The 4 Dimensions of Mental Toughness

(and why poker accidentally teaches them better than life)

(Image above: the four dimensions — Tolerance, Fortitude, Resilience, Adaptability)

A few days ago I watched a video by Alex Hormozi where he broke down mental toughness into four distinct dimensions:

Tolerance – how long you can endure pressure before you crack

Fortitude – how destructive you become when you do crack

Resilience – how fast you recover

Adaptability – whether your new baseline is better or worse after the storm

What surprised me wasn’t the framework itself.

It was the realization that I had independently arrived at the same structure from a completely different world — poker.

Different paths. Same nervous system.

Hormozi reached these insights through business pressure and personal grief.
I reached them through variance, repeated losses, and long nights at the tables.

Different costumes.
Same human psychology.

Poker, when played seriously, is not a game of cards.
It is a stress laboratory with brutal feedback and no room for self-deception.

And when pressure is applied long enough, the mind adapts in very specific ways.

Always the same four.

How poker trains the four dimensions (without you noticing)

Tolerance
Early on, a small loss feels unbearable.
Over time, the same loss barely registers.
Your fuse gets longer — not through willpower, but exposure.

Fortitude
The question is never if you’ll feel emotion.
The question is how savage you become when you do.
Do you spiral… or reload calmly?

Resilience
Some people need days to recover from a bad session.
Others need minutes.
Poker teaches you to reset now, not tomorrow.

Adaptability
This is the most important one.
After repeated pressure, do you become tighter, afraid, scarred?
Or do you emerge with a higher baseline — able to handle more without losing clarity?

Most people think mental toughness is one thing.
It isn’t.

It’s four skills — and they can be trained.

This is the heart of The Electric Fence

In my upcoming book, The Electric Fence, I describe a poker framework that accidentally became a mental toughness training system.

Not by motivation.
Not by mindset tricks.
But by designing an environment where:

losses are small enough to be survivable

exposure is repeated

recovery is immediate

and growth is inevitable

Poker is just the medium.

What’s being trained is the mind.

Why this matters beyond poker

The same four dimensions show up everywhere:

business

trading

creative work

relationships

life under pressure

Poker simply removes the excuses faster.

That’s why I believe the best poker books are never really about poker.
They’re about how humans behave when things don’t go their way.

The Electric Fence will be released soon at feeel.poker.
It’s written for poker players — but it’s really for anyone who wants to build a mind that doesn’t collapse under pressure.

Quietly.
Without bravado.
Without pretending not to feel.

Just stronger than before.

—

Bogdan