The Role of Pain in Improvement
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[00:00:00] Welcome back to Next Level Chess podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noël Studer, and I help chess players train deliberately with what I call the Simplified Chess Improvement System. Deliberate chess players live by three rules. Do what matters, do it well and do it consistently. If you're tired of training randomly and want to follow a simple, proven system, this podcast is for you.

I feel like we are living in a society that has a very dysfunctional relationship with pain. Either we tend to avoid pain at all, cause seeing it as something we should never have in our lives [00:01:00] or we fall into the other kind of extreme where we just seek pain. That's especially true with all of these toxic masculine influencers of like, yeah, let's go.

I can just sustain pain and sleep is for the weak, and all of that stuff. And that kind of idea has led me to write a newsletter that I was very happy, it has connected with so many people, resonated with many people and I got a lot of feedback on it, a lot of happy emails from people that said, yeah, that's actually true.

Thank you so much for sharing that. So here is that podcast episode of said newsletter. Enjoy. There's a quiet belief that keeps most people stuck in chess in life in nearly every serious pursuit. It's not always loud, but it's there. It whispers things like, you shouldn't struggle this much. If you were really good, this would feel easier, [00:02:00] or there must be a better way to improve without mistakes, without pain.

And that belief is that we can grow, succeed, and improve without ever going through hardship. It sounds nice, but it's a lie. And it's a lie that cost me dearly. So through my recovery from my traumatic brain injury, I learned a lot. Years ago, I suffered this traumatic brain injury. The early challenges were obvious.

I had constant headaches. My focus was gone, and even daily tasks felt overwhelming. But the biggest problem came later. After I looked fine on the outside, I stopped trusting myself in difficult moments. I was afraid of hardship. I feared any situation I couldn't fully control. I avoided uncertainty like the plague.

Even something as simple as a planning a trip became stressful. Yes, my wife, Alessia, can [00:03:00] attest to that. If the day didn't go exactly how I imagined, I'd feel lost, unstable, off, and I was getting nervous quite quickly. It wasn't that I couldn't function, it was that I had started believing I shouldn't ever have to suffer again.

But life doesn't work that way, and chess definitely not. The more I tried to protect myself from difficulty, the more fragile I became, the more pressure I felt, the more anxious I got, because I was convinced I can't afford for this to go wrong. So the basic belief was I am unhealthy, so I need to protect my health at all costs, and I can't sustain any hardship.

Eventually I realized it wasn't the pain that was the problem. It was my fear of pain or of something difficult. Now let's move away from my brain injury and just discuss how this shows up in [00:04:00] chess, probably in your chess as well. You can see the same pattern in chess all the time. You feel like you need to memorize every line of your opening repertoire, so you never, ever get out of theory.

You think you need to master all endgame theory to avoid one critical mistake. You search for the perfect training method that guarantees improvement without confusion or effort. All of it is built on the same fantasy. If I prepare enough, I'll never feel pain. I'll never be confused. I'll never make a mistake.

But that's not preparation, that's fear speaking. And ironically, it makes your chess experience way more stressful. Instead of seeing difficulty as normal, you start seeing it as a threat. Every mistake feels like a sign that you're failing. Every lost game becomes a crisis. Every tough puzzle [00:05:00] feels like proof.

You're not improving fast enough, and that mindset is super exhausting and unsustainable. This fantasy that we can grow without pain doesn't come from nowhere. We're conditioned to believe it. Social media feeds us a steady diet of perfection. Everybody looks amazing. Everyone's achieving, everyone's winning, traveling, building businesses, crushing life, having a great time.

So what happens? We compare our messy reality to everyone else's highlight reel, and we start to believe that something is wrong with us if our days feel hard. But here's the truth. The good moments you see online, they're a small part of those people's life too. And maybe by the way, even they might be not authentic in most cases.

What doesn't get posted is the frustration, the confusion, the fatigue, the doubt. So we keep striving for this imagined life where [00:06:00] progress feels effortless, and we panic when reality doesn't match. And when we do hit the wall, many people do something even worse. They quit. That's where a lot of the, I don't believe chess improvement is, for me, comes from, and there is even another hidden cost of quitting when things get hard. 

