Ambitions without expectations
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Speaker: [00:00:00] Hey everyone, I am Grandmaster Noël Studer and you are listening to Next Level Chess Podcast. On this podcast, you will get actionable grandmaster advice that will help you break through your chess plateaus and improve your chess game. And then ultimately also your chess rating. If you want to get more chess grandmaster advice, then please check out my links in the description.

You'll find my free newsletter, blog articles ebook, and my courses, obviously, as well. As well. Now today on this show, I want to talk about my favorite mindset, which I call ambition without expectations. I hope you'll enjoy this episode. So I often hear things like I won 50 Elo points this month, so I should win at least 50 Elo points next month.

Or I've beaten this [00:01:00] opponent every time. Obviously I'll win the next game as well against them. These are just two examples of a bias we all fall for. It's human psychology. Once we have something, We expect to have at least the same in the future. It happens with money, status, and chess rating. Once you achieve something, you think it's normal to achieve that again.

The problem is that money status or chess ratings are not granted. Just because you earned it once doesn't mean that you will earn the same or more in the future. And your recent good results might be the product of luck or variance. And that is especially true in chess where you can win a game, but you can actually have made many, many mistakes.

And if you don't analyze your games well enough. You will not realize that and slowly move towards [00:02:00] disaster. Rising expectations with a nearly inevitable fall in real world results lead to frustration. So on one side, you get the wins, your expectations go up, but actually your chess wasn't that good. So at some point, Your chess that isn't so good will show itself.

You will start losing games and you will think, why am I losing to these guys? Only for a tiny percentage of humans does the common solution just work harder and don't fail work. We might know somebody in the chess world. Carlson, he said once that the best way to recover from a defeat is winning the next game, which again, that's working maybe for Magnus because he had a hundred games unbeaten streak because he basically never loses two games in a row for mere humans.

Even a grandmaster like me, that's just not working. That's just resulting in a lot of. pain. [00:03:00] Only if you're so good, if you're in the top 0. 0000001 percent of your domain, you can basically nearly avoid losses. But actually, for example, in investing Warren Buffett says that it's so important to just not lose your mind.

and not lose money in the first place, right? Because investing, you're extremely good. If you're 60, 40, right? 60 percent of the time you make money. That's amazing. You still lose 40 percent of the time. So you need to get used to bad results. What works for me is reducing. The expectations. So what I combined with reducing expectations for a long time is, well, you're just a weak guy.

You don't want to achieve a lot of stuff. So you just don't expect yourself to win this game. And that will lead to you being lazy on the sofa all the time. But then I realized that you can combine. lower expectations with the ambition part. And [00:04:00] that's where I found my optimal mindset, because actually there is an equation for wellbeing or happiness, however you want to call it, which is obviously it's not the ultimate truth, but I think that it's showing very well, why expectations are so bad, which is.

The reality, so the real circumstances, minus your expectations, are your well being. So let's say you expect yourself, reality, expectations, you expect yourself to make a performance of 1800 Elo rating points in this tournament. The reality is that you made 1700. Now you have higher expectations than the reality is.

You will feel bad probably. If you expect yourself to make a performance of 1500 and you make 1700, then you feel good. The problem is that, well, roughly half of the time you will be lower than your expectations. Well, actually more than that, because most people have unrealistic expectations. I count [00:05:00] myself to that group.

So you will be unhappy a lot of the time. And if you were just Put down the expectations and say, Hey, I don't have expectations. Then actually you can feel pretty well, even if a tournament doesn't go your way. So the lower your expectations, the higher the chance you have to exceed them and feel happy about it.

with your results. I've worked for years with a sports psychologist on my expectations. I really suffered for a long, long time with very, very sky high expectations. And then I got a lot of disappointments because, well, obviously I can't just beat 2650 GMs all the time. Also with black, that sometimes was my expectations that I could just beat everyone with every color and that just won't happen.

Right. So, I needed some strategies to manage expectations. And it needs a lot of internal work, but it's funny that at some point after [00:06:00] working, two, three years on this and my sports psychologist started to feel I might be ready for it. He told me there's just absolutely no reason to have any expectations.

