The one lesson I learned in 2025
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[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome back to Next Level Chess podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noël Studer, and as always, I'll have a chess improvement tip or a lesson I learned in this podcast episode. And this time I want to talk about my 2025 and how I took one big lesson away, which will translate also in how I set goals in 2026.

Stay tuned for that in the next podcast episode. So let's talk about 2025. I had a great year both personally and in my business. I failed all of my three stated goals. So I wrote a newsletter in very early 2025 stating [00:01:00] three main goals, especially for my business, but just in general, which was work 40 weeks a year.

So take 12 weeks of holidays. That's quite a lot. It's quite nice. Three x my business. And that's in terms of revenue and then working six hours a day maximum. So I had these three goals and in my mind it was like, oh, if I achieve these three goals, I'll have an amazing year. So these kind of things are really what matters.

So I'll put these as goals. And turns out they didn't really matter because I, as mentioned, didn't get to do any of these three goals. I worked more than 40 weeks. I didn't three x my business, not even close, and I sometimes worked less, sometimes worked more than six hours a day. But what really mattered is what I realized is I really liked my year.

I had plenty of time with loved ones. I married Alessia after eight or nine years of relationship. So that was definitely a highlight. I enjoyed traveling to the USA. I went to [00:02:00] Bali with Alessia, basically on a honeymoon. We went to Italy together. We did a road trip there.

I did start making YouTube videos, which was a lot of fun and just was very happy how this has been going. I went away from being self-employed and created my own proper business. So I'm now finally got a real job. My parents are really proud of me. I could even negotiate my salary with myself because I'm the business owner and the only person working at this company.

And I did run a half marathon, so that was also quite a big goal. And so a lot of good stuff, a lot of good stuff. My health is definitely in a better place than in the beginning of the year, so really happy about this. And when I started reflecting, when I took my diary, started writing down, kinda with shock, realized that I set this goal because these three goals I abandoned, like.

I dunno. I think in May I already said, ah, that's not the goals I should care about. So I realized how silly most of my goal setting or goal setting in general, I think [00:03:00] especially results oriented goals are like this. If I achieve this one huge thing or these three huge things, then my year will be great.

Right? And it's just not how things work. Because I started realizing that I could have achieved all of my goals, and I could have had a terrible year. And now I had, I didn't achieve any of them and I had a very good year. So if you start realizing this, then it's like, okay, then why? Why even set these goals?

They don't have a clear impact or maybe they have an impact, but it's not, it's not given, right? It's, you can have a great year without achieving the goals. You can have a horrible year, but you achieved all of the goals. Just like you can reach your dream chess rating, by the way, bringing it back to chess, right?

This is a chess podcast after all. You can achieve your dream rating and you didn't enjoy the journey at all. It can be like you're setting, oh, I want to win 300 points this year. You do, but you hated every moment of it, or most moments of them. That actually happens quite sometime because a lot of [00:04:00] adult improvers especially put a lot of pressure on themselves and then you can reach a results based goal.

But it, it wasn't really fun to get there. And for me in my professional career, that was one of the reasons why I stopped as well, because I put so much pressure on these results oriented goals that I didn't enjoy the process as much as I could have, right? There was a lot of stress, a lot of pressure, and achieving goals was more a relief than a real joy.

Oh, finally I can relax for a bit and then set new goals and then be stressed again.

So I was thinking what actually has a big impact? What is really defining if the year is good or not? And it's much more the small habits and the systems that I create and can stick to. So the day-to-day things that I do consistently have so much more of an impact of how I feel every single day.

But then later on, actually also, funnily enough, also in the outcome, but just on how I feel, how the journey has been, [00:05:00] these small things I do every day have way bigger impact than one or two or three huge calls at the end of the year. And one very good example for this is running a half marathon in April, 2025.

So I, I set that goal. I started training in late December, 2024, and I thought, yeah, let's push myself. I was already in the back of my mind thinking maybe I'll do a marathon afterwards. So we will get to that. So I have this goal and it was great. It was amazing. But not for the reasons that I thought it would.

We always have this kind of in, in our heads that I set this huge goal, I get to the finish line of the half marathon, and we see that in the sports events, we see the Olympic games or like the, if you watch NFL, like the Super Bowl or whatever sport you're watching. It's like this finish line and then you win the gold medal and you cry.

And sportsmen are saying all the hard work was worth it. You know that that moment pays for everything. And I just believe that's just [00:06:00] nonsense. I just believe that's a huge lie. I've been there myself. I thought that it would be paying off everything, ev.. All of my hard work would pay off if I had this one achievement, grandmaster, Swiss champion, all of that stuff.

That's not really true. With the half marathon, it wasn't like this as well. It wasn't like I crossed the finish line. It was worth it. But actually what was really great with that goal is that as it was in April and I wanted to train for it, I went to run three times a week very consistently. In the coldest months in Switzerland, so December, January, February, March.

And so in these months, I wouldn't leave my house otherwise. I definitely wouldn't cross my mind to go for a run when it was like minus five degrees Celsius and freezing and just crazy bad weather. Sometimes I went with a snowing, raining, whatever. I just went for a run to train.

