else and can’t recognize the difference. I’m going to urge you to try to keep an open mind as you read on. Many people have developed terrible habits when it comes to strategic thinking, and it’s not really their fault—so many human instincts (mainly based on risk aversion) that were once valuable when it came to survival over the millennia are ill-suited to properly assessing risk and reward in the modern world.

It all starts with knowing your priorities and understanding why those things are priorities to you. My priorities have been the same for the last 20-something years: father, husband, attorney, horseplayer. There are other priorities (especially being a good friend to others), but those are the four that spring to mind for me, and in that order. (How fun that I get to drop attorney from that list now that I’m retired!) I don’t want to spend too much time getting into the specifics of my personal priorities or express things in a way that might make you feel that I’m challenging or questioning yours (no judgments here). My specific priorities shouldn’t really matter to you except to the extent that they perhaps get you to focus on your own and help you to understand my thought process.

Is your priority to achieve something, or is it to achieve it only through a certain method or process? Are you focused on the process or the result? It is very easy to confuse the result with the process. One idea from poker that really applies to all gambling and all of life for that matter is that you should give much more weight to making good decisions than congratulating yourself for merely getting good outcomes.

Does a poker player focus on winning the most pots or winning the most money? Does a horseplayer focus on cashing tickets in the most races or winning the most money? Is one even conscious of the difference while playing? Be clear on your objective.

If your priority is to have fun, that’s great. No baseball fan goes to a White Sox game and expects to come home with more money. We all accept the reality that we often have to pay for entertainment. Vacations—especially those with the entire family—can be expensive, and they are taken with zero hope of a financial return on investment. There is nothing wrong with treating your time at the racetrack in a similar manner, setting aside an acceptable amount of money to pay for your fun.

But if your priority is to win money, that’s another story entirely. You will have to make all kinds of different choices than you would if you are simply trying to entertain yourself. You’re going to be playing fewer races, and you will have to think a lot more strategically when it comes to wagering. Knowing your priorities must come first, and that will save you a lot of money and heartache.

There is an incredibly impactful line from one of my all-time favorite movies, Lost in Translation. A young not-so-happily married Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) asks an older not-so-happily married Bob (Bill Murray) if marriage gets easier. At first, he says no, but he rethinks his answer and says, The more you know who you are and what you want, the less you let things upset you. Spot on. Know yourself and your priorities. By definition, the things that matter less to you are not your top priorities—why let everything get to you when only some of it really matters?

Setting priorities is one thing. It’s also paramount to know how to honor them and then also to follow through. Many will hear those words and think, Easier said than done, but that’s missing the larger point. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t let things get to you. Important things should get to you, but if in general you feel that it would be extremely difficult for you to shrug off setbacks and disappointments, I contend that you don’t have a very good sense of your priorities and what really matters to you. Everything can’t matter the same. Focus on what counts.

I went to dinner with someone last week who took ten minutes reading the menu from cover to cover and then back again. So many good choices was the exact quote. I was even asked which of a few items sounded good to me (which made no sense to me, but I answered anyway). After the server came back a second time, my friend ordered and, as luck would have it, the restaurant was out of that particular item. My friend was pretty upset and ordered one of the other top contenders. I thought that was hilarious. I opted not to needle him about it, but for the life of me, I couldn’t understand how such a close marginal decision could lead to such disappointment. It was admittedly a super-close decision, so how big of a deal could it have been if it went the other way? If that wasn’t a good candidate for letting something roll off one’s back, I don’t know what is.

I’ve noticed something incredibly different about myself relative to other people, and I’m convinced it is something that can be taught to anyone by simply encouraging them to understand their priorities. If you know what’s really important to you, you will seldom feel torn or face a decision so tough that on some level you won’t intuitively know the answer. As a result of my sense of priorities, I usually instinctively know what is right for me and why, and I’m tremendously committed to acting on that consistently (with the most notable exception being my diet, where I go in and out of periods of motivation).

This self-awareness is an important tool that makes life easier than it might otherwise be. I know plenty of people who are tortured by everyday decisions and others who just seem to have a hard time at big moments. It’s my opinion that these people do not have their true priorities locked in, and I’m grateful to not have to deal with that unpleasant uncertainty. That’s true even in really big moments where others might expect to generate more indecision or lack confidence. Even better is that when I say that I don’t care or that I don’t have a preference one way or another, I’m not biting my lip; I actually don’t care. That makes me pretty predictable and reliable to my friends and family, and I like being dependable that way.

Apologies in advance, but this one is an outright lecture.

If I came home from the racetrack after participating in a $10,000 horse-racing handicapping tournament, and my wife said she wanted a purse, new clothes for the kids, a family vacation, or any other need or want with a price tag for which $10,000 would make a big difference, then my value system tells me that I would have had no business participating in that tournament. I don’t gamble with money I need or for which I have other more important uses. Hard stop.

