Hello all!  It’s been a while and we are approaching what will be a year for me since I last played a hand of poker online.  Yes yes, I know you can still play on some other random sites out there.  But to be quite honest, I don’t trust them at this point in time.  The fact that I still have 5 figures wrapped up with Full Tilt still to this day has left a sour taste in my mouth.

The sour taste still lingers, but it is not as bad as it once was.  I do have to admit though, I was extremely depressed for about 6 months there.  So much hard work seemingly down the drain.  I still look forward to the day that I can play online poker in the comfort of my home and easily transfer money from one site to the next.  Ahhhh, yes it is like an american poker player’s wet dream.

I did manage to sneak in a couple live sessions at the closest casino to my home which is in Charles Town, West Virginia (a 3 hour drive for me).  I ended up winning a couple hundred bucks I think in about 5-7 sessions playing for a total of 3-6 hours each session.  (pretty bad stat keeping, right?)  The last session though, made me realize just how I wouldn’t be able to make a living at live poker when the drive is 3 hours away.  I sat there, and sat there, and sat there some more just waiting for the hands.  Being the online action-junkie I couldn’t take it anymore and ended up playing out of my comfort zone.  This would prove to be disastrous as I dropped I believe it was around $800 in about an hour.  But hey, like I said, I still ended up overall.  Since that dead run of cards for a session, I haven’t been back.  The commute back-and-forth just isn’t worth it for the chance to go through another cold deck. So I haven’t played any poker online or live in a few months now.

Just to remind you, I do still have a full-time job.  On that front, things have gotten better.  I am still with the same company, though doing something a little different.  Something is more up my alley.  Though I feel I could be happier elsewhere, I am in no dire need to leave except for the reasons of money, which is definitely WAY TOO LOW.  Especially since half my income, what was my online poker income, is gone to me now.

But anyhow, about being depressed for about 6 months.  I didn’t do a thing.  I was just so extremely unmotivated.  I hope I never experience anything like it again.  Then something just kinda snapped around November/December (around the same time of my last live session).  It was that inner voice telling me I need to get my act together.  Sitting around moping isn’t going to bring online poker back.  All the ideas and things I talked about last post back in April of 2011 were still sitting there,  being left untouched.

So around the middle of December I decided it was time to get to work.  I created a new website.  Something that I hope can really catch on one day.  If it doesn’t that’s OK as I have learned a ton of new things in the short period of time that I have been working on it.  I already have some other great ideas that are in the works and might see the limelight here soon as well.

The site I am working on is called todaysRAGE. The general idea I will get from the about page on the site:

The idea

When you read an article, whether it be in your local newspaper or your favorite website, do you read every single thing from beginning to end?  Be honest.

If you are like most online users, the answer is NO.

Most people will read the title.  See the image.  Then if they are interested, they might read the first paragraph or two and MAYBE scan the rest.  Scanning is not reading though, and some important facts might have been missed by the reader.

Even if you do want to read just the summary from a news publication, it is often just the first paragraph anyway!

This is where todaysRAGE comes in.

The pitch

todaysRAGE is a news and trending-topics resource that provides fact-driven, brief stories based upon what is being sought and shared on the web at any given time.

…And that is pretty much it in a nutshell.  I do have more plans for the site, as they should be released here in the next week.  As of now I am still in build mode.  I started working on the site in the middle of December, and just to remind you… I have no idea what I am doing.  I am not some computer science major.  But one thing I am good at, is learning on the fly.  I have simply just done the same thing I did for nomenot.net.  I just googled “how to do this” and “how to do that” and then just stuck with it through trial and error.

Once I am completely done with build mode, which should be sometime in February.  It will be all about getting people to the site, marketing mode.  I am starting to tell more and more people about the site (as I am doing here), but when I say marketing mode….I mean really hitting up every avenue possible to drive people to the site.  Of course content is king, and that is kind of lacking at this point in time.  I went a week away from posting any new stories to really work on the front page of the site.  I know that is not a good thing.  But for now, I only plan to post one or two stories a day.  After all, there is so much one person can do, especially when it isn’t his full time job.  But maybe one day, it will be.

