June 2025 - The Game, Obsessed, Mastery & Passive Discipline

Active vs Passive Discipline & "Working"

Treating business or your active income endeavors as a game is something I originally thought was a bit naff but the concept has grown on me immensely in the past decade.

Calling business a game I always thought was degrading it, a game is below a sport and a better business metaphor could be something like a war, but in reality I think a game is actually the best example.

Approaching something as a game takes the edge off, makes it all a lot less stressful, whereas approaching something as war is probably not great for your mental health or stress levels when everything is treated as life or death.

This was a quote I saw recently that I really liked;

All very accurate but the “a goal to work towards” part is what we’ll focus on here.

Elegant and so simple but so accurate.

I’m a very goal-focused person, something I’ve written about multiple times on this site.

But I’ve found approaching this as a game really does help reduce stress, it also allows you to cut out and “stop playing” the stupid f*cking games you might be playing.

I’m looking to play and do well in the income/earnings game (primarily through betting sports at the moment), updates on all that progress later.

But I’m not going to play the corporate game, or the “convince a banker to give you a loan” game.

Those games are BS.

But whatever game you personally choose to play, try to be the best at it.

If it’s the corporate ladder game you can still use all the personal growth skills to help climb it, it’s just a different endpoint we’re aiming for.

And always ensure you choose a game you actually want to play and win.

There’s nothing worse than winning a game after a decade or two to realise you didn’t want to play it in the first place and it wasn’t worth winning….

There’s another good quote from Naval about this;

Or in short; “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes”

It’s why I think most people shouldn’t be in their current jobs, simply because a.) they dislike it. b.) Not challenging/learning/growing. c.) Do not earn enough.

Importance in that order.

This is also why people who are striving for excellence in any field, almost regardless of what it is, are extremely interesting and infectious to talk to.

Because they are playing their own game, they aren’t trying to play for status or anything, they are just trying to become the best at X.

They also seem more at peace and calm (just something I’ve noticed but keep an eye out for this if you meet someone who reminds you of this).

Update on my Game

One of the core reasons I like/have chosen sports betting is because it’s a closed game within an open one.

Closed in the fact that you either win a bet or it loses (99.9% of the time).

Open in the fact that placing the bet, what to bet on, how much to bet, how to get that money down, who you need in your team, what systems etc.

Business is an open-open game.

Sports betting is a closed-open game.

Jobs can be closed-closed in some cases but in reality you can make anything open with enough creativity and drive.

The key is just creating the type of game (business/approach) that you enjoy and suits your personality.

I was re-reading a trading book recently that nailed the concept, although this was about trading it applies across to betting as well.

You can’t find many other activities where success of failure depends only on you.

Business can be similar but you also have to rely on customers/clients, suppliers etc. Even though you need to take responsibility for everything regardless of whether it was your “fault”, I prefer as closed as possible.

This is also why I hated the B2B client-agency model business.

I know this business model can work well, but for me it was a bad mix, and although I did well for a few years in this industry, if it were a different business model that was more suited to my “natural” skillset it would have been far more profitable.

One side-note I remember was losing the biggest client we had at the time, roughly a 180k/year hit after we’d just pretty directly added an extra $10M/year of organic traffic to the site (measured by how much it would cost to buy ads of that same traffic’s keywords).

This was one of the many straws breaking that led to the realisation that this business model wasn’t for me.

I know there’s other revenue-share business models and ways to mitigate this from happening but situations when campaigns go perfectly and you still lose because of someone else’s decision making…. That’s not for me.

But anyway, less ranting.

So like most human’s I’d rather have a consistent, semi-reliable, increasing income stream or business that grows (ideally quickly) over time.

In reality both business, trading, investing, betting is not like that, it’s “clumpy” “streaky”.

Large, short increases in profit/earnings, followed by steep losses, or flat lines for days or weeks.

It’s tough.

In that trading book there was an example of an individual who only had 6 large profitable trades in a single year, and if you took those 6 days out, his return was only around 3% or something crazy low, with these in it was closer to 200% with 100 million dollars.

But for most people (including me) that level of nothing/nothing/nothing/20 million day/nothing/nothing is not something we are evolved well to do.

On the sports betting/personal side, I’ve noticed that results can be very streaky as well.

You might make 15 units in a month, but all that profit comes from 3 days in any month period, with the rest being fairly even or only up 2-3 units.

This is really tough from a human perspective as we like to see that earnings line going from left to right increasing gradually and easily, but it’s not how anything works.

Even previous businesses, month after month would be fairly slow and then 2 big new clients in the same month to double business.

This works on the downside too, Covid can cut a business in-half, Google can release an update and we’re in a very different situation.

I think by being obsessed with the game of something you automatically win.

