Annoyed at Clickbait videos Do This.
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[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome back to Next Level Chess podcast. Today I want to talk again shortly about clickbait videos and how you can stay away from things on the internet that promise you so much, but more often than not, sadly, can't back it up with real chess improvement for you guys at home. And two weeks ago, I believe it was, I talked about a way to stay away from the algorithm. Was very technical, how you can clean up your YouTube feed so you don't even see these things.

But let's be honest, we will get confronted with courses that promise you 300 points improvement in a few weeks. You will get confronted with articles or videos or Reddit threads or wherever you hang out on the internet. There will be these big, lofty promises. So today I wanna talk about a more mindset driven approach to stay away from these things.

And what you actually just have to do is change your expectations and accept one single harsh truth. [00:01:00] So yeah, really excited to get into this one. Enjoy this episode.

So the basic problem here is that we are psychologically driven to try to get what we want in an as easy way as possible, but that often leads to not getting what we want at all because, well, hard truth, it's not going to be that easy, right? So from our psychology, we are vulnerable to those clickbait videos.

We are vulnerable to strong marketing that basically tells us, just buy this. Don't worry. In three weeks you'll have 500 points more. Now, once you are in this moment, and once you see these things, if you don't prepare for it, you probably will get caught. Now, I have many people in my Simplified Chess Improvement System that know this already.

They are prepared, they are ready to train the right way, but sometimes they get caught in these, how I [00:02:00] call them FOMO. So fear of missing out marketing campaigns, and they write in the community, Hey, I still bought three courses this Black Friday. I know I don't need them.

But in the moment, I felt so strong that I need them, so I bought them. So how can we prepare against this? And I believe that whenever we fall for these things, there's one key thing that happens. It's all wish to achieve what we want in an easy way.

And there's a tweet I really love. It's from Morgan Housel, and I'll quote it here and it explains basically how these things work more from a creator perspective. So quote: at Jason Zweig, three ways to get paid to write. One: lie to people who want to be lied to, and you'll get rich. Two, tell the truth to those who want the truth and you'll make a living.

Three, [00:03:00] tell the truth to those who want to be lied to and you'll go broke. End of tweet. So this tweet is very interesting because it basically implies that there are two ways for clickbait to work, or for this marketing to work. One thing that needs to be is that a creator is ready to lie to their viewers, right?

But the second thing that needs to happen is you need to be ready to be lied to.

And just as a small in-between, like I, as an idealist, I would love to call out all the YouTubers and so on, that I believe they are doing clickbait and why it's not right and so on. But let's be honest, will it really change anything? Some people don't even care. I. And, additionally, there will always be somebody else that creates clickbait content or just exaggerates claims in their marketing.

So I don't believe that's really a useful way of going about this, trying to hold myself back with this, [00:04:00] but instead, give valuable advice to you at home, how you can actually stop being lied to. .

So the problem I mentioned early on is that we still have this wish. We still have this hope that it could be easy, and in other words, this is where we want to be lied to. We would like to hear that chess improvement is easy, that there is this one magical secret that improves or game. And if we finally figure out the secret, and somebody that is on the internet and just claims to have them, they have the secret.

We watch a video or we buy a course and then boom: our chess is easy and everything flows perfectly. As long as you have this expectation. And this can be very strong. So some people have a very strong expectation of this. Some people have it underlined. If somebody buys my Simplified Chess Improvement System course, that means that they know that it's not right, but somewhere hidden deep inside there is still this wish, and [00:05:00] especially the longer your plateau will be, the more you suffer at the moment from bad results, the stronger this can grow again. Like, oh, this is, everything is so hard, it's so annoying. And like, hmm, if I just buy this one thing, it would be lovely that everything is solved.

And when you have this wish, you are susceptible for clickbait, both in videos, in articles, and for extremely strong promises in marketing guiding you to buy stuff. Just because someone says, in one week you will easily improve. Boom, boom, boom. Just give me your money and I'll help you. The problem is doesn't really work like that.

So what's the solution? The solution is pretty simple. You need to wholeheartedly accept that there is no way around the harsh reality that chess improvement is hard, that there will be plateaus and there will be the need for you to do difficult things with good focus, spending time and [00:06:00] energy to get to a point of improvement again.

So listen to this as many times as you need to. Chess improvement is hard. Achieving anything meaningful involves doing hard things. Anybody trying to convince you otherwise is at best wasting your time. And whenever you realize that a part of you is hoping for this quick improvement. It's hoping for, oh, maybe there could be this one thing or thing, or you listen to a success story of somebody just finding the secret and then exploding 700 points or whatever these people usually share.

Just realize, oh, oh, oh, danger, danger. Your alert signals have to go on, and you need to realize this is a dangerous mindset to be in because the stronger you have this, the more you will be susceptible to clickbait and strong marketing. And by the way, this doesn't only apply to chess.

If you are looking at the financial scams out [00:07:00] there. There are sometimes ridiculous YouTube advertisements staying on YouTube, right? Ridiculous advertisement like make, I don't know, whatever, 5000% on your investment this year, or learn to trade in half an hour and make all of this money, like whatever these people try to teach.

It's always make quick money easily. You just copy me and make this amount of money, right? So whenever you are thinking that there is a way, there is a secret that something you want to achieve that is meaningful and important and many people want to achieve could be super easy and super quick if you just found the right thing.

Well, there's so many people that are ready to promise you this exactly what you hope for and just sell you something or waste your time with something that can't back up this claim because, well, nobody is a magician. If there was the super simple secret to making millions without having to work, or if there was the [00:08:00] super simple secret to becoming much stronger at chess without really having to think for yourself and just copying moves from the engine, then it wouldn't be meaningful at all. We would all be grandmasters and nobody would care about grandmasters because this is just like, yeah, okay, yeah, you found the same secret, right in quotation mark on a YouTube video that has 5 million views. Is it really a secret if you just share it with the world?

So yeah, this is the main mindset that you need to have. Whenever you think it's going to be easy, whenever you think it's going to be quick, cut yourself short and tell yourself chess improvement is hard. Achieving anything meaningful involves doing hard stuff and anybody trying to convince you otherwise is at best, wasting your time.

So the next time you go to YouTube or you go to an article, or you try to buy a course and you see a title, and this is a real YouTube title, that's not my imagination, that's actually written by a person. Give me eight minutes and I will make you a great chess player. End of quote. [00:09:00] You'll just smirk. Click.

Don't remember, don't recommend this channel. You can do this on YouTube. Like, I don't wanna see that stuff anymore. And then find a valuable video instead that actually teaches you something useful, but doesn't promise you to improve your game quickly and easily. That's not going to happen.

Okay, That's it. Hope you don't fall for clickbait and, uh, strong FOMO marketing anymore. See ya.