Why CEOs have a hard time improving chess
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[00:00:00] Hey everyone, and welcome back to Next Level Chess Podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noel Studer, and today I want to start the episode with a tricky, difficult question. How many hours do you think you have wasted studying chess the wrong or studying the wrong things in chess. Now, I can imagine some of you have very high estimates, and that's what happens to my private students as well, because the first reaction they usually have when they start working with me, they see my training plans is, Oh my God, I've wasted so much time and so much money on things that don't matter, or I've wasted this time on things that matter, but I did it completely wrong.

I just got [00:01:00] last week two students that reported that they believe that they both Wasted around 15 to 25 hours every single week studying chess the wrong way. Now this is a super painful insight and both of them were quite disappointed. But on the other hand, they were also hopeful because it meant that it wasn't them.

They weren't the problem that they didn't improve their chess. It was just that they were doing the wrong things or the right things. the wrong way. And now they are very hopeful that with my help we can reduce their chess training and actually improve their rating. And that means also more time for family, more time for themselves, more time for their successful careers.

So if you're spending tons of time on chess and you don't see appropriate results, this podcast episode is for you. But just be careful because you might realize that you too have spent a [00:02:00] Hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours studying chess the wrong. Now, before we are getting into the two main reasons I see for many people studying chess the wrong way, I want to talk about intelligence and excuses, because it really has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence.

Basically, all the students I work with privately and some of the students that are in my next level training course are very well educated. They are successful people. I work with CEOs. I work with business owners. I work with lawyers. I work with investors. So these people aren't stupid and these people have motivation.

They have time and they have drive. So it's really nothing at all about intelligence. They come with high expectations, as I mentioned, good motivation and the readiness to spend a lot of time and energy, and yet they don't see results, they get stuck, and that's [00:03:00] why then they start working with me. And I believe there are two main reasons.

Reason number one, this is something I talk about a lot, is information. overload. If you compare chess and school system, that's the main system that everybody knows and everybody learns in, then the school system has actually some advantages. Now, I hated learning in schools and high school. I was lazy.

I did the absolute minimum and I love learning on my own, but I understand that the clear guidance that schools can give you and universities give you as well, can help you improve or learn new things. So if we compare universities with chess, in university, you get a clear curriculum, you get guidance from an expert, you have a prof, right?

This person has to have studied and has to have, somebody looked at their record [00:04:00] before they stand in front of you and they teach you and you get a list of books, resources you should study. So these resources are vetted. It's not just like, okay, just Google and go see. What happens or what is written on the internet about that topic.

If you now look at chess nowadays, you have absolutely no clarity on what you need to learn. Everybody on the internet is saying something different. Then many people giving chess advice absolutely have no idea what they are talking about. I'm very sorry that I'm so strong on that, but it's true. Many, many people, seem experts.

They try to, give advice. But have absolutely no clue what they are talking about. And then number three, there are way too many books, way too many courses, videos, free articles, free videos, courses that you have to pay. There's so much stuff. A lot of it, again, is quite low quality and didn't stand the test of time.

So you need to understand what you're studying and you might fall into [00:05:00] a lot of pitfalls. Going deeper with this comparison, I feel like most chess improvers would benefit from a primary school approach, very simple basics, but they are reading books meant for a master's degree.

Imagine learning math, by driving right into advanced calculus before you've even done basic arithmetic. you have absolutely no idea what's going on. The result would be a waste of time, a hit to your self confidence, and tons of confusion. Sounds familiar? Well, that's absolutely what I see in chess nowadays.

In this sense, I would say that people who are successful in academic fields, especially If they are successful before the internet or before, a lot of stuff has come up on the internet before, it was basically the main way of learning new things. They aren't used to skimming through lots of crappy information and they take a lot of stuff they [00:06:00] learn at face value, which is a problem if 95 percent of the things you read on the internet are probably

at best, not accurate. So if you've been very good at universities, at studying, at learning this way, you might actually have problems learning in a chess environment because it's way more complex. You need to skim through resources and there's way more that you should learn and you don't know exactly where you should go and it's just a big old mess. Now you could argue, well, corporate life works differently. So people that have success in corporate life, they should have no problem studying chess. Now we get to problem number two, grinding hard, not smart, doesn't work in chess. I really don't mean to be derogatory towards people that have huge successes in the corporate world.

Well, because I'm just a nerd studying chess for 15 plus years and trying to tell you what you should do better in [00:07:00] chess, it's arguable if it wouldn't have been better to get a corporate job as my parents would have loved. But anyway, let's leave this aside and take it with a grain of salt.

What I observe in most of my successful students is that they have a granding mindset. What does that mean? That means they want to put a lot of time in. They think that, well, I do the hard stuff, I can do this. And then they get in trouble because of that. They are ready to work long hours.

No, it won't be easy. And we'll try to put everything from work to family and chess improvement in their 24 hours. And that's very difficult. One absolute positive thing is that usually my students, they have absolutely no excuses. They are always blaming themselves, but in corporate world, for example, with lawyers.

they are billing per hour of work. So it automatically gives you a mindset of more hours is better, [00:08:00] right? So quantity is more important than quality because even law firms will put pressure on their lawyers to bill a minimum amount every week. How well it was done? Well, that's secondary. So this is a big problem because in chess, there is a huge problem with that.