I have no problem with someone celebrating a win by buying something nice or doing something fun, but I actually try very hard not to do that. I would far prefer to live a life that puts my money toward my top priorities rather than toward a lower priority with the hope of winning money that I can then use to put toward those higher priorities. I can admittedly be pretty judgmental when it comes to this topic, but I think it’s critical to how I view my priorities.

I’ll readily admit that I could have had a more decorated or impressive career as an attorney. I’ve been offered promotions that I turned down due to what I perceived to be a conflict between my ability to do that job properly and to be the husband/father I wanted to be. I was doing well enough financially and therefore had the luxury of being able to act on higher priorities. Someone with my skill set likely could have achieved more had I focused more on career growth. Heck, at 52, I could have left my last General Counsel job for a bigger one, but the overall work-life balance I was trying to strike relative to my evolving priorities led me down a different path. If I were still working, I never would have had time to write this book, which was a big priority for me. Others with different priorities may be scratching their heads, wondering why this idiot decided to limit his career upside so dramatically. It doesn’t matter to me what others think—I made the decision that was right for me.

Here’s a musical reference point, and one that I can very much relate to: John Lennon’s Watching the Wheels. It’s a good example because it also shows how priorities can change over time. Lennon, one of the most famous people in the world, didn’t want to be John Lennon, Beatle anymore; he wanted to be John Lennon, father and husband.

He sang about how much he loved to simply watch the wheels go round and round.

"No longer ridin’ on the merry-go-round. I just had to let it go."

The lyrics connect with me deeply. Lennon wanted to be with his family, and the world just couldn’t seem to understand. Many people in his life and in the world at large couldn’t believe he would give up fame and fortune to be a stay-at-home dad, but his priorities had shifted. He didn’t let the world’s expectations shape him. He was going to follow his own path and set his own priorities.

2

HOW TO GET THERE

(aka Everything I Needed to Know About Life I Learned From The Matrix)

Don’t laugh. The film series The Matrix had a profound impact on my life and how I view the world. Before you roll your eyes or picture me cosplaying with sunglasses and a floor-length duster, let me explain. When it comes to priorities, the hard part isn’t determining what they are. Often the hard part is focusing on how to act to serve those priorities. It’s easy to say that you want to win a game, and in a given moment of your life, winning that game might be somewhat important. Where does your focus turn once you decide you want to play that game, however? What rules or constraints are there? Are they real or self-imposed?

Back to The Matrix. For the uninitiated, here’s a quick summary (spoilers ahead). The human race believes it is existing in the real world and living normal lives. In actuality, intelligent machines have taken over the world and created a computer construct called the matrix that creates the impression of reality for those plugged into it. There are some humans who managed to avoid/escape the matrix, and they are desperate to enter the matrix to free Neo (The One), whom they believe will be capable of saving the rest of the human race.

That’s admittedly a lame summary of the premise of a spectacular movie with a lot more going on than I have described, but here is the key point: The matrix is a construct that is designed to control and limit behaviors. It isn’t reality. The rules of reality don’t necessarily apply within it. As Neo is identified and saved from the matrix after taking the red pill, the scenes of Morpheus explaining to him what is and isn’t real are absolutely mind-blowing. Neo gets tired in a training exercise and is asked why he is breathing hard inside of a computer program. He is breathing hard because he had been conditioned to breathe hard when expending tremendous amounts of energy, but that was just a construct; he didn’t need to breathe at all and was limiting his performance by introducing that variable. Neo is also challenged to make a massive jump between two buildings—impossible in the real world, and yet within the made-up construct of the matrix, who is to say? Shocker—he actually failed to make that first jump because his mind wasn’t ready for it, but in no time at all, he was flying.

The point I’m trying to get at here is that it was very difficult for Neo to unlearn so much of what he truly believed to be the proper way to do something because of how he was conditioned. There was a lot of trial and error as he tested the limits of the system (i.e., his powers), but in the later scenes (and movies) in which he needed to re-enter the matrix, he was incredible to watch. He eventually evolved to the point that he saw the matrix fully as a construct and operated with tremendous flexibility of thought and movement.

I hardly mean to create a debate or say anything controversial about religion, but the logician in me needs to point something out about the simulation theory that underpins The Matrix. Putting aside what we were taught about religion as children or how those thoughts may have evolved over time, the argument that there is a single God overseeing or controlling this one isolated planet with life in this massive solar system seems about as plausible to me as the idea of this planet—or my life on it—being part of a simulation model.

That view has strengthened with advances in Artificial Intelligence—it’s incredible to see how closely we can come to replicating reality. I see no reason to assume that the reality we are experiencing is the only one true reality and that all the other realities created by technology are the fake ones. It actually hurts my brain to think too hard about this topic. Ultimately, I know that I know nothing and respect everyone’s rights to their own views, but to me, the very idea that this life could possibly itself be a simulation is fascinating. I’m looking forward to learning more about what is possible.