Let's say you play a terrible tournament, you lose badly, you feel embarrassed. You take three weeks off. I see this very regularly among students or readers say, well, now I need time off of chess. I can't look at chess anymore. You don't look at a board. You avoid the game entirely.

That might feel like a relief at first, but here's what you've really done. You've trained your brain to believe that difficulty is dangerous. You've sent yourself a message and the message goes. This game is so painful that I need to hide from it, or [00:07:00] losing is so painful that I need to hide from it. And what happens the next time you play?

You feel more anxious, you feel more pressure. You're more afraid to fail because now failure means emotional shutdown. You've taught yourself that when you fail at something, when it gets difficult, you need three weeks off of that activity, which is a long time, probably a time you weren't enthralled with your life.

So not positive. And ironically, that fear increases your chances of failing again, because when you're playing with fear, you're playing worse, becomes a vicious cycle. So how can we escape this? How can we actually build self trust? It's by flipping the script. One of my most painful moments in my chess career came at Biel 2017. 

It was a major tournament on my home turf in Switzerland. I started, okay, two draws in the first three rounds, one of them [00:08:00] against the later tournament winner who Yan I. Then I lost six games in a row, six straight losses. This was super painful because everybody I knew was watching. I had my sponsors coming, I had my family watching.

I put pressure on myself. I knew because it was a pretty important tournament on the tournament calendar. There were several 2700s that people internationally were watching, so this hurt really bad, but I'm so glad I didn't let it break me. I gave myself a little space first, but then I recovered.

I came back, I kept training, I kept playing. I kept improving, and over time that experience became a pillar of confidence. To this day, whenever I face something difficult in chess or life, I can remind myself this isn't as bad as losing [00:09:00] six games in a row. In Biel 2017, I survived that. I'll survive.

That's the real solution. Experiencing the pain, realizing is not the end of the world, coming back from it and building confidence. So the actual answer is not avoiding pain, it's not glorifying it either. It's intentionally, voluntarily exposing yourself to challenge, so you build the belief that you can handle it.

You do hard things on purpose. You let yourself fail. You sit with discomfort, you study a difficult game, you push through a tough puzzle set. You analyze a loss without flinching, and every time you do that, you train one powerful muscle: self-trust. The belief that you can handle hard things, that you don't need to run.

That setbacks don't define you, that the pain will pass and you'll still be standing. And just like in [00:10:00] physical training, that muscle needs to be worked consistently. You don't get it once and keep it forever. You keep coming back to difficulty, voluntarily, gradually, and with every rep you get stronger.

But now comes the problematic side. If we're swinging too far. Pain in itself isn't the goal, and it's not something to be proud of or to show off to others how much pain you can endure. There's a danger though, once you realize pain can be good, there is a temptation to overcorrect. You go from a must avoid all discomfort, to, I must suffer every single day. You start thinking, if I'm not in pain, I'm not growing. Real achievers grind 16 hours a day. Sleep is for the weak. As I mentioned at the start of this episode, you see this in the hustle world, especially with male [00:11:00] influencer. The toxic masculinity out there is really going crazy.

Guys like David Goggins, by the way. I find him very inspiring, but he can go over the line, talk about running ultra marathons barefoot, refusing water, going to war with their body every day, and sure there's something powerful about mental toughness. That's the inspiring part. But pain for the sake of pain is not growth.

At some point it's trauma or it's just stupid. I fell into this trap myself while preparing for my half marathon. I overtrained, ignored the signs, pushed beyond reason, and it cost me six weeks of forced rest.

I can still remember the moment where I felt on a long run that my knees were hurting and this didn't feel like normal pain. Something was off. But then I had this voice in my head saying, Hey, you are not a quitter. Come on. You can sustain [00:12:00] pain. You're very good at going through pain. And I pushed myself through the pain, but it wasn't very smart. And it cost me a lot of training weeks and it was just super unnecessary. And then when I trained again and I had finally the race, I managed to find the right balance during the race.

