Bond18 teaches you to grind

Came across a great post on Two Plus Two from Tony "Bond18" Dunst. Its long, but its well worth the read. Click on the title below to read the full story.

The Theory of Grinding (TL;DR) - MTT Community - Multi Table Tournament Poker Community

It will come as a surprise to very few people that those who become the most talented at a certain skill set are those who practice the most and spend their time the most efficiently. It's no secret that in order to excel at something, you have to do it with enormous volume, repetition, and frequency, particularly if it is in a field where your competition will be doing likewise. Poker is just such a field, and a difficult field to stay at the top of because its demand for time forces us into a conflict of interest between pursuing excellence within the game and pursuing our passions outside of it in order to become a more well rounded person. Additionally, a sect of our competition will have few interests or activities outside of poker, lending them the opportunity to envelop themselves within the game and with a fervor that is difficult to match for those of us with more obligations.

What many people aren't aware of is their potential. We generally assume that we are naturally talented at certain activities and functions and that our capacity for learning the others is limited by genetics, resources, time, opportunity, or our own apathy. As a result of years of social conditioning we have had programmed into our personalities what are known as 'limiting beliefs': assumptions we make about we are able and unable to do based on our own experiences, what society has told/taught us, and the feedback we get from peers and loved ones. Limiting beliefs are especially restrictive and damaging to those who have no prior success to draw upon; if you were never successful at one thing what makes you think you could possibly be successful at something else? We often believe that we are capable of what we are currently doing and perhaps a little more, and few of us have the confidence, ambition, or sheer audacity to believe that we have the ability to be elite at something, particularly something that's highly competitive. The truth is however, that you have a near endless supply of potential and options, and over the last few years I have watched my own limiting beliefs get shattered so many times that I now understand that near anything is possible.