Episode 99 - The Most Exciting Way to Quit
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[00:00:00] Welcome back to Next Level Chess Podcast. As always, I am your host, Grandmaster Noël Studer. I'm now a full-time coach, and I wanna help especially adult improvers from 0 to 2,000 level simplify their chess improvement and actually get better results.

And today, I wanna share a story that repeated itself many times in my active time as a professional chess player, and I only fully understood it much later. So I hope by sharing this, you will realize the same thing might be going on for you, and you can adapt it already now.

And this story that repeated itself was dreaming [00:01:00] about a perfect future tournament instead of improving the current one, especially when I was on a tournament and the tournament wasn't going well. But it can also happen, someone shared this with me when they read this newsletter. That it happens for them just being in a bad position they don't like, they start having the same process. So here is how it happens and what you can learn from it.

So the trigger really for me were these bad tournaments, but they happen to everyone.

But the key is really, like, what are we doing when they happen? Because in chess, this is very different from some other sports. If you have a bad tournament and you end up losing a lot of games in that bad tournament, it might not take one, but, like, one, two, three, four, five, six tournaments to get back to where you were before that bad tournament.

Unlike tennis, let's say. You play a bad match, you're out, next tournament is coming. In chess, you might be out of contention, you [00:02:00] might not be in good shape or whatever, but you usually just have the five, seven, nine rounds to go, and you just need to keep playing, and you might lose a lot of rating if you mentally check out.

So for a long time, I believed I was great at coming back from bad results, but occasionally I had this feeling that I checked out mentally halfway through the tournament. And now I really understand why. There was a psychological mechanism going on that I wasn't really recovering from the bad results, but I was escaping the tournament mentally.

So when I was faced with bad results, right now, let's say I started a tournament, I would maybe start with one out of three points. Instead of thinking about, oh, how can I turn this tournament around, I checked out and was planning and writing diary, preparing. Really doing a lot of things, sometimes until deep in the night, for the next tournament.

I was writing down, oh, at home I will train [00:03:00] tactics, I will do this, I will do that, I will prepare better, I will be fitter, I will... All of these things. And it felt super excited. I felt like, oh, I do something, right? I have hardship and I'm planning for the future.

But the reality is this is just what feels like serious work, but it isn't. It was really just a comfortable way of quitting the games that were in front of me and that I didn't have a lot of motivation for. I checked out, ah, this tournament's not exciting. I'm probably not going to win it or not going to score in the way that I imagined, so let's think about the next one.

But the problem really is, by this checking out and thinking only about the future, I made the situation even worse. I would maybe not go to sleep. I would not feeling motivated. I would feel even less motivated for the remaining games because I was like, "Yeah, let's, let's get over with this. I wanna live in my perfect future."

But the problem is at some point, that perfect future becomes the [00:04:00] present, and I'm only trained to work on the future. And so if the next tournament doesn't start as I want it to, I'm already checked out again, thinking about the next and the next tournament. And like this, I was mostly just worried about the next potential perfect tournament instead of making the current one a little bit better.

So why does this happen?

The reality is messy, very difficult, and often not fully in our control. But if you're anything like me, driven, goal-oriented, quote-unquote, "an achiever," you don't really like the fact and tend to work towards trying to gain more control over the future. We wanna have that control. It's, it's so messy to live in the present, so let's try to escape from that and try to have control over the future.

But that's really the problem, right? As I mentioned before, that there is nothing yet to control. We can't control the future. The future tournament doesn't exist. So what happens is, I [00:05:00] was pouring all my energy into managing a thing that isn't real, and I felt even productive about it. I felt like I was doing something towards my goal. And it's really what our brains are used to do.

In that moment of hardship, our brains just pick that perfect illusion over the messy present if we don't get aware of it and work against it. And it's the same principle that is going on when you're sitting on your couch, lazily sit- sipping a beer, snacking, and then thinking, "Well, tomorrow I'll start exercising," or, "From next week I'll work on being in the best shape of my life."

That kind of ideal future gives a quick dopamine hit from this perfect illusion, but nothing changes.

So if I could go back to 19-year-old Noël, here's what I'd tell him. Change can only happen in the present. So go to sleep early, focus on [00:06:00] the right process, and give your best in your next game. It is all you can really influence.

And I'm sure that he, young Noel, wouldn't have liked hearing that. But the boring advice is often the true one. If we want to actually improve, we have to accept the messy present and work with it. It is the only place change is possible. Not in the castles that we build in our head.

And so as Oliver Bergman puts it perfectly: instead of thinking about the perfect routine and all the habits you could improve, what is one thing you can do right now, today, or at the very latest tomorrow to improve your chess?

Hey, guys, just two quick things before you take off. If you enjoyed this episode and want more structured chess improvement [00:07:00] tips from myself, check out my newsletter at nextlevelchess.com/newsletter. It's totally free. It will always remain free, and it goes out every single Friday with the best, latest chess improvement tips that I have.

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