And after every single run I did, I felt better than before I went. And that's [00:07:00] really what matters. That was the huge win. The daily win or the weekly wins of three times training. But what happened as well is, I, I wrote about this as well last year, is I set a big goal for this half-marathon. And it was like.

A good friend of mine who convinced me to do this run together. He told me his quickest time, and I'm not sure anymore how much exactly it was, but I thought, oh yeah, this friend is older than me. He's 20 years older than me, so I can just go for his quickest time. Would it be fun, right, if, if this friend already did like several marathons, so it is just incredibly stupid of me to believe that I'm this superhero who another person runs for so long in their life, like 15 years of their life is running training. And now I come and I'm saying, yeah, my first half marathon will be at your pace. So that was my thought.

I'll just run with him, would be funnier if we can run this half marathon together. I don't wanna slow him down, so I [00:08:00] need to be his pace. So I set this goal of like. One hour, 45 minutes for a half marathon, and very quickly I understood, okay, that's not going to work. So I put it under two hours, but still as I had an ambitious goal, I trained too hard.

I was focusing too much on achieving this goal, and I got injured and I couldn't train for a month. So that really sucked. By the way, at the end of the day, I did, I think the marathon in two hours and one minute. So it was close, but I didn't achieve that goal. But again, that doesn't matter. Who the hell cares?

So the point here is that if you set goals and they impact the day to day, that's actually positive. My three times running, I really love that. But the problem was setting a results oriented goal, which was way too ambitious and I got injured. And wasn't good, wasn't fun. I had pain.

I had to stop playing football, which I enjoyed on the weekends. So the day to day was actually getting much worse because [00:09:00] of that goal. And so to me it became very clear and I thought about goals for a long time. I wrote about it also, results oriented versus process oriented. But it became more clear even to me that big goals are only useful when they inspire constant positive action.

Okay, I repeat that. Big goals are only useful when they inspire constant positive action. But what happens in our results oriented world, with all the influences we have around us, these goals quickly become more toxic than useful. And when I'm setting goals, I'm always thinking about, keep it process oriented.

But I still slip into these things. So what happens is I did over training. You can get anxious because it's such a high goal. You're not sure if you reach it. And what I see in chess, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. You search for quick hacks just to achieve goals. If you set too much of, I want to progress this much, you're not ready to train for three months and not see any improvement.

Not working on the [00:10:00] basics, but you just want to see immediately, okay, I want to see the line going up and that's bad. So here's my new thought about goals. Goals are useful when they are a means to an end. So for example, I set the goal to run a half marathon so that I go to run three times a week, even when it is cold.

Goals are toxic when they become the end in itself, which would mean that just reaching this goal should pay for everything you did previously. That is just a lie society tells us and we, I don't know, we have the wrong role models there as well. Because there are so many sports people as well.

They're super successful. But they promote this of like, oh, now I'm world champion, and it was worth it. And everybody else thinks that it's really like that. No, that's an unhealthy way of living. You need to enjoy the process. You can't just focus on the goals because well, you don't get that time back.

You need to enjoy the journey. You need to enjoy the year, [00:11:00] not sit there on the 31st December and think I achieve my goal. So, every day sucked of this year, but at least I achieve my goal. Like, who cares? Like your life sucked. That's what matters. So if the goal is more, my goal is to run a half marathon in under two hours and I'll do everything to achieve that goal, it becomes toxic.

And it took me a little bit longer this year to set my goals. It's already, when I record this, it's the 13th of January. So it took me longer and I'll take some time more to think about what is my exact goal in 2026. But I just wanted to let this out and share it with you because I hope that you can reflect as well on your own goals.

Probably you've set them already if you are a person that sets New Year's resolutions. But maybe you can think and ask yourself like, does this goal inspire constant positive action? Or does it actually instead drive me to do too much burnout and search for shortcuts? And the kind of the [00:12:00] absurdity of it all is that when you focus on the daily positive actions, in my experience, when I did this in my chess career, when I do it for my personal life, when I do it for my business, at the end of the day, the outcome will probably also be better.

Because that's the only thing you can, you can impact the day-to-day thing, right? So kind of caring less about this goal, but just focusing on what can I do? What goal can I set so that I do my daily stuff that makes me feel good, makes me do the hard things that I want to do, but maybe would be too lazy to do.

When you set these types of goals at the end of the year without having an expectation of three x-ing or winning 500 points or whatever it is, the outcome is likely going to be very positive because you put in the work every single day. And much more importantly, you actually enjoy the journey. So it's a win-win.

It's just much less celebrated and [00:13:00] yeah, it's a little bit different than what we hear all the time. So I'm very curious to hear what goals you've set. You can email me those calls or put them in the comment section. If you are where you listen to podcast, there is a comment section and yeah, curious to hear and just ask yourself, is this pushing you towards positive action or does it induce anxiety, kind of stress when you play, you don't really enjoy your day-to-day chess training?

That, that's not good. That is not a positive goal. Okay, that's it from me. See you next week where I'll share my goal for 2026.

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