More is not always better
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[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome back to Next Level Chess podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noël Studer, and today I have a special episode for you. It's one that I'm really excited for because I think it's going to be very, very instructive and can help a lot of people because it helped me when I started realizing this fallacy I'm falling for.

But also it's not so easy to pull off, so I'm a little bit scared as well. But yeah, you can tell me at the end of the podcast episode, if I did a good job of bringing across this idea. What idea am I talking about? Well, the main idea that, or takeaway I'm going for today is that we often have this feeling that just because a course is bigger, because we get more hours of view time, we get [00:01:00] access to more things, whatever it can be, that means more value, and that means the price can be higher.

It's justified to have a higher price, and I think that's not true, and especially in chess. What I see is that if something is well done, it can actually be that two things are true. One, it is harder to create a shorter course than a longer course. And number two, because you put in more time to create that shorter course.

And because we have limited amount of time, the shorter course should be higher value. Both for your chess and that would then also justify a higher price. And this is pretty counterintuitive, but I hope I can bring it across in this podcast episode. And for example, one idea I had while preparing for recording this was actually authors and writing books.

What you can hear [00:02:00] a lot with authors is that their first manuscript, their first kind of draft of their book can be like two to three times bigger than what the books looks like once it's edited. And so the bigger version, if you would say, oh, this book is 900 pages. Actually the 900 page book is less valuable.

Worse quality than the same book that is written in 250 pages. And so you can argue that the 250 page book should be costing more and it's worth more and it wastes less of your time. So it's an win-win, win scenario, but we often kind of don't see that. So let's see how I'll do.

And what got me on the idea to write about this and now record a podcast episode about it is that when I see promotion of courses on another website in chess, there are basically two things that always stand out. Usually, especially the author himself, but sometimes also the website [00:03:00] publishing the course is saying, oh, I've worked so hard.

I worked on one and a half years, or I worked thousands of hours, or whatever it is, right? So the amount of time that has gone into the course, and then also how many hours of video have been done. So sometimes you can see, for example, openings courses that have more than a hundred hours of video.

And intuitively, what I think this marketing is going for is what happens with many of us. It's like, oh my God, for this price I get a hundred hours of opening knowledge or whatever. Like, that's insane. It's incredible. And then you can maybe even break it down what you pay per hour in a dollar amount.

And it sounds like you, you pay very little for so much material.

And I can also see that same mindset with my own courses. They are on the lower end and some people have told me, Hey, add more material to justify your prices. I was like, no, no, no. That's upside down. I think if I would add more material, you would get the [00:04:00] same benefits. The course would actually be lower value, not higher value.

So it would be easy for me to give 50 hours of video. With the takeaways I have right now, I really worked hard to define and condense everything down to the, I dunno, whatever it is, 15 hours of course videos that I have that I think gives you everything you need. So. This is my thought process on why longer courses can often be worse than short ones.

And why then as well, if we think about value, short courses could actually be more expensive, which is counterintuitive, and longer courses could be cheaper. And the main idea really is that the one thing that is really scarce is your time. And I have a basically 90% adult improver audience.

Nobody's a professional. Basically. Nobody's a professional that reads my things and listens to my podcast. So for you, that counts [00:05:00] even more. You only have a certain amount of time that you can spend on chess. I would say that there are some people that maybe spend half an hour a day.

And then there are more ambitious ones that go maybe up to two hours. That's the range that is most common from people I work with and I interact with. And so even if you are on the higher end, even if you're spending two hours a day, what that means is if you buy a course that has a hundred hours of video footage, that is 50 days of your full chess training only for that course.

If you take days off, and you would exclusively do that, that would be roughly two months just to study one single course. That's so much time to invest, to get out what this courses may be promising. Then the problem also is, especially with opening courses, it's not just about listening or watching these videos, but it's actually, well, by the time you have finished the hundreds hour of the course, you already forgot [00:06:00] everything that was in hours one to 80.

So you would also have to repeat. And so with files, the same thing is true. The bigger an opening file, the less valuable it becomes. The shorter, smaller, if it's condensed, broken down into manageable parts, it actually becomes more valuable.

And especially nowadays where we have access to so much information, right? Both in chess and outside of chess. Just the pure amount of information we get is actually not that valuable anymore. And I think that mindset, that kind of more is better. These ideas, they still stem from the past and we still use those easy ways to break down if something is worth it or not, right in quotation marks.

But actually nowadays, what matters is really two things. The quality of a resource and how quickly and simple someone can bring across their main point.

Here is a real world example, and I saw a version of this also in a YouTube video actually talking [00:07:00] about the business side, and it's very, very interesting and something I always fall for as well. More to my personal anecdote later on. But let's take a real world example. So think about this situation.

You've got a problem with your house. You get two offers, two possibilities to solve that problem. And for the sake of clarity, let's say both of these options have the exact same outcome, so you know that. Obviously in reality, it's very rarely the case. Let's say you have this totally same outcome, two different offers.

Person A fixes your problem in five minutes. You just watch them do it. They do very little, they don't break a drop of sweat. Easy. And person B is working hard for 10 hours, asks you to leave the house because it will be too loud and they, it's just too hard work for them to do. After these 10 hours, they are finished.

Now the question is, who are you ready to pay more for? Person A or person B?

