Don’t Tell Me What To Do!
I don’t like being told what to do. Which is fine, of course. But it ends up being a bit of a problem when it comes to learning new things.
As you know, I’m a writer (duh), and I’m a novelist. As a novelist, I have always loved reading… and yet, you know how many “required books” I read in high school? One. I read “To Kill a Mockingbird,” because I read the first few pages and enjoyed it and decided (on my own – because I wanted to…decidedly NOT because my teacher was telling me it was required) to read it. With any other “required reading” in high school, I blatantly refused to pick up the book in question.
That doesn’t make much sense, really. I was still reading all the time, so why not read the book I was supposed to be reading. Right? But you see, logic does not enter into this strain of thinking.
When I was in college, I started out with a double major in creative writing and business marketing. After three semesters, I dropped the writing portion of my major. I always said it was because I learned more about writing on my own time than I did in the classes. And sure, this was true. But it was not necessarily true for the reason I led myself to believe at the time – that my professors and the groupthink nature of those classes could not possibly help anyone to truly become a better writer. It may, instead, have been simply that I could not learn in that type of environment… because I refused to learn in that type of environment.
Sometimes, this is a good thing. I’ve always been passionate about learning new things – and about learning as much as I can in any subject or area that grabs my attention. Writing is, of course, one such area, and I constantly strive to read new authors and study techniques and tinker with my own approach; I constantly strive to learn (as long as I’m not being told, of course, what I should be learning!).
Daily fantasy sports is another area that has grabbed my attention, and because of this, I constantly aim to learn, to expand my knowledge, and to strive toward improvement. Except… yeah.
I guess part of my block against listening to others is that I do not want to listen to someone I see as competition. I can read old masters of the craft of writing (Shakespeare, Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Salinger, Steinbeck, etc.) and never feel (uh…rarely feel, I should say) as though I am in competition with them. As such, I can open my mind, pick up new things, and improve my own writing as a result. But when I read, say, a tremendous author under the age of 40 (my own age bracket in the literary realm), I start to pick apart the things I feel they do poorly, rather than taking note of the things they do well. I notice specific areas in which my writing is better than theirs, without pausing to also acknowledge (and learn from) the areas in which they are better than me – the areas, that is to say, in which I can learn from them.
The issue with carrying that over to daily fantasy sports, however, is that everyone is competition! Sure, as I said during football season: the reason I help others (in my articles, and even more directly in the way I aim to help friends learn and grow in DFS) is because there is room at the top for everyone. And honestly, that’s true. No one is going to win every tournament, every night. But if we help one another improve, we remain above the rest of the field.
And yet…
You see, it’s funny. There are certain guys I do not view as competition – certain guys I, in fact, view almost as “old masters.” It has nothing to do with how long they have been playing. It has, instead, to do with my original perception of them.
Because I began my DFS career on DraftStreet, that was where most of my early learning took place. At the time, I did not even know that RotoGrinders existed, and so, the bulk of my learning took the form of studying the lineups of the guys who finished near the top of the standings each day – guys like Notorious, and Dinkpiece, and STLCardinals84, and BirdWings, and SalCaps (RayofHope on DraftKings). (BeepImAJeep would be on that list as well, but I got all confused with him because when I started playing on DraftKings and FanDuel I did not realize he had different usernames on different sites; by then, I already knew my stuff, so when I saw someone with a username I didn’t know who was doing really well, I saw him as competition, without realizing he was someone I had been learning from before; the satellite signals for my mental block against learning from “competition” got all jammed up with that whole thing!). Even now, I can look at the rosters put together by those guys each day to see what I can learn from them; I will sometimes even scroll through the standings specifically in search of their teams, simply in order to see where their thinking was that day, and to see what – if anything – I can pick up from what they did that day.
There are a lot of other guys who know just as much as those names listed, however – and who dispense plenty of publicly-available thoughts and information – whom I have a very hard time listening to or learning from. They’ll say something, and I’ll try to find a reason why I feel they are wrong. They’ll offer advice, and I’ll attempt to poke holes in that advice in my mind.
I did that last year with Beermakersfan’s 6 Pack. I didn’t know who the guy was, so the first few times I came across the 6 Pack, I scoffed at his suggestions and intentionally stayed away from them. (Ha! How do you think that worked for me?)
And even now – even as I know this about myself, and aim to correct this not-quite-fatal-but-still-severely-detrimental flaw – I find myself building cash game lineups and thinking, “Yeah, but everyone will be on this guy – he’s so obvious. There must be something deeper I can dig into in order to find a different play.” What? Why! It’s cash games, Jordan – it’s okay if the play is obvious and highly owned!
I’m working backward here. Because what I’m about to advise you to do is the opposite of what I am telling you I do.
