Over the past couple of days I've been out of town on a consulting assignment. While out of town, I decided to take a trip to one of the local casinos, so to speak, to play a little bit of poker. I've made no secret on how much I love to play the game.

I sat down at the table with $80; I'm superstitious so that's the amount I always start with. At the time I got there the guy sitting next to me had more than a thousand dollars on the table, and since one can only start with a maximum of $200, I knew he'd been on a roll at some point. He was a really good player and while I was sitting there, at least for the first hour or so, he was making more money than he was losing; that's always the goal.

However, the baseball game was on, and it was getting into the later innings, and suddenly he lost his edge. He was playing cards that he wouldn't have played earlier and his concentration was shot. When he finally played a hand that was so ridiculous that I asked him about it, he realized that he wasn't mentally into the game anymore, since the end of the baseball game was close, and he left the table with just over $800; that's not a bad day.

In the meantime another guy at the table went on an amazing streak, and at one point he had around $1,500 sitting in front of him. That's pretty amazing at the level of game that I play, and he was taking some serious chances with his hands that were coming out good for him. The problem is that he was playing a fairly reckless style. If you know anything about poker, I can tell you that he was calling a lot of hands but not betting many hands first; that's a bad strategy because it means you're hoping for hands to come and not scaring anyone away. You can lose a lot of money that way, and he lost it all in less than 2 hours.

As he walked away, I thought about this thing where people often don't know when to walk away from something. It's a lesson I've had to learn playing poker, and it's a lesson I've had to learn in business as well. The difference is that, in poker, when you walk away from the table you're usually walking away with money, whereas in business when you walk away from the table you're usually leaving money behind in some fashion.

There are always times to walk away. Sometimes it's smart to walk away from an argument. Sometimes it's smart to walk away from a job. Sometimes it's smart to walk away from a project. Sometimes it's smart to walk away from something that's way over your head. And sometimes it's smart to walk away, take some time to think about things a bit, then go back to it.