Jack of All Trades

Well, fancy this. A new post only 10 days after the last!

I've got this week off work to spend at home sorting things out around the house, so I figured what better way to spend an hour waiting for the mortgage broker to call back than by putting down a few thoughts that have been milling around inside my head.

A while ago I started writing a series of articles about whether my life was better because of poker. I didn't finish them, but they covered or would have covered my financial situation, career prospects, relationships and friendships, hobbies, health - both physical and physiological, and intellectual well being. I'm not entirely sure what my overall conclusions would have been. The process of writing the articles was supposed to lead me to realise the effects of poker on my life. I suspect that there would have been a mixture of good things and bad to have come from poker, but ultimately it's hard to tell what would have happened if I'd never discovered poker.

At 26 I know I'm not old and I certainly don't feel old, but I am beginning to feel that I've already lived long enough to have done quite a large variety of things and to have been through a variety of different phases in my life:

I grew up in rural England and went to a local primary school. I lived a pretty standard parochial existence, but I wasn't getting on at school. I was in trouble quite regularly and probably wasn't enjoying it much.

In an attempt to give me better stimulation improve my behaviour and probably also my prospects, my parents had me take a choral scholarship at a choir school. I got the musical and academic background that has served me well so far in life, but my behaviour still left quite a lot to be desired.

I took an academic and music scholarship to a good secondary school and I gradually grew up. There was some excellent teaching and I grew to love science as well as music.

I got a place at Oxford to study biochemistry, but in the meantime I took a year off and taught in a primary school in Kenya. During that year I did virtually nothing in the way of music and very little in the way of any kind of study, but it was an incredible experience and I know I matured a lot during that time.

I shouldn't really be surprised that I changed dramatically during the course of four years at university either. I met the future Mrs. Pink. Music became much less a part of my life, although I still did some singing. Academically I started off strong, but I wasn't totally convinced with my choice of biochemistry and my by the end of the second year I was thinking about doing medicine as a second degree. In the third year I discovered poker and my studies almost completely ground to a halt. My third year exams (about 60% of my final mark) were fairly abysmal and the idea of medicine pretty much went out of the window. By the end of my degree I didn't really have much direction in terms of future plans...

... except that I was going to marry Mrs Pink. We got married after I'd finished my degree and moved down to London. Mrs Pink had a job lined up and I treaded water playing a bit of poker, doing a bit of office work and then trying my hand at the career I'm currently in, before giving it up to play poker full time and then realising that I wasn't really cut out for full time poker and coming back to the job I'm in now.

Right now both I and Mrs Pink have both got good jobs with interesting paths ahead of us. Poker is a big part of my spare time and provides a handy supplementary income. I'm not really doing much else, however. I keep myself fit with a bit of exercise, but I'm not doing any music and I'm not sure my brain is as active as it could be.

Last night I was thinking back to all the different things I've done and am not doing any more. As I've gone through life, I've been pretty successful at everything that I've put my mind to, but I'm not sure I've really mastered anything at all. Of the two things I'm doing right now (work and poker) I'm not sure if I'll master wither of those either. I'm never going to be a world class player and I'm extremely unlikely ever to win a WSOP bracelet. As far as work goes, it's not out the question that I could end up at the top of the tree, but it's a pretty distant ambition and it'll certainly take a hell a lot of hard work and luck.

Does that mean I'll end up being a jack of all trades for the rest of my life?

Well, maybe I will, but what I've realised it that that's not at all bad. As long as I'm happy - and I certainly am - then life should be pretty enjoyable. From what I've experienced so far I think the two ingredients in my life that are necessary to be happy are Mrs. Pink and having something to strive to achieve at any given point in time and if I never master anything else, then it probably doesn't matter.