My grandpa used to joke to my mom and say, “Do as I say, not as I do.” That’s how I feel sometimes – I feel like one of those preachers who has really great sermons but then gets caught in some shady business or other (wait…I can say that, right? – if it makes a difference, I’m a churchgoing man myself, so I’m throwing stones inside my own home with that one). The point is: people can have a very clear idea of what “the right thing” is, and can be very good at explaining to others – in a clear and easy-to-understand manner – what this “right thing” is, and still have a difficult time following this “right thing” themselves.
Does it feel like I’m lying down on a couch in your office at the moment? Like you’re wearing fancy eyeglasses and sitting in a big leather chair and tapping a pen against a yellow legal pad? Like you’re my emotional therapist, and I’m spilling my thoughts? Because I’ve gotten a bit off track (if this were a text message to you, instead of an article, I’d insert a “haha” there, to indicate, “haha, don’t worry, I’m taking myself lightly enough…I promise”). But this all leads to the same place.
Don’t tell me what to do, okay?
But listen (I’m about to tell you what to do…), you should be paying attention to – and learning from – the thoughts and opinions of others. All the time. Every single day.
I’m painting a darker picture of my own actions and inability to learn from others than is actually the case, because the article is just plain more fun that way. But honestly, here’s the truth: I read the Grind Down every day. I read tweets from different DFS guys every day. I read any other articles that go up on the site each day (have you been reading the articles Dave Potts – CheeseIsGood – has been writing? – pure gold! (not literally; don’t get too excited, you don’t get actual, real life gold from reading them)). I even read the forum each day – picking through all the posts different RotoGrinders members have posted about that day’s slate of games.
Usually, I read all this after my teams are set. Usually, I do not change anything in my own team after reading the thoughts of others. But you know what the best part is about reading these things each day? It’s this: each day, I learn new things! Everyone has different bits of valuable knowledge – things I would not have known on my own. Things you would not know to look for, even, without reading the thoughts of others. Some of the things I picked up last year, early on in my time on RotoGrinders, that I would never have otherwise known about, included the importance of wind at Wrigley, or the difference in performance Strasburg tends to have at home and on the road. Once you know these things, you think of them as common knowledge – as things that are purely and thoroughly obvious. But how did you find out about them originally? More than likely, you found out about them because someone said them.
By reading all these things, every day, I am able to constantly pick up little bits of knowledge I would never otherwise have had. Even if you are like me – even if you are adamant about not taking the direct advice of others – there is so much knowledge out there to gain!
Heck, one of my favorite things to do during football season was to watch the Round Table discussions on RotoGrinders, in which various DFS guys would talk about that week’s slate of games. Again: I always watched these after I had my teams set. I rarely changed my teams after watching these. And even though it was my first year playing NFL DFS, I would have put my NFL knowledge up against anyone’s – and I was riding an epic hot streak through the first 8 weeks of the season in which I had cashed in the top 10% of tournaments with 60% of my entries! And yet, every week, I would carve out a couple hours to watch Boggslite and Britdevine and Beermakersfan talking about that week’s slate, and to then watch Al_Smizzle and CSURam88 and Adam Levitan doing the same. Sure, I would scoff at some of their suggestions. I would argue with them in my mind about reasons why they were wrong on certain things they were saying. And if they began to strongly advise people to play someone I was already playing, I would immediately (and idiotically) start finding reasons why I shouldn’t play them (you know – that whole “competition,” “don’t tell me what to do” thing). But still, I would watch. And I would listen. And I would learn. And every week, it seemed, I would apply some sort of knowledge I had picked up from them the week before. Every week (self-editor’s note: Jordan, don’t forget about paragraph breaks! (oh yeah – crap, you’re right; also, don’t tell me what to do…)), I would find myself thinking back to something one of these guys had said a week or two earlier – something that had nothing to do with the slate I was playing – and it would help me. A lot.
I say all that, then, to say this: You may be like me in this area. You may not be like me in this area. But either way, realize that there is always more you can learn about daily fantasy sports. And one of the best ways to learn is to listen to those who know things already.
Do you know more than me? Sure! Let’s give you credit and say you do. (I have to do that to myself sometimes, when learning from someone else. “Okay…yeah, I probably know more than them. But they do know some things I don’t know as well. So I can learn from those things. “) But even if you know more than me (I bet you can guess what I’m about to say next), I still probably know some things you don’t know. And you can learn from those things.
And you can learn from the things Notorious has to say each day.
And you can learn from any other articles that are posted on RotoGrinders throughout the week.
And you can learn from the thoughts people post on the forums – even if those thoughts come from people who are not “known names” in the DFS community (hint: you should be visiting the forum each day and reading the thoughts people are posting on that day’s slate of games; you may not use any of the knowledge you gain that day in the team you are building that day, but you will almost always leave the forum with one or two little tidbits of knowledge you did not have before!).
And you can learn from DFS Twitter (also: if you’re playing DFS, you should have a Twitter – even if you “don’t get” Twitter or don’t tweet yourself, because there is a lot of great knowledge dispensed on there!).
You can always keep learning. From everyone.
Even if you don’t like being told what to do.