I haven’t been posting much and that’s because I’ve been busy gathering material. As I’ve gotten older, some events seem less worth reporting than others. Whereas I felt obligatory to give you my continuously losing DFS lineups, I’ve decided to harness back the garbage and start emitting quality. How quality that is will be questionable, but explains the lack of material.

One area of life that I’ve been focusing on is information and who I’m taking it from. I’ll start out saying that most people are not worth listening to. With my latest endeavor in the sports betting world when I tracked 1,200 bets to the tune of a $700 loss from May to October, I learned that no single person is trust worthy about predicting future events. Some may be better than others, most bad, but no one (aside from Matt Zylbert’s Over/Unders) was any better or worse than the next guy. It taught me that people who actually make money, generally don’t share it. People who make money by means of other people paying them to tell you how to make money, are usually not that good at their job.

That little betting anecdote aside, in life you are constantly surrounded by information. What you choose to listen to and pay attention to is up to you. Here are a few examples in my life of where I had to make adjustments.

Facebook – I was looking through my feed and came across a pregnant woman who I had met a few times in my life a decade ago. She is relatively attractive, but I asked myself, why am I looking at this? It has negative relevance in my life. So I unfriended her. Then I saw a guy I played ball with back in college with his wife and 2 kids and thought, “I will *hopefully* never have to talk to this guy ever again. Unfriend. I started looking through my list and could have unfriended half the people and be no worse off. What is odd is that in college it felt that more was better. Except the truth is that more leads to less. Now I want less to lead to more. As such, the Facebook feed is trash. 

Twitter – I followed a bunch of gambling personnel back when I started tracking. Once I realized that their information is shit, why the hell was I still following them? I don’t know them personally. Their tweets suck. Unfollow. I don’t need shitty information from shitty people in my life. Same concept applies, I need fewer and better. Not more and worse. 

I’m taking your advice you clown!

General Media – Unbiased reporting is trustworthy. There is no such thing. Being controlled by what the media wants you to think seems like a shitty way to go through life.

The Pivotal Discovery

From now on (to quote the Greatest Showman which our family watched over Christmas), I’m only listening to myself. I’ll consume information like a sponge, but when it comes down to it, it’s going to be me. I’m going to be contrarian when I want to be contrarian and I’ll follow the herd when I want to. I’m not longer listening to other people as “truth”. No one knows the future and there is so much noise that I think best practice is to block it all out. That way you can only blame yourself and not others. I believe results will follow. 

I see how I use this to apply to mostly betting, but I feel like the intuition of yourself is a point that shouldn’t be overlooked in all aspects of life. More posts to follow on this topic.