It’s called Mastery.

Mastery

Since 2020 I’ve had a Google doc called “The Mastery of Betting” — originally built after re-reading Mastery by Robert Greene (for the 3rd time).

One of the core ideas in here is summed up by this quote.

However long your project takes to complete, you will always experience a sense of impatience. The single greatest action you can take to acquire creative power is to reverse this natural impatience. You take pleasure in the laborious research process. Time is in fact your greatest ally.

Flipping the impatience to try to achieve mastery of something.

There’s also another idea that I’ve taken from Modern Wisdom (or maybe Naval) that’s around “If you're succeeding at something you don't enjoy, imagine how great you'd be at something you loved”.

This was in the midst of really not enjoying agency SEO life, despite it going really well from a financial perspective.

I had no interest in being a client facing B2B services person. It was just for the money and although 100 times better than working a job you hate, having a business your not thrilled about is not that fun either.

So instead why not try to build something great around the game of prediction. Because I hate perceptions of anything and societal norms, I needed a game that was semi-closed as mentioned earlier.

I think this is what drives a lot of people to financial markets and trading.

It’s so closed, market go up, market go down, it’s binary.

Life obviously isn’t.

But where you can build systems that are mostly closed (or closed off from you personally) will help relax you, you will feel less unease and anxiety.

The fear of the thing is so much worse than the thing itself.

I had this personally twice this year.

The first is with essentially stopping becoming a profitable marketing agency, turning down any new leads (albeit not really many at this point) and also losing the last big client.

The fear of that loss, even though it had been planned for years was still worse than actually losing that extra £10k/month.

In fact when it happened, I felt literally nothing, not really even any disappointment.

Eventually it would be amazing to have ONE THING. We’re a long way from that but that’s the goal.

The other time was receiving money that was owed from a business sale that has not been paid and all the SPA business agreements being broken in the process, 9 months late the payment was received,, we’re still 6 months behind at this point but when it was received no emotions were really felt.

Anyway, one more thing before we get onto our June update.

Active vs Passive Discipline

Active discipline is the idea around do-something.

Go to the gym.

Work for 4 hours even when your tired and ensure you are productive.

Passive-discipline is an idea I created (although definitely not the first person) that focuses around how to be disciplined by not-doing or by being patient.

One of my issues is I’ll do multiple things, too many projects and when it comes time to focus on one project (others might be in motion) and hence the focus and productivity to switch-back won’t be there.

Also thinking about this as lazy-discipline.

This is why I never want to live more than 15 minutes walk to a gym.

I’m disciplined enough to go to the gym everyday/most days, but add travel time and maybe not.

Same thing for diet, when you hear people discuss not buying junk food and only going out of it, the lazy-person in me can’t be bothered so even though it’s not a rule “only eat healthy”. The rule is, if you want crap food, you have to go get it.

This is called adding or removing friction to habits/processes.

AKA if you live next door to a gym you are more likely to go (removing friction).

Or if you want ice cream you need to walk to the gelato-store not your freezer (adding friction).

On the discipline side of this idea it comes back to knowing when to have patience (passive-discipline) and literally do nothing in some cases vs when to have real working flow state days (active-discipline).

For example, an athlete might need to train extremely hard but if they get injured the need the “discipline” to do nothing and rest and recover.

On the business/betting side this is the case I’ve noticed.

I need the discipline to build models, back-test, scrape data, come up with unique custom strategies and complete entire leagues in a week that would have taken months before.

And then to not over-bet things and not bet larger than the bankroll, track granularly and remember that the number of bets and time spent betting a league INCREASE the profitability of it as fixes and tweaks get made.

This is the passive-discipline side.

Bet something for 2 months and make 1 tweak to make something 2% better, and build from there, increasing units slowly.

Similar to the idea above, don’t take on more sports and leagues because when the tweaks need to be noticed and mastery of an individual sport needs to be achieved, if you are spread over too many or spread over multiple businesses or projects, you won’t know the actual tweaks or notice the nuances that make these models go from good to incredible returns.

It’s ironically the harder part but something that’s going well and getting better.

June on the sports betting side

As mentioned in all other posts our goal is £50k/month through betting.

So far in June we’re sitting at around £16,000 profit, primarily through rugby league and cricket. Another good month for both of these.

These nuances to all these sports but this £16k profit is especially promising because of 3 reasons;

1. It’s the first time we’ve had 5-figure back to back profit from purely sports betting.

2. We had a £7,000 loss in the first 10 days of June, due to just variance, bad luck and 2 smaller bugs in 2 models.

3. Low bet volume - In June there’s not a crazy amount of sport on (that we bet) so having a relatively high profit in this month is great. (16% ROI).

Cheers.