So to end this already extended update of a post.  I ask that you visit the site and let me know what you think.  I take criticism extremely well so don’t be shy.  You can post here or contact me through todaysRAGE either via the comment section or the contact page.

Until next time……(lets hope online poker comes back soon) good luck!

Happy belated holidays everyone!

Sorry I haven’t been updating the blog regularly recently. I have had a ton on my plate. This post will help explain some of it.

Poker

Not much going on in poker for me recently.  I just have been pretty unmotivated since I have had such a brutal last couple of months.  I have really “plateaued” recently.  I look at all my graphs in my excel spreadsheet.  I have been pretty much break-even since the end of August.  Not good!  But at least I am not losing I guess.

Nonetheless, I expect to play a TON before year’s end.  Not for any specific reason outside of the fact that I need to make 10k VPPs before the end of the year on PokerStars in order to hit 200k for the year.  With the 200k VPP mark, will come a nice $3,400 bonus.  So it is a must that I reach that mark.  This may require me to play a bunch of games that I normally don’t play, but not reaching 200k VPPs when I am this close will just be throwing money away.

Holidays

I might as well have gotten the best Christmas present ever!  See, back in June, my dad passed away.  It is something that I still don’t think I have fully accepted to this point.  It has been a tough time for me and my family.

But we must carry on, and the present I received from my mom may very well help ease some of the pain that is still left.  I received a quilt from my mom that was made from old shirts that my dad would customarily wear pretty regularly.  As soon as I opened the box and slid away the wrapping paper, I knew exactly what it was.  It was a truly amazing feeling as I could feel my father’s presence as I was glossing over this new quilt.

What a great gift!

Possible Business Ventures

I have been diving back into looking for opportunities to start up some websites for the sole purpose of providing a service and thus providing myself with extra income.  I am not going to mention the names of the websites just yet, but stay tuned as I work on putting these sites together.  If you have been reading this blog close to its inception, you will know that it may take a while as I am a complete novice with this stuff (plus it is not like I have all that much extra time in the day).  But I am excited to think of the possibilities that these sites may bring.  I will keep you posted as these sites reach “ready for public” status.

Back to Work

Sigh, my goal to 60k really just did not pan out like I thought it would.  Though I knew I would likely not hit 60k in poker profit in 6 months, I thought I would do better than what I have.  It has been a brutal 6 months (well July was great).  The plan was to hopefully make somewhere around 50k or more.  This would have provided me with a great cushion to break away from my current job.  But looks like that plan will need to be delayed a little.  I still plan on doing it sometime soon.

But my decision isn’t just based on that.  I don’t know if anyone had been following the “Reid Bill” stuff that was being passed around in Congress for a while there.  But that really got me worried and excited at the same time.  It was basically going to fully legalize and regulate online poker (though right now it isn’t illegal).  But one stipulation that made me worried was the fact that there might have been a so-called “blackout period” that would have given us no online poker at all for 15 months.  LOL!

Well, though the end product would be great, 15 months is a long time without poker.  Though the bill was never really introduced during the lame duck session of congress, I have a feeling it may pop up again sometime in 2011.  If this is the case, and with a 15 months of no poker, I just can’t feasibly leave my current job to play poker full-time.  I could essentially be out of work for more than a year.  With a family I need to take care of, it is just too risky at this point.

So I am keeping my ear close to the ground to hear for anything that may be circulating.  This and my poor last few months have made me reconsider the jump.  But once things turn around, and I feel more secure in the fact that poker will be here for a while, it will likely be time to make the move.

Hopefully some of these websites I have dreamed up will help me leave the job I am currently at and inherently play more poker.  But that is way too premature to even think about, and likely will not be the case.  But it would be nice!

Bun in the Oven

If that wasn’t enough to scare me from making the jump.  The wife is pregnant with number 2!  She is due in late June and I am truly excited.  We should know if it is a boy or girl sometime in February.  It is pretty well-known though that I would like a boy since we already have a girl, but either way….I am excited.  I guess all you can really hope for is for the baby to be healthy.

