The Solution to Bad Times - A Plan
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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.

We are living in very turbulent times now. Last week, the markets have been going crazy, and this is not about putting blame on someone or anything political, but it's just accepting the situation and thinking about what we can do [00:01:00] when we experience such a situation. Because my first instinct, when I look into my investment app and I see just everything red 20% down or whatever it was, it's like, oh, I want to do something right.

Should I sell? Should I change allocations? What should I do? And it makes me anxious and it would bring me to emotional decisions that I might regret later on. So when I had this feeling last week, I was like, oh my God, what should I do? Should I read more about it? What can I do? I was like getting this thought, oh wait, I had a plan when I started investing.

So the only thing I need to do is to follow this plan. Now, this is not a perfect plan. This is not financial advice or I got the biggest investment guru in the world. Tell me what I should do. But I just followed what people recommend sometimes. And what especially, for example, [00:02:00] Ramit said, he is a guy I follow.

He's just recommending investing for the long term. So just put it somewhere in an ETF. I let it sit and I don't touch it, and I should check again in 20, 30, 40 years. So when I remembered this plan, in the moment where I got emotional, I was like panicking. Oh my God, what should I do? I calmed down. I said, okay.

Let's close this up, I had a plan. The only thing right now I have to do is to follow that plan, and I also realized in this moment that this is what I recommend in chess, and this is what I do basically in any area of my life. Very often when I don't have a plan, I take emotional decisions, and then it doesn't end up that well.

Usually when I take these quick, rushed decisions, I make some mistakes that I later regret. And so I work best when I work with plans. For [00:03:00] example, in chess, when we have a bad game, a losing streak a week, two weeks, a month, where we put in the effort or we don't, and we just have bad results. Usually we overthink stuff.

We think, am I studying the wrong stuff? Should I change my openings? Should I buy new books? And then, there's a new course coming out. We're like, oh yeah, this, we need it. And then we just buy it impulse by. We overreact. Some people just completely scratch their training plans and they start from new, when they lose a few games and usually.

The solution is quite simple. If you have a basic plan, and that's what I teach in the Simplified Chess Improvement system as well. You don't need to solve everything in the moment. You just need to remember the three dos of chess improvement. Do what matters, do it well, do it consistently. So more often than not, you don't need to question everything.[00:04:00] 

You just need to follow a simple plan. If you know what to do, you can give away these emotions or accept the emotions that they are there, but then say, okay, I don't need to act on them. I can rationally decide a plan when I feel happy in the moment, not emotional, not driven by anxiety, and then I can just execute when times get hard.

And I have another example for you. I started this running challenge. By the time this podcast is out, I will have run the half marathon and I had a 16 week plan. And then at some point I didn't follow the plan anymore. I overdid my training. I got injury. And then I had to stop for four to six weeks, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been able to get back to any training because I felt my habit was gone.

I was getting [00:05:00] lazy. I didn't feel like running. And so at some point I just said, okay, let's just take the plan and go back to it. I just take a slower time. I try to run a little bit slower because I didn't train for a while, but I just stick to the plan again. So the last three weeks were very nice.

Again, I had a plan, I could just stick to it. So just having this plan helped me that when I came back from an injury, I at least knew what I was supposed to do again, and this is why plans are so important. Many of you might feel, well, I don't need a plan. That's often the case when we have a good streak, right?

Nobody needs a plan. We feel amazing, life is calm, your work is not overloading you. You have time. You can spend time on studying chess. Everything goes well. That's when we don't need a plan. When we need a plan is when things go bad. And the problem is, when things are already going [00:06:00] bad, usually we are in a bad mental space to create a plan, right?

So in the moment where I look at my phone and it's everything is minus 20%, if this is the moment where I come up with a plan for my future, I'm guided by emotions. I'm guided by negativity, by fear, by anxiety, that plan is not going to be good. It's not going to be objective. It's not going to take into consideration that usually markets go up, even if sometimes they go down, right?

So the plan I'm coming up with in this emotional moment is not going to be of high quality. Same in chess. If you're plundering, if you're losing a lot, if you're frustrating by losing rating. Then the plan that you're coming up with is probably not the plan that you want to execute in the future. And so what is the solution?

The solution is to start planning even when things are going well. I do that for my chess. Well, I did that for my chess. I do that for my business. I do it for my running. [00:07:00] I do it for anything that I wanna improve. If I want to improve my health, for example, if I want to improve my eating habits. I need a plan for it.

If I have to decide in the moment, more often than not, I take an emotional decision. I let my feelings guide me and I'm not doing what I wanted to do when I set out a plan. So, I just write plans basically for everything, and I see plans more as an easier way to help us to go through hard moments and to not get guided too much by emotional decisions.

'cause very, very often when you get guided by fear, when you get guided by anxiety and you make decisions, lasting decisions for your life in this state, you will later on look back and say, oh my God, why did I do this? So if today you're feeling in a good mood for your chess, but you don't have a plan yet, [00:08:00] be aware that at some point there will be hardened moments, and so you should have a plan to prepare for those.

'cause otherwise you'll take emotional decisions. You will stop training, you will buy things you don't need, and you will get off track sooner or later. 

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