At all, because if we take that equation, reality minus expectations, it's wellbeing, then no matter how much you have, if you still have some expectations, well, you reduce your wellbeing and happiness. Why should you do that? It doesn't make sense. So the ideal way. Would be to get rid of our expectations all together to not project like results into the future, not thinking I should beat this guy.

I should win this game. I should make a norm. I should win this tournament. I shouldn't become last. Like all of these things are expectations that ultimately just make you less happy. What you can do again, lower expectations doesn't mean that you're just sitting at home, lazy on your [00:07:00] couch.

You can put up your ambition so you can say I'm ambitious. I want to be the best version of myself, but in this short term specific instance, I don't have clear expectations. So when I play a game of chess, I just want to do my best. Whatever comes out, comes out. If I lose, that is okay. I want to do my best.

When I train chess. Maybe the only expectation you can have is like, I want to give it my all, but to the result, you don't have any expectations. You don't think I should solve 15 puzzles in a row. I should do this. I should do Y, I should do Z. Just don't have expectations. And this really became a little bit my mantra.

Well, whenever I really think of it. For example, I don't expect my spouse to wash the dishes after cooking. This way I'll be positively surprised if she does. Now, some of you might argue, well, if you cook, then she should wash her dish, the dishes. Well, even if that would [00:08:00] be an agreement, it's still better for me to just not expect it.

Because if I expect it, I will be upset if she doesn't do it and I will be neutral if she does do it. If I just don't expect it, I don't have a reason to be much upset if she doesn't do it. Shit happens. And if she actually does it, well, I'll be very happy and I say, thank you, my love. That was very nice of you.

And that's just such much easier and nicer way of living. I also don't wake expect to wake up extremely full of health every morning. Now, some of you might know I have this traumatic brain injury, a long story, blah, blah, blah. I might make a podcast on that one day. But I just live with an not ideal, perfect health.

For eight years now and what helped me is to not expect that I'm just feeling perfect every morning because this way, if I have good mornings, I'm actually feeling happy. If I expect that every morning I'm feeling good, then on the [00:09:00] mornings that I don't wake up super healthy and jumping around like a small kid, then I will feel frustrated.

Another example is I don't expect my loved ones to be around forever. This way I can appreciate them as long as they are here. This might be a little bit a sad thought, but it's just a true thought. We are all going to die at some point. So, we can appreciate the moments with our loved ones even more.

And then we can come back to chess. I don't expect. To win the next game. I don't expect to make a certain rating performance I don't expect now in my business to get a certain monthly income to get a certain readership to get a certain whatever. I don't want to expect numbers So this is just helping me to take away the expectations whenever I feel like oh, I expect this result I want to tell myself.

Hey I just want to have good ambitions. I want to be a good version. The best version of myself [00:10:00] is possible if possible. And then I want to see what comes out of it. And I don't want to expect anything in terms of results. Now this might be a bit woo woo for some of you. It's like, Oh yeah, just don't expect things anymore.

Ha ha ha. But actually it sounds good and it helped me a lot and it helps a lot of people. So this is a game changer for me. Try it out, what do you have to lose? Just don't expect anything. Haha when you try this out and Then see how you feel about it. Just try to go into a chess game not expecting that you beat your lower rated opponents, but just trying to do your best and Try to do that for a bit of time and then see how it feels for you Maybe it's not the right thing for you then throw it out the window and say this guy GM Noel Studer, he is a woo woo guy, don't wanna listen to his stuff anymore.

That's your choice, right? But I just highly recommend, try it out and see how [00:11:00] it feels for you. Am I enlightened or some kind of guru and I just, smile every day and everything is perfect? Hell no. Like, I still expect stuff. I still have periods where I accept expect way too much stuff. I forget that mantra from time to time So it's not like everything is rosy and perfect and whatever But when I remember to have less expectations and when I manage to put them down consciously work on them put them down I feel much happier.

Just because you've won five games in a row doesn't mean that you will win the sixth one as well. The only thing you should expect yourself to do is the best you can in every training session and the best you can in every game. That's all you can control and then you don't have to expect anything for the game results.

They will be. As they will be, you'll make the best out of it. [00:12:00] Okay. Here's to ambition without expectations. See you in the next episode.