So yea, I have alot on my plate right now.  It may not seem like much on paper, but it is.  Plus there are always even more random things, but I will save you from more boring details.

I just don’t know what to think these days when it comes to work.  There are so many mixed messages out there.  I am really at a loss as to which direction I want to take my career.

When I am on the road for my current job, it isn’t rare for me to spend up to 8 hours a day in the car.  It can feel like a huge waste of time.  To make myself feel like I am accomplishing something, I will at times listen to an audio book.

A Thirst For Knowledge

One audio book that graces the speakers of my company car is that of  Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki.  When I first listened to it, it re-opened my eyes as to what I really want to do and what kind of life I really want to lead.  It began a rampage that turned into a thirst for knowledge on the subject.  The subject of entrepreneurship which also made me stumble into self development.

To give an example of one of the results from this quest for entrepreneurial knowledge, I came across 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job by Steve Pavlina.  It proved to be more about how I need to get out of my current job situation .

Having Doubts

It is a lot easier said than done though.  I mean we all want to do what we want, right?  But we have to pay the bills somehow, I just don’t know if I can make the leap to self-employment.  What if I fail?  How am I going to take care of the baby?

Ah yes, failure.  I recently wrote an article called Don’t Be Afraid to Fail and how accepting failure might relate to business success.  I give the example of how LeBron James uses this mindset and how I was attempting to apply it to my life.

I am applying it to my life with more of the everyday situations as related to what I felt was causing some of my procrastinations.  I just don’t think I could possibly apply it to something this big.  Taking the chance to leave a job, my main source of income, to hopefully do what I want while paying the bills is quite a huge step.  I just get shaky knees when standing at the ledge.

My Current Situation

I mean I have wanted to leave my job for one reason or another for about the last year.  But on the flip side, there are some great advantages to my job that I would be worried to lose.  I just don’t know what to do.  It could just be the old case of the grass being greener on the other side.

One great thing about my current job is the flexibility it provides.  It is because of this job that I am able to be currently sitting at the office writing this post.  (I hope my boss doesn’t see this)  When I am not at the office, I can pretty much do whatever I like as long as I am producing the kind of results expected of me, which is a breeze.

But the negatives of the position keep on popping up.  Things like the feeling of no accomplishment at the end of the day and knowing that the position is leading me to a dead end as far as career progression is concerned has become almost too much to bare.  Not to even mention that I am getting underpaid as compared to the industry standards.

The Job Market

I feel like with the things the way they are, economically speaking, I just can’t do anything about it right now.  To give you an idea of how the current job market is, my company recently put a new position on Craigslist for an adminsitrative position vacancy.  Within 24 hours, there were nearly 300 applications submitted!  This same position a few years ago would have seemed lucky to get 5 applicants within 24 hours.

Every position out there has plenty of people vying for the opportunity.  There are just too many people out there that are unemployed at the moment.  Maybe I should just be happy to have a job.

What I Want To Do

I feel like the guy from Office Space.  I could take any number of quotes he says in that movie an apply it to my situation.  But what do I really want to do?  Even in the movie, they say that you should do for a living what you would do if you were already financially secure.  The main character in the movie said “I would do nothing.”  I would say I would like to own multiple businesses, play poker, and travel.

I have even taken a self-assessment test and not the basic 10-20 question ones you can get by surfing the internet.  I took a in-depth profile test.  To make a long story short, its top recommendations for me were:  small business owner, stock trader, CEO, and sales representative.  If you are interested in finding similar tests, at a cost, check out www.attributesforsuccess.com.

How Can I Get There?

The aged old question for me I guess.  I could just drop everything today and start playing poker and probably have a decent shot at making the same amount I do from my current job within a year’s time.  Too risky though.  I have a family that relies on me to be able to pay for my half of the bills.

I could apply for a job where I might feel a little bit happier.  But the feeling of happiness would just be temporary until I reach my end goal.  Besides if I do take on a new job at this point in time, I couldn’t be 100 percent sure that I would be guaranteed that income stream for the next year or two.  So many people are getting laid off these days.