I take away from The Matrix the idea that we often create obstacles, constraints, rules, or conditions that aren’t really there as we go through life, and these constraints keep us from achieving our priorities in ways both big and small. Don’t make things harder on yourself than you need to.

Don’t accept answers to questions that boil down to: Because that’s how we’ve always done it. Ask yourself if that’s really the best way. When people say to do something by the book, there often is in fact no actual book.

I’m overwhelmed as I think of all the examples of this that I see every single day. People seem to be going through life as if they were programmed to do things without thinking, and if you stopped to ask them why they are doing something a certain way, they would provide an instinctive answer rather than a thoughtful one.

I could provide countless examples: (1) my own career as an attorney because attorney, doctor, or accountant seemed to be my three default career choices; (2) the commuter who drives the same route every day despite the availability of Waze or Google Maps to potentially provide a more efficient route to avoid an accident scene; (3) the person who pulls into a jam-packed Starbucks drive-through line on a nice sunny day rather than quickly walking in and out of an empty store; (4) the angry Walgreens pharmacy customer who endures a painful process at the register for refills each month rather than looking into a new and easy mail-delivery system; etc. The list is endless, but here are two of my all-time favorite examples.

RENTING A CAR

My dear friend (and former work colleague) Brad Anderson and I have taken some phenomenal trips together to see the horse races—especially the annual two-day Breeders’ Cup. We typically arrive at the event the day before so that we can check into our hotel rooms comfortably, go to the track to get acclimated and registered for the big tournament the next day, and have a nice relaxing time at the races before the intense action starts. It’s a fun day full of pleasant anticipation—especially when visiting a track for the very first time.

Our flight arrived in San Diego on the Thursday before the 2021 Breeders’ Cup. We had arranged for a rental car and knew that we needed to take a courtesy shuttle from the airport to a standalone facility. We exited the plane with all of our usual excitement and made our way to the place to pick up the courtesy shuttle. Our good vibes were instantly crushed when we came upon the line. In a flash, it was clear that this was going to be a very long process and that our day at the track was in serious jeopardy. It’s fair to estimate that there was a line of at least 200 or more people waiting for the shuttle. The only thing we had going for us was that it was early in the day, and my guess was that the rental car facility itself wasn’t yet too busy.

Brad is a really smart person and a successful business executive, and I don’t in any way mean to try to make myself look better than him by repeating this story at his expense. But Brad did—or at least he started doing—what everyone else was doing. He knew we needed that car, and so he proceeded toward the back of the long line to get to the rental-car facility. That’s just what you do, right?

All I can tell you is that the last thing I was going to do in that moment was get in that line. There was zero chance I was immediately accepting the fate that our fun day was going to be ruined. As my mind started racing for solutions, I happened to catch a particularly strong glimpse of the color yellow and had a eureka moment. I asked Brad to follow me, and we walked maybe a minute to the cab line. I asked the first driver if he knew where the rental-car facility was. He laughed that it was just a few minutes away. I offered him an extra $10 for the quick ride on the condition that he beat the bus that was loading with people doing it the conventional way, or as so many people in my life love to tell me, the right way. The point of the story has nothing to do with the creativity of this particular solution. Rather, the point is that the situation called for something creative, and I spotted that early enough to do something about it.

We pulled our rental car out of the facility before that bus had even finished unloading the first of many passengers. We made it out of there on schedule and feeling like we were already winning. We ended up giving back a few minutes of our time when I got pulled over for rolling through a stop sign (somewhat of a habit of mine—both getting pulled over on Breeders’ Cup trips and minor traffic violations), although the fact that I got off with a warning even made that feel like a win.

Back to the point: I hope that everyone is clear on what my objective was in that moment that we got off the plane. It wasn’t to get on the bus to go to the rental-car facility. It was to drive away from the airport in a rented car as quickly as possible so that we could start having fun at the races. When presented with an unexpected obstacle, we pivoted to a creative and inexpensive solution that avoided the obstacle completely. Little did we realize just how much fun was in store for us (more on that later).

DAY TRADING

I was incredibly lucky to graduate law school with no debt and a few thousand dollars in the bank from savings from prior summer jobs. I absolutely appreciated my position in life, but I couldn’t quite grasp at the time the extent to which a window of opportunity had opened up. As law firm associate salaries were going through the roof due to changing market conditions, I managed to start saving some money, as I didn’t yet have a house, family, or any real responsibilities in life.

I was watching CNBC one day and saw something about currency issues in South America and the big effect that was having on global stock markets. I didn’t know anything practical about the stock markets at that time. I had graduated from the University of Illinois with a finance degree, but that didn’t come with training in stock trading. I was nonetheless curious. Thankfully, I mentioned my curiosity to friends and family, and I was put in touch with one of the warmest, kindest, and most generous people I ever could have asked for: Dan DeClue at SF Investments. When I told him about my interest in the market, he cautioned me against trying to "catch