If you're not focusing correctly while you do your chess training, you might as well just not do anything at all, especially with things like playing games and doing tactical exercises, solving difficult puzzles. You really need to be focused in order to learn something, to improve your game. So if you're used To this corporate grinding attitude of just putting in more work of maybe being in a conference call, but also writing an email, all of these things, then if you bring over that same attitude to chess improvement, you will spend a lot of time on chess.

You will [00:09:00] do a lot of things, but you won't see. any improvement. So that's very, very important. And there is even a further analogy I would like to make, and it is with marketing. So when you think about marketing, many people are working and they are cold calling people. Right. They would just, call clients every day.

They maybe call hundreds of clients every day. And the guy that is doing more is the one that is most rewarded by the firm and is the one that is looked at, Oh my God, this is a real grinder, right? So they would do 150 calls a day. And even if they sign up 10 percent of their clients, that's amazing. They get 15 new customers.

super cool and the rest, the 135 no's, they sting a little bit, but they aren't, losing money for the company. Now, if you do the same again in chess and you're just going to play 150 games. And 10 percent of them are great, yeah, you have 10 percent won games, [00:10:00] very nice, but the 135 games that you draw or lose because you weren't fully focused or you didn't get, lucky with the game, then you lose a lot of rating points and it's just not working this way.

So if you're having a grinding mindset, if you're thinking just more clients, more potential, so more leads, more whatever. is better, then chess improvement will really be tough for you. So now what am I doing with these students? What is the solution? So if you're having the same problem, spending a lot of time on things that don't really matter, what can you do?

So I usually ask my students how many hours they are currently studying chess. And then I start by using 30 to 50 percent of their current estimate As a first training plan, and for some of them it's even more radical for some of them. I even like to just start by saying, Hey, every single day [00:11:00] you're playing two games with good focus and you're analyzing those games.

You're not allowed and supposed to do anything else in your chess study. So I'm trying to start small. I'm trying to break the habit of just more, more, more, more, more. And I'm trying to start a habit. That is, when I do something in chess, I do the right thing and I do it the right. So that would then be step number two is really getting into the mode of doing everything you do for chess, you do it with a good focus.

And some people, they don't realize how important this is and they don't take me serious. They're thinking like, yeah, yeah, he says everything with good focus, but I do this, I do that, I do this. And then six months later, they come to me back again and they say, hey. I'm stagnating while what is happening.

Well, you haven't done it with good focus. That's the reason. So I try to help them deleting, cutting out all of [00:12:00] distractions possible. So, all of the digital things to pop ups to whatever you can get distracted by, talking to their families. One of my students is waking up earlier than his family, just to study chess in the morning.

So just. Be aware of distractions. And then the second thing is actually training your brain or training the student's brain to think for a long time with good focus, because you might be surprised how many people that are super successful in the corporate world actually aren't used to spending 60 minutes without distractions.

Most CEOs will have a phone all the time, or they will have emails. They will need to react all the time. And they are not used. To unobstructed focus periods. So we need to reintroduce that into their lives. One of the concepts I help them with is to create a chess zone. So to have a zone, a place a, chair, [00:13:00] a computer, whatever it is that they only use for chess.

So the brain starts connecting chess to good focus, and then we are just working slowly to. increase the difficulty of the puzzles and to really make sure that they are fully focused when they Spend time on chess and then the last step is really Just celebrating all the small steps and staying patient Mindless grinding can work for a while, but at some point it is going to lead to plateau, to frustration.

So the most important thing with this process is that we are staying on the right journey, and we are doing things with focus. We are doing the right things. We are starting small. We are increasing our training incrementally, slowly, slowly, so that it's not just one week, one hour a day, and then the next week again, 20, 30 hours [00:14:00] wasted.

Everything is going bananas. We don't want to do that. So I really help them and I write their training plans, try to Say, Hey, I'm so proud of you. You did that. You did your games. Perfect. Don't have too high expectations at yourself. Now we can celebrate that. Be happy about it. Take a day off. And next week we will do 20 minutes more every single day.

So if a student comes to me and in the first week just plays two games with good focus every single day, if that's Blitz or Rapid, mostly it's Rapid, but it could also be Blitz. If they already managed to do that. I'm happy we are going into the right direction. So if you are struggling with the same things, if you're spending so much time, but you don't see improvements, then consider just starting small, just taking a challenge.

Do the first week only half an hour a day, only 15 minutes a day, but do it well. And then slowly. increase. [00:15:00] And if you need my help to improve your game and to know what you need to work on when you work on chess, then don't forget, I have a course next level training. It's called, it's linked in the description.

In 10 hours, you will learn how to study any area of chess that really matters, how much you should study it, which way with which book with which courses. So everything is in there. So you actually stop wasting. So much time studying things that don't matter because that's what really gets me going crazy when I see how many people spend hours and hours and they get frustrated they don't improve their game and it's just because they're studying the wrong things or they're studying the right things the wrong.

See you next week.