My best option right now seems to be what I am doing at the moment, plus some things I would like to do:

1. Stay at my current job, which is flexible enough to allow me to chase my dreams away from work.
2. Attempt to start up some businesses, which is exactly what this blog could be looked at if I can drive enough traffic to my site on a daily basis.
3. Make money playing poker.  Something I would like to do more of as I have only played one session of poker in the past 2 months.
4. Start setting up some assets.  Back on the topic of Rich Dad Poor Dad, it is the way to be financially secure.  Don’t let my main resource of money be from a job’s income.  Let it be from assets.  I need to start letting my money work for me.

In Closing

I am not sure if I am just up in arms about nothing.  I just feel as though I have hit a temporary dead end as far as my young career is concerned.  I know many people out there would be happy to have my job, and maybe the standards I have set for myself are too high.  But then again who knows.  I am not even sure what I want to do anymore (outside of what has already been mentioned).  If you checked out this video I posted the other day, you can see how the future job market is likely to be completely different than it is today.  It is almost scary.

This feeling of hitting a stalemate in my career could be short lived and I hope to look back on this post one day and feel happy with the progress I made at that point.  When that day comes, I will share my experiences and hopefully help out someone that might be going through a similar situation.  Until then, I will be working on bettering this website to hopefully bring in more traffic and I will be keeping my ear close to the ground for any potential dream jobs that may arise.

This video might be old news to some of you as it already has nearly 5 million hits on YouTube.  I just saw it today for the first time when it was emailed to me.  Within the email, it said “Sony played this mind-blowing video at their executive conference this year.”

I am unsure as to what was said at the Sony executive conference.  But I can guess it was along the lines of how technology has progressed and is expected to progress in the future.  Some stuff in the video really is mind-blowing, just as the email suggested.

I have said in the past that I had lost all respect for the show 60 minutes on CBS due to the way they misinformed the public about the legality of online poker.  I even took the time to call the show 50 minutes. However, they recently had a piece on LeBron James that was very inspiring and hit close to home for me in certain ways.

There is no doubt that LeBron James is on top of his game not only on the court, but off it as well.  All of this before he is even 25 years old.

What sets himself apart from the rest though?  Is it that he is stronger? Faster? Smarter?  I believe a vast majority of his success in basketball and now business is due to his frame of mind.  He sums it up well at about the 8 min, 30 sec mark when he says:

You can’t be afraid to fail.  It’s the only way you succeed.  You’re not gonna succeed all the time, and I know that.  You have to be able to accept failure to get better.

This quote might seem obvious to some.  But to really think about it, too many people are afraid to fail.  I have come to the realization that I am one of these people.  But at least I have noticed the problem, and am now attempting to do something about it.

How this relates to me

I am not talking about failing at making the fade-away jumper as the clock approaches zero.  I am more concerned with more of the everyday situations.  I noticed that I never acted upon many of my good ideas.  It was as though I had become a huge procrastinator with things I knew could better my life in one way or another.

Take this website for instance, I have been thinking about making this site for well over a year until I finally decided to put the money down to get the domain name.  What took me so long?  The fear of making a website that would become a failure in my eyes.

What about one of my hobbies, online poker?  I haven’t been playing nearly the number of hours that I once did.  What gives?  Even though I am a proven winner in the game, deep down I think about all of the bad beats I have had and shy away from logging in to play when I have a free minute.  Even when I have a win, I play concerned about the chance of losing some of what I just won.  I honestly should be much further along in poker monetarily than I am today if I just put in the hours.

What I am doing about it

It is really hard for me to think of a way to articulate it, but the first thing that comes to mind is the Nike slogan Just Do It.  Psychologically speaking, people are creatures of habit. My old habit was that of procrastination due to the fear of failure.  I have been slowly breaking away from that old habit as I start new positive habits.

I have come to realize that by taking on a project and failing at it, I am better prepared for the future than I was had I not at least attempted the task.  Eventually the failures will come at a lower frequency as I better myself from previous experiences.

