This is something I have done in my workshops, it's known as the 'Dickins Pattern' and is loosely based on the famous Charles Dickens story 'Scrooge' who gets a visits from the ghosts of Christmas the past, present and future.
I got down to some serious thinking in the week between Christmas and New Year and i remember watching and laughing at the Blackadder version of Scrooge that got me thinking about the Dickens Pattern again and I decided to do it on myself.
Four years ago we were all living in a very nice Spanish type villa in Dubai, I was teaching Jeet Kune Do classes to just over 200 students six out of seven days of the week, and had just done the Dubai Marathon and passed my World Boxing Council (WBC) Referees diploma, and was very much looking forward to heading out the the U.S to team up with Damian Ross at Pete Barry for a few days in New Jersey.
As a family this time four years ago we were very settled in the 25c warm winter sun.
Fast forward 4 years and I find myself in The Netherlands, I have not done any teaching or even serious training myself since April last year, as for my interest in combat sports I diden't even watch the UFC Bisping V Silva fight at the weekend. I have just come back from talking the dog on the beach were 2c is as good as it got and 6c is as good as it is going to get today.
But it's not doom and gloom, far from it. Like i said I got down to some serious thinking between Christmas and New Year and despite of were I now live, or my age, and my shoulder injury i still wake up excited about the day ahead.
If I am honest I am probably more excited now to jump out of bed then ever before.
One of the things I did over the festive week was take a sheet of A4 paper and write down everything I had ever done that earned me money, within about 20 minutes I had almost filled the page and about an hour later remembered something else, then in the evening I added a couple of other things I forgot about earlier, and remember getting out of bed about 10 minutes after I got in because I remembered something else.
That bit of A4 paper had everything on it from cleaning windows, delivering newspapers and caddying for golfers as a kid right through to having a part in a commercial for Mercedes, being a guest presenter on TV, and a whole lot in between. (I declined the Santa Claus offer in Abu Dhabi)
However ... The next day I woke up and took a different coloured pen and circled a ring around all those jobs I really enjoyed doing and then took a highlighter pen and coloured in all the ones I had circled if I could answer 'YES' to the question could I do that here right now.
Out of a page and a half of jobs or work that I had earned money from in the past only a few had got a red circle around it and only one circle was highlighted. In that circle was the words ... BETTING ON HORSE RACING.
Now I am going to be honest out side of betting on horses in June and July my profit and strike rate were not much to get excited about, but if I was going to be successful at this in those other ten months I was going to have to get both well disciplined and serious.
I looked at what it was that made betting profitable in the hight of summer and not so much in the other months, the obvious thing was the weather with horses racing on perfect ground, but I started looking for other connections and that search took me back to reading a very interesting book that I had read years before called 'The Ultimate Wheil of Fortune by Che Van Der Wheil. The very first page took me into listing speed figures and I realized that I had been doing something with speed figures gained from horses running in the spring and summer months and not making the allowance on the figures for changing ground, reading much deeper into this I decided to rectify those old summer habits and make a fresh start. (I started that very day even though New Year was only a few days away when I guess most people make a fresh start)
I then dug out the rest of the Van Der Wheil books and started reading them all over again while looking at the days race cards and started searching for selections that were proven in the going, proven in the class and proven at today's race distance and nothing else to start with, this started to narrow the number of races I was looking at and highlighted only a couple of horses in those races left. but the real light came on when I decided to look beyond the horses ability. I had one of those OMG moments.
These books had been sitting around in the storage loft since 2001 and I was very close to dumping them when we moved, so far in the very short time I have put what I have found into small stakes betting and have had 20 winners, 6 losers and one none runner in the last two months. That has beat anything I have ever achieved in June or July over the many years I have been betting.
So I have recently set up a new betting bank using the very generous offer from BET365 who promised to match 100% of my deposit, with that now in place I am going make an attempt to continue the profitable strike rate and make some sort of small income from it (Notice I said small income and not a small fortune) from the acorn grows the oak tree.
Fast forward February 2020. Well at the very least I will have four years of solid data, but I will also have a hobby that i hope to make the equivalent income of a part time job for a man of my age in the comfort of my own home, somewhere near Newmarket and working the hours that fit in with me and my families needs.
Can I do it?
Going back to that original bit of A4 paper I noticed something else that I had not noticed before at the time. And that was that the things that were circled because I liked doing them all started off with me watching someone else doing that very same thing and me saying to myself ... "I COULD DO THAT"
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