The Secret to Loving Chess Even During a Plateau
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[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome back to Next Level Chess Podcast. I am Grandmaster Noel Studer, and today I want to talk about the secret to loving chess even during a plateau. Now you might have read this title already and think, "How is that even possible? I'm so annoyed by plateaus and I'm training to get better at chess."

Let me tell you this: the secret to loving chess, even during a plateau, will help you be more consistent, work better, and thus improve more. At the end of the day, the secret to chess improvement is the secret to loving chess, even during a plateau. Enjoy.

Many chess improvers are frustrated. [00:01:00] If you are fully satisfied with your progress, if you have the perfect chess improvement graph, it's always going up, it's just so beautiful, you're winning all your games, you're dancing around, every time you train chess, you love it, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast, right? What are you doing? You love everything you do. Why are you listening to a chess improvement podcast? , 

More than the lack of results, I believe a wrong mindset is the main cause for your frustration. And in this podcast, I will exactly show you why this is the case. As you'll soon hear, even someone winning 200 points a year probably has mostly a negative experience with chess.

Now that sounds crazy, but I had that myself. So yeah, trust me on that. In today's podcast, I will show you why the most common mindset in society is a trap and how you can escape it. So [00:02:00] let's get to this idea of winning 200 points, but feeling bad. Unless you're starting from a zero or let's say a 400 rating, where winning 200 points a year is maybe not as impressive for anyone above a thousand rating, that's super impressive and we can be very, very happy and proud with that. I'm not saying you can't do more than that. But I'm saying it's a super impressive improvement graph. But as mentioned before, this doesn't guarantee a positive experience. Now, if we make a few assumptions. Let's say you have a average mindset of today's society.

I will soon talk about what I believe the average mindset is. And then we say that you have an average chess improvement graph, saying that you win actually 200 points. So an average chess improvement graph is not linear, it's not like a straight line you can imagine, just like this perfect [00:03:00] graph, but it's a little bit of ups and downs.

And usually you have jumps, where you win 50 points and then you have plateaus where for a longer time you're stagnating and then you jump again. That's how you usually win 200 points. It's like you're having four bursts, four jumps where you within a week win 50 points and then four times a plateau of 12 weeks. Every 13 weeks, you have one week where you actually jump 50 points and then 12 weeks where you don't win any rating points at all. And now if you compare these things, you will see that there is a 12 to 1 ratio. So you have 12 times more stagnation period than actually the jumping period.

And now we get to the average mindset, which is mostly a mindset that focuses so much on results. We always see the best sportsmen because they win medals. We look [00:04:00] at the financial outcome of things. That's again, results. Everything is result, result, result, result, result. You probably have a result based goal.

You're saying, "Hey, I want to have 1700 rating" or whatever your rating target is. is. So when you're focused on results, the danger is that you're only happy with your process. If you're actually seeing rating gains at this very moment. So if we go back to that standard year, we have 48 weeks where you're stagnating and you have four weeks where you're happy because you jump 50 points.

That means even if you win 200 points a year, and that's a super impressive result, that's maybe 5% of people will manage to do that. Even then, you have a 8.33%, that's four weeks out of 52 weeks, 8.33% chance of being happy with your game because you're [00:05:00] actually improving in that week.

And then for the other 91. 66 percent of the time, so basically all year, you will be frustrated because you're seeing no change in results. And that is quite miserable. And now let's even talk about something more miserable, as if it wouldn't be bad enough. Nearly nobody gets to reap the rewards of their work during a plateau because they give up earlier or later. 

Let's be honest here. It is damn hard to do the training, right? With the right focus, when you feel down or you feel unmotivated because of your lacking results. So if you're taking motivation out of results, it's very hard to stay consistent in these 12 weeks of plateau. And more likely than not, you will quit somewhere in these 12 weeks and you won't even see the next rating jump. Maybe you're not quitting, but you're just quitting training. And that's [00:06:00] why you're just in a endless plateau because once you try training well, and then after three, four weeks, you're like, "Well, it doesn't even bring anything. So why should I train? If I anyway, don't improve?"

So you just stop it and you accept the miserable plateau, not being super happy about your chess, but you think you can't do anything about it. Life status or chess status. This is really a big problem that we can see that most people, even those that win rating points are unhappy with chess, are frustrated in chess.

And it's very unlikely that if you're unhappy with this progress, if you're unhappy during a plateau. It's very, very unlucky. You're actually even getting to the point where you would jump. So there is one solution only. And it's not like Magnus Carlsen says, "After you lose a tough game, the only way to come back and to be happy is to win a game", because we can't rely on winning all the time. [00:07:00] That's only the best that has ever existed. And that's Magnus, in my opinion, that can have such a rotten mindset and actually it could work. But for us mortals, everyone will lose games. So the only thing we can do is change our mindset, change how we look at the process, change how we look at these 48 weeks of plateau and four weeks of rating jumps. 

Experienced athletes often say they focus on taking it game by game and trust the process. While this may sound very cliche and it really happens so often in the interviews with good athletes that it sounds very cliche. It is the only way to stay motivated during challenging periods. And now again, we can a little bit exclude Magnus because he is the GOAT and his mindset is a little bit different. But if you're looking at other sports, even the best of the [00:08:00] best face plateaus, hardship, and periods where they are disappointed more often than they are happy.