I pushed myself through some pain as well. But I did so knowing I was safe from long-term damage, I talked to doctors, to therapists, and to a friend that is an athlete coach and asked if in this particular race, if I feel a little bit pain, how much pain it could be, and if I would be okay pushing through it and how quickly I would recover.

By looking at it this way, I actually managed to recover basically one or two days later, didn't have any injury, and I was proud of myself [00:13:00] for not stopping when I felt a little bit of pain. So that's the right balance in my opinion. It's to push yourself, but recover as well. Pain is a tool, it's not a lifestyle.

And to finish this off, I wanna take this kind of idea of either avoiding pain at all costs or going only into pain. Also to something more personal to relationships. This philosophy doesn't just shape how we train or compete. It also shapes how we love. I think it's really something you can see a lot in relationships.

I recently married Alessia, the love of my life. We have a beautiful, fulfilling relationship that I'm incredibly grateful for. And yeah, in written format, you would see a cool picture of us getting married. But as you're listening to this, you can just imagine the two most beautiful humans ever touching this earth, hugging each other.

Okay? Irony off, [00:14:00] but let me be clear, that doesn't mean it's always been easy. What makes our relationship strong isn't that we've avoided hardship. It's that we've gone through it together. We've had disagreements, we've had moments where we wanted very different things. She's an extrovert, I'm an introvert, so we generally tend to want different things out of our free time. Mostly we have different needs, different emotional rhythms and different ways of handling stress.

But when things got difficult, we didn't walk away. Again, if you have something difficult coming up and then you're saying, oh, I need now three weeks, then you teach yourself that it was so hard that you need a long time. Now, taking your time is not a problem, but if you quit after something difficult, it's not a good way of teaching yourself.

So when we had these difficult moments, we had honest, sometimes painful conversations, and because of that, we grew closer. Not despite the hard moments, but [00:15:00] because of them. So many people I see or speak to are waiting for a perfect relationship that never has any problems, and when the first challenge arises, they panic and let go of something that could have become truly meaningful.

But love isn't about perfection. And by the way, again, the opposite applies as well. I see some people that they struggle a lot in their relationship and it seems to always be annoying. They always talk pile about their partner. I mean, it also doesn't have to be pure suffering to be with somebody. I mean, it should still be nice, right?

So it's, again, there is a balance that we need to find. It is really about the willingness to face things, to learn, and to keep showing up. For Alessia and I, we can both think if we could get through that, we'll get through the next thing too, and that confidence comes from the same [00:16:00] place as it does in chess and anywhere else in life, not from avoiding difficulty.

But from having been through something difficult and having recovered, and you're now here, and then you can trust yourself to do that again. And if we are looking at the best in the world or in anything, but we can go to back to sports. You see, the biggest difference between high achievers and those who stay stuck isn't whether they face hardship.

It's how they respond to it. After Biel, I took time off. I even considered quitting, but I didn't. That's what made all the difference in the long run, and that's what experienced athletes do. They don't pretend pain doesn't exist. They don't let it crush them either. Think of Olympic athletes, they might miss a medal by a fraction of a second in one event.

And just two days later they're back competing, maybe even winning. That's the [00:17:00] difference. They bounce back quickly because they've trained that muscle over and over. They trust themselves and that's what you need to train too. So as for my finding final thoughts on this episode, if you're improving at something meaningful - chess business love, also life pain will find you.

Sometimes it's physical, sometimes emotional, sometimes mental, and the goal isn't to escape it. It isn't to build a life where pain doesn't get to you anymore. The goal is to be ready when it comes, because it inevitably will. So what should we do? We should stop chasing perfection. Stop avoiding mistakes, and stop believing that others have it easy.

Instead, we should train our self-trust. Do hard things on purpose for the sake of doing something hard and [00:18:00] going through it. Recover with intention and come back. Always come back. Because the real difference between those who grow and those who stay stuck isn't how many times they fall. It's how many times they come back. Smarter, stronger, and still moving forward. 

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