A career advisor explains why many talented, hard-working people often miss out on their full career potential, revealing the tells, blind spots, secrets, and unspoken rules you need to know in order to play the game to win. While many careers have been impacted by economic downturns, failed projects, downsizing and restructuring, or just bad bosses or bad timing, we all know of colleagues who continue to rise through every tough situation. Most assume that they have an advantage that protects them—degrees from the right schools, great mentors, influential friends and family, or just better luck. But these hyper-successful professionals have faced setbacks, too. Instead of allowing challenges to derail their rise, they’ve learned how to manage them better. In Workplace Poker, Dan Rust gives you the strategies you need to accelerate your career, and prevent setbacks from stalling your progress or spiraling it downward. The trick, he reveals, is to “play the game under the game,” to think more deeply and act more strategically. If you are talented, ambitious, and hardworking, but feel your career just isn’t accelerating as rapidly as it should, or as fast as you would like it to, this book is for you. If you have been frustrated to see others (less talented, who don’t work as hard as you do) achieve rapid professional progress while your career stalls out, this book is for you. If you’ve been annoyed by those who are successful primarily because of where they went to school, or family connections, or financial resources, this book is for you. Rust gives you the insight and skills you need to transform yourself and adapt and survive any hurdle—to turn every adversity into advantage, and every struggle into strength, including: • Recognition of your own “blind spots” and what to do about them • Mastering strategic and authentic self-promotion • Enhancing your personal charm and likeability • Achieving the high energy, both mental and physical, necessary to drive an exceptional career trajectory • Developing an interest in “corporate anthropology” and the complex human dimensions of business • Neutralizing the career-stalling impact of difficult or dysfunctional colleagues • Deeply “owning” and learning from career missteps and failures In his smart, funny, relatable voice, Rust shares stories of individuals who have applied these capabilities in real world situations, and provides short, focused exercises to help you think about yourself and your own career. With Workplace Poker¸ you’ll learn how to get out of you own way, and find the success you deserve.

The author recounts his experiences on the lucrative Wall Street bond market of the 1980s, where young traders made millions in a very short time, in a humorous account of greed and epic folly.

Using the latest techniques from poker players to detect when your patients are lying to you. Forensic psychiatrists frequently deal with deceptive people. In these cases, malingering is the most common type of deception one encounters. However, deception on the part of mental health clients in other treatment settings is much broader and more complex than malingering, and learning the signs of deception can be useful for therapists in any specialty, especially those who do not necessarily take what their clients tell them at face value. The book begins with an introduction to some basic concepts concerning deception, with particular emphasis on “what it is” and “what it isn’t.” It then looks at the motivations behind and methods of deception in mental health practice, as well as the common contexts in which deception occurs. Finally, with an eye toward the detection of deception, the book looks at the game of poker as a “clinical case study” to explore whether the popular notion of “tells” has any relevance to the practice of mental health treatment. This short and uniquely illustrated guide will help mental health professionals determine when, why, and how their clients may lie to them. With some of the analysis based on insights from the world of poker players, readers will learn about methods of deception, reasons why clients deceive them, and the best methods to uncover the truth.

Love’s Work is at once a memoir and a book of philosophy. Written by the English philosopher Gillian Rose as she was dying of cancer, it is a book about both the fallibility and endurance of love, love that becomes real and endures through an ongoing reckoning with its own limitations. Rose looks back on her childhood, the complications of her parents’ divorce and her dyslexia, and her deep and divided feelings about what it means to be Jewish. She tells the stories of several friends also laboring under the sentence of death. From the sometimes conflicting vantage points of her own and her friends’ tales, she seeks to work out (seeks, because the work can never be complete—to be alive means to be incomplete) a distinctive outlook on life, one that will do justice to our yearning both for autonomy and for connection to others. With droll self knowledge (“I am highly qualified in unhappy love affairs,” Rose writes, “My earliest unhappy love affair was with Roy Rogers”) and with unsettling wisdom (“To live, to love, is to be failed”), Rose has written a beautiful, tender, tough, and intricately wrought survival kit packed with necessary but unanswerable questions.

A New York Times bestseller • A New York Times Notable Book “The tale of how Konnikova followed a story about poker players and wound up becoming a story herself will have you riveted, first as you learn about her big winnings, and then as she conveys the lessons she learned both about human nature and herself.” —The Washington Post It's true that Maria Konnikova had never actually played poker before and didn't even know the rules when she approached Erik Seidel, Poker Hall of Fame inductee and winner of tens of millions of dollars in earnings, and convinced him to be her mentor. But she knew her man: a famously thoughtful and broad-minded player, he was intrigued by her pitch that she wasn't interested in making money so much as learning about life. She had faced a stretch of personal bad luck, and her reflections on the role of chance had led her to a giant of game theory, who pointed her to poker as the ultimate master class in learning to distinguish between what can be controlled and what can't. And she certainly brought something to the table, including a Ph.D. in psychology and an acclaimed and growing body of work on human behavior and how to hack it. So Seidel was in, and soon she was down the rabbit hole with him, into the wild, fiercely competitive, overwhelmingly masculine world of high-stakes Texas Hold'em, their initial end point the following year's World Series of Poker. But then something extraordinary happened. Under Seidel's guidance, Konnikova did have many epiphanies about life that derived from her new pursuit, including how to better read, not just her opponents but far more importantly herself; how to identify what tilted her into an emotional state that got in the way of good decisions; and how to get to a place where she could accept luck for what it was, and what it wasn't. But she also began to win. And win. In a little over a year, she began making earnest money from tournaments, ultimately totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. She won a major title, got a sponsor, and got used to being on television, and to headlines like "How one writer's book deal turned her into a professional poker player." She even learned to like Las Vegas. But in the end, Maria Konnikova is a writer and student of human behavior, and ultimately the point was to render her incredible journey into a container for its invaluable lessons. The biggest bluff of all, she learned, is that skill is enough. Bad cards will come our way, but keeping our focus on how we play them and not on the outcome will keep us moving through many a dark patch, until the luck once again breaks our way.

Every day we make choices. These choices impact our lives, our careers, our families, our health, our successes, and our failures. Often we make choices without considering the impact or consequences that may result. We make choices every day in the workplace and in our personal lives that mold and craft our future, and we are not even aware of it. Where we are today is a direct result of the choices we have made. Where we will be tomorrow is directly related to the choices we are going to make. Each of us has been dealt a hand of cards. The cards we have been dealt may have been outside our control. However, how we respond to these cards is 100 percent within our control. The best poker players don’t win because they always have the best cards; they win because they know how to play the cards they are dealt. They know when to fold, when to stay in the game, how to read the other players at the table, and when to bluff. They win because of choices they make with the cards they were dealt. It’s Your Choice will help bring clarity and perspective to the choices you are faced with each day in the workplace and in your personal life. It will bring reason and logic to things that you may not have considered before. It’s Your Choice is designed to challenge you to think differently, more clearly, and with a larger perspective of the choices you make each day. There will be things in It’s Your Choice you don’t want to hear. There will be things shared that will challenge you to think deeper than you have in the past. What you do with what you read in It’s Your Choice is indeed your choice.

Compares business environments to a poker game in order to show how to use winning card strategies to promote group and individual performance.