Especially in those times, they need to focus on what they can control. And that's the process. And in my seven years working with a sports psychologist, nearly everything we discussed, and we discussed a lot, centered on this one main topic. Two critical questions had to be answered. 

Number one: How can I enjoy the process of improving myself without getting frustrated by the lack of positive results? That means, how can I enjoy the plateau? 

And then question number two is: How can I trust my process and give my best even when things are going great? 

And this is another danger because if we focus so much on the results. Once we get good results, we might get a little bit less disciplined. We [00:09:00] might not do the real hard things because we feel, "Well, now I figured out how to do tactics. Now I'm never blundering anymore. Why should I do tactics if I win all my games? Doesn't matter, right?" And then maybe we still have a week or a few days where this is going well, but then inevitably we might stagnate. And if we're doing the wrong things, we might even regress. So we'd go down again with our rating 

And one of the main things or the main thing is for me, and I did that with my chess, I tried at least, and now I do it with my business, is taking joy in doing the right thing. So, you don't want to get the joy out of winning a game and winning a certain amount of rating points. That's very dangerous because then you will get double that joy as pain when you lose game. But instead, you want to get the joy out of doing the right thing.

So, let's say you [00:10:00] have a training plan that is saying, solve this tactical exercise with good focus, you want to be overjoyed or at least pretty happy with yourself when you do that task. So then the good hormones are kicking in, and as you can control that, as you can do that day by day, you will get all the good hormones that make you happy and feel like the progress is going in the right direction. You will get these on a daily basis and not just every 12 weeks. With a little distance, I see that this change has been a major contributor to anything I've achieved during and after my career. This is really not an overstatement. 

And don't get me wrong. I still fall into the result focused trap too often. It's like I have a, sale of my courses and I just look at, "Oh, how much did I sell?" I post on social media and I see how many likes did I get? I send out an email and I see how many people [00:11:00] actually read it. How many responded, what did they say?

But instead, when I focus on the process, when I focus on doing the right things, I immediately start enjoying my life more. So in these same examples, if instead of focusing on how many people are buying my course, I'm just happy with the work I put in into my course. I can have that joy, that happiness on a daily basis. 

Instead of looking, "Oh my God, how many people listen to this podcast episode? How many people subscribe to my newsletter this day?", I'm just very happy of how this podcast episode turned out. I can control that and I can have consistent bursts of feeling good. And even if the results plateau, I can feel good and continue to put in the work and enjoy it. And that makes it more likely that I will be able to see this burst of improvement in results.

So [00:12:00] this same mindset works in your job, it works with your studies, and it works in chess. And my good friend, Dror, he's an excellent executive coach. He worked in a very big and successful company. He was an executive there. Then he retired early and now he's coaching other executives. He has an amazing question that he asks himself every single day. And I've started using this question as well. 

The question is: "Did I do my best today to...?", and then whatever you wanna do. For me, this question is, "Did I do my best today to be present with my fiancée, Alessia?" Another one I have is: "Did I do my best today to be process oriented?" Another one is: "Did I do my best today to reduce my phone usage?"

[00:13:00] So whatever I want to achieve, I focus on something that is in my control every single day. I focus on something that is process oriented and not an extrinsic result. And then I answer this question every single evening. And this way, when I can click on yes, and the screen turns green, I get the joy of doing the right thing.

You need to try this out for your own chess, because every time you're managing to tell yourself, "Okay, yeah, I did the right thing. I did the right thing." You can really have a long plateau, but you can actually enjoy the journey. You can actually enjoy training chess because you're proud of yourself for doing it the right way, for doing it with the right focus, for showing up when you don't feel like it.

For example, this morning, I'm training for a half marathon. And holy cow, no thing in my body felt like going for a run. [00:14:00] But because I have to answer this question in the evening, did I do my best to run before I start work, put on my clothes, it was like zero or even minus degrees, I went out for a run.

I did 25 minutes. I even did more kilometers than I thought I would. And I was very, very happy and the day started with a big success. So, my suggestion or my request of you guys, my audience, is to implement this question and to implement a new mindset. And as Dror has taught me, there are two ways to change your behavior.

Either you can work on your mindset and then at some point this new mindset that you crafted will help you do the right thing. This is something I've used a lot in my life, but it takes time. Working on a new mindset is like you're slowly shifting a few things. You have these deep held beliefs and you're working on them. Maybe a few months down the line, the new [00:15:00] mindset is there and then you start implementing it. 

But instead, what Dror reminds me often, what you can do is you just focus on doing the right things. And then at some point, your mindset will adjust. That means instead of now saying, " At some point in my life, I will be process oriented. Once I am process oriented, I will then not take joy anymore from my wins, but I will take joy from doing the right thing."

You can flip the whole thing and say, "How can I every day now force myself to take the joy out of doing the right things?" When you do this long enough, when you ask this question long enough, when you remind yourself long enough how you should be thinking, at some point you realize, "And I don't have to remind myself anymore, my mindset has flipped."

This is how you can enjoy your plateau and how you can apply it in your own chess is to one: Train with focus [00:16:00] every single day. And then two: End each day by asking, "Did I do my best to improve my chess today?"

That's it for this one. See you next week.