A trend I want to kick... (poker content but life application)

[ggbman]

So a little relevant background... I am a junior at Bentley College and have been playing poker for a few years. I have done well enough to give me a nice head start in life and am probably good enough to make a comfortable living from poker barring a huge change in game conditions. However, i do not want to play poker for a living for a very long time. In my ideal world, i would play poker as my primary source of income for another 3-4 years and then have it take a backseat to real estate which would be my main job, and i could supplement my income playing 10-15 hours a week of poker. There are a few issues i am having though, and i am just seeking some general advice even if it seems obvious or an experience you have had isn't exactly the same but has some similarities...

1.) The thing that bothers me the most is that I feel that i use my success through poker as an excuse to make dumb mistakes and not learn from them. I should be doing better in school, I should never being paying penalties and interest on taxes for being unorganized, etc... 3 Years ago i would have killed to be in the position that i am in right now, but i am letting poker close avenues for me instead of opening them.


2.) Over the summers when poker is my only responsibility, i am able to stick to my plans pretty well, get in a lot of hands, and my results are typically very good. But when i return to school, knowing that i am going to get in less hours, i seem to have less discipline and be more degenerate. (I game select poorly and have played online blackjack 5 times in the last year which has proved to be costly [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]) I feel as if poker takes away from my concentration on school, and then i try to compensate by doing really well at poker to make myself feel like thats ok.

3.) I am doing a better job attending classes and paying attention to schoolwork this year because it's an important year for me, but i still don't think i am doing it well enough relative to how much focus is placed on poker. Those of you who play poker and have a job or are still in school, do you have any system that you feel helps you balance them well? I have always just really gone about it by trying get a decent number of hours in and then jamming schoolwork in however it fits (staying up late, waking up early, etc..)

4.) Poker takes away from my ability to form solid backup options, which is bad since i don't want to play poker forever. I pay for most of my own school which is a huge investment, and i feel like i am letting it go to waste. The major the interests me the most is finance, but it is probably the most difficult and i didn't think i would get competitive grades to get top jobs despite putting in more school hours, so i went with management which should be easier and caters to my strengths a bit more in regards to how materials are graded. (Given how much work i currently do, i do better on case studies on essays than exams) I still think i will get a minor in finance though to keep that door open to some extent. My girlfriend was also a management major but got tons of offers in finance because her internship had finance stuff involved, so i feel like i am not totally closing that window to myself, yet still feel like i might be copping out.

Now while I have been pretty hard on myself here, don’t get the impression that I’m not optimistic or happy with myself on the whole. I know that I have worked extremely hard to be in this position, but I don’t want to let that stop me from being real with myself when it comes to making some changes. I am getting into real estate gradually (I bought a condo which I already has a tenant as a rental property and am purchasing a good fixer-up property with a partner) I just feel like for whatever reason, I encounter situations where I know what I should do/need to do, yet don’t bring myself to do so. I don’t know if this is me being jaded from poker, immature, or something else. I know this is pretty long and rambles a bit, but I wanted to put my thoughts in writing and see if anyone has some input here.