During the holidays I always try to reflect on the year that was. I usually do a recap of the past year and some analysis on whatever happened. This post is going to be a little different. 2011 was such a clusterfuck of a year that I am just going to talk about the most important thing I learned and the reason I was able to learn it.

In the past, I used to read just about everything I could possibly read about the poker industry. As a result of this, I am sure that I know more about the online poker industry than all but a handful of people in the world. From 2007 to early 2011, when I wasn't working on something specific for CardRunners or Hold'em Manager, I was reading a poker forum, news site, blog, or playing poker. I was also of course totally consumed with playing poker from 2003-2007. If you spend more time than anyone else doing something, you're going to become knowledgeable about it.

This time last year, we were working pretty hard getting DraftDay off the ground. I came to the conclusion that in order to give DD it's best chance at success, I needed to grow the audience of people listening to me. I reasoned that if a lot of people were listening to what I said, I could sell them on the concept of DraftDay when we got to launch. It wasn't practical to pump out blog posts daily, so I decided that I needed to get active on Twitter. I found last year's New Year's Resolution thread on 2p2, you can read my post in January of last year that highlighted this as one of my goals for 2011.

An interesting thing happened next. I got on Twitter to achieve the aforementioned goal, but I got a whole lot more out of it than I could have imagined. I quickly moved on from following poker celebs and started following entrepreneurs, investors, news sites, and tech types. Over the course of the last year, I grew much more interested in learning about business than the poker industry. While I still spend time reading about poker, the vast majority of my time is spent reading other things. I spend about 3-4 hours per day, 7 days a week, reading things on the internet.

A whole different post could be dedicated to the idea that I made a major change in my life almost completely by chance due to a new year's resolution (poker industry study -> general business study). I find that fascinating but that is not the point of this post.

The point of this post is that thanks to the time spent on Twitter, sometime during the course of the year, I came across this 45 second video of Steve Jobs' vision of the world.


You should quickly watch that. If not, the most important quote is "...Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it.."

I think I had an intuitive understanding of this concept before I listened to this video, but watching this drove it home for me. I definitely didn't understand this when I was younger. It's really a brilliant piece of advice from Jobs. Here are some stream of consciousness thoughts about this video:

Go out there and take what you want from the world. Apply yourself, work hard, work smart, have fun, and enjoy the ride. If there is something out there you want, fight for it. Don't sit around and complain about not having money, a good job, a girlfriend, whatever is bothering you. Have confidence in yourself, believe that you can succeed at whatever it is you want to achieve. Don't be lazy, don't waste your time sulking or being unhappy. Life is short, don't waste it, and for the love of god, don't give up.

This is a powerful concept to grasp. I'm going to put it into action. I've made an impact on the poker industry but I am not going to stop there. I want to change the fantasy sports industry. We are going to do that with DraftDay. After that, I don't know what is next but there will be something else, hopefully something bigger and better. I am going to bust my ass to carve out the life that I want to lead. Sure, I'm going to fail along the way, but I'm not afraid of failure. I'm ready for the challenges that lie ahead and I'm looking forward to beginning to change the fantasy sports world in 2012.