Again using this website as example, if this site goes on to not do as well as I had hoped in terms of the number of people that visit on a regular basis then I will feel comfortable in knowing that I learned a ton in the process.  Just a couple of months ago I could not tell you the slightest thing about HTML coding, WordPress, SEO, and much more.  However today I have this website as a testament to what I have learned while at the same time knowing that I still have plenty to discover.

Are you afraid?

Can you relate to much of what I wrote here?  If so, I urge you to join me in attempting to do something about it.  Do some research.  Visit personal development websites.  Start doing instead of just thinking.  You will be much happier in the long run if you do something about it.

Good luck and just remember that it is alot harder to get started than it is to keep going.  So get started now so you can get the hard part over with already!

Welcome!

Hello, and welcome to the brand new website!  For about the past month or so I have been slaving away at creating this site.  I am still working on some small things here and there.  But I feel as though the site is “ready enough.”  I really hope people will enjoy it and come back to visit.

Past Web Experience

To start, I have absolutely no idea what I am doing when it comes to building a website from scratch.  The only web experience I have had up this point was the creation of my old site on blogger.  I definitely hit some dead ends with some things but then would make a breakthrough with others when it came to the little intricacies of creating this website.  It was a ton of trial and error type of stuff, and this is the final product!  I am really excited about it.

I really feel like I learned a lot while going through the process of building this website.  I encourage anyone else thinking about starting a website to do it on their own and not hire outside help if possible.  In the coming months I will discuss how I created this website from scratch by using templates and plugins via wordpress.

The Old Site

Already mentioned, this website is a product of the transferring of my old blog.

The old website, nomenotpoker.blogspot.com

nomenotpoker.blogspot.com was my old blog hosted by blogger.  The old site was strictly a poker blog.  In fact, everything you see here on this site written before Mar 12th (’09) is a direct transfer from the old site.

The New Site

I noticed that as I was creating a new post on the old site one day that I didn’t really feel like talking about poker at that moment in time.  I wanted to broaden my horizons at a blogger.  I started talking about how the wife and I were expecting our first child (which is due any day now).  It was a start of the realization that I need to write about more than just poker.

That is exactly what I will do here at nomenot.net.   I will discuss pretty much whatever is on my mind for that day.  I am not going to limit it to just poker.  I will likely discuss the following:

1. Business- as I am a true entrepreneur at heart.
2. Sports- being an ex-student-athlete in college, it is a part of who I am.
3. Life- pretty broad topic for now, but think family stuff.

Of course that will just be the start of it.  I will post some as just quick updates or short topics on the day.  While at other times, I will attempt to approach a topic with the mindset of providing a true value to whom ever may read it.  I feel I did that with the poker article I wrote, Tournament Strategy to the Nth Degree.

So Why NoMeNot?

Nomenot, that was the title of this website I decided to go with.  Was it a lack of creative ideas or just the right idea staring me in the face?  I’m not sure exactly, but it is what it is.  If you are more interested in knowing where the term “NoMeNot” came from check out my About page.

Not only is that a term from way back when, but it is a term that is seeming to creep back into my life to describe my feelings as of recent.  When I think of the term “NoMeNot”,  I think of an anarchist, break away from the norm, point-of-view.  That is viewpoint I have had recently towards my work.

That brings up my next point as to why I started this website, to hopefully break apart from my normal 9 to 5 one day and do what I want to do.  Haven’t you ever heard someone say that you should do for a living what you would be doing if you were already financially secure?  Well, I would probably just play poker, attempt to own multiple businesses, and travel.  This would be my first attempt at owning a business.

The Business Side of It

Yes, there is another side to this website.  I am also trying to make some money if at all possible.  I plan to be completely honest about that with all of my visitors.  I hope the advertising will not discourage people from coming back to my site.  Hopefully I can provide good enough content to see to it that it couldn’t be an issue.  At the same time, it will be something for me to post about.  The business side of NoMeNot.net.

Keeping the Conversation Open

If you like what you see so far, I ask that you bookmark my site and comeback again.  If there is something you would like for me to talk about or you want to just say “hi” you can comment below or let me know.

-NoMeNot