Work - it gets in the way

I've always worked hard. Never been unemployed. I started as a trainee and worked my way up to a highly paid consultant. Then I started my own business and won some contracts. Its been very very busy. My personal life started to suffer because I was working too hard. Something changed in late 2006 and I starting scaling back a bit. Then in 2007 it got really busy again. Even though I mostly worked from home I was getting burnt out. Eventually in August 2007 I decided I needed a break. From the years of success I had saved a bit of money. It was time to be "unemployed".....at least for a little while. so as of mid September I stopped working.

Of course poker was part of the reason for this. I had decided that I needed to master the game and work was getting in the way. I needed to enter more tournaments to get some practice. I needed to read some books. I wanted to understand why 50-100 players were so damn good. And I am an entrepreuner - the good players are all releasing books and stuff and making loads of money. Poker is on a huge surge of popularity which is leading to bigger and bigger tournaments. I want to see if I can be a part of it but my work in getting in the way.

So how long to be unemployed for? I figured I needed 3-4 months to train and see if I could become good at poker. Remember my definition - good == positive cashflow. If I fail I will go back to work and have no regrets. But I hope to succeed. And I can measure my success by how far I get in the tournaments I enter.

So it feels good to be unemployed. Nobody is paging me. I have no responsibilities to anyone else (Except my wife). I have a massage a couple of times a week and have booked in some travel. All my friends think I am crazy.....but are also maybe a little interested. Being a trainee professional poker player is definately more of an ice breaker than working with [boring] computers.

Now I can concentrate on learning poker and practicing in tournaments.