And to me, [00:08:00] intuitively, it feels very weird to pay the person that has five minutes to fix a problem, the same amount, or even more than the person that has 10 hours. But this is looking at the problem from an hourly rate from the other person's perspective. We are thinking about how much are they making per hour or per minute and is that good?

But if we think about what we get, this is more important. What value are we getting?

And in this case, when you start thinking about the value, it's way easier to get the problem fixed in five minutes. And you don't need to leave the house as well. You don't need to leave the house for a full day. And so the value that you are getting as a customer is actually higher with the person that works for five minutes, because these 10 hours of leaving the house also has a cost for you.

Maybe not a financial cost, but a cost of time. You need to make space for that. Maybe [00:09:00] change something with your work schedule, whatever. If you have kids at home, you get it, right? So at the end of the day, when you think about what you are getting, the value you're getting from the person fixing it in five minutes is higher.

And so we could argue that the price should also be higher, or at least it's sensible that the price is higher. And this is so counterintuitive because most of us, me included, what we do is breaking down how much the person doing the job is earning. Per hour, per minute, whatever it is.

I mentioned that already. So if we say, okay, we get a bill, it's $1,000. Let's keep it simple, right? For somebody who worked 10 hours. We're like, okay, a hundred dollars an hour, at least milling in Switzerland. I'm like, yeah, that's just normal. Actually, anecdote to the side, if you know how expensive stuff is in Switzerland, that's actually low for basically anything.

So, yeah. But that sounds sensible, right? Maybe I even have the feeling that I made a good deal, [00:10:00] right? I paid fewer per hour than what I'm used to. So I think, oh, that's great. But paying somebody a thousand bucks for five minutes. Just seems completely absurd, right?

Let me make the math. That's 12, that's $12,000 an hour, I think. If you bring it up to the hourly rate. And so that seems completely insane. It seems super egregious. And so we always think from this perspective, and what I learned getting into business is that, in business, many people actually learned to train, to think, what am I getting?

What is the value I get, and not how much am I paying per whatever? That there is a lot of transactions in business. Where I would think initially, for example, I have to hire a freelancer to do something. And I look at the prices and I kinda say, no, this is egregious. Like I'm never paying, I dunno, somebody 300 bucks to look 10 minutes at my stuff and solve a problem.

Probably it's just one line of code. Why would I pay so much? [00:11:00] And so what I did is I went for, with this kind of longer, the person that has longer, person that is less experienced, but I feel like, okay, I, I have a decent deal. I pay a decent hourly rate. I'm not overpaying anything. The problem is that there were so many times already this, that I go for the cheaper option per hour.

I maybe even end up paying more because they spend so much more time. But the real problem is also that sometimes my problem wasn't even fixed. Like I would pay someone that was offering their service for kind of a moderate price. They would spend three, four hours, couldn't solve my problem.

I was like, oh my God. And then I would go to the more costly, more experienced version option, and turns out, well in 10 minutes they solve the problem initially. But also they tell me, well, who did that? What was that? There was a second problem. And so they see that the person that worked before even created more problems. So they resolve [00:12:00] everything, cost quite a bit.

But at the end of the day, I would've been way quicker and cheaper if I would've gone for the more expensive option quicker. Now, I don't mean to say that more expensive always means better or quicker always means better. But there is a possibility that someone who has a ton of experience, has spent hours and I mean dozens, hundreds, thousands of hours figuring out deeply what they are doing and so they can resolve problems better and quicker than nearly anybody else.

And we don't get access to these people if we are not thinking about the value we get. And instead, you think about their hourly rate.

So let's get back to chess.

Kind of the ideal thing that you can get as an adult improver is a quality content in the least time possible. We've already covered this.

So as an another thought experiment, what should [00:13:00] happen to my course, my main course, Simplified Chess Improvement System has currently roughly 16 hours of content. Now, imagine that same course gives you all the same kind of feeling, the same takeaways, the same spreadsheets, everything. The outcome is exactly the same, but I teach you in one hour.

Or I teach it to you in a hundred hours. So we have the hour version, 16 hour version, a hundred hour version. Again, to our brain, it feels like a better deal if we pay the same amount for the 100 hour version, because we're like, okay, per hour I get way more material. But it's not about how much material.

Actually, it's worse getting this amount of material, right? And so the one hour version would be the highest value. And then you can argue that highest value would mean more costly. 16 hours is the mid value, and the 100 hours would be pot. This is so overwhelming. You can't finish that course without forgetting everything that you studied in the beginning.

I just also want to specify here that with all the [00:14:00] information you have online, basically the only reason for you to buy something, to get a, paid course, book, whatever it is, is to get a more condensed version, is to get a more clarified version, is to get the material that might be scattered out there, but in a very digestible, simple, arranged format and maybe on top of it you still get to ask some questions. For example, with me, you get a community and you get some spreadsheets that you don't get otherwise. But it's not anymore that you can just say, oh yeah, if I buy something, I get this hidden secret information that is nowhere else applicable.

So the main reason for you to buy something or for you to get a one-on-one training is to save time. That's basically it. Because you could scratch the internet and maybe do something similar. If you read all of my 200 plus articles, listen to my podcasts, watch the YouTube videos and then try to scratch [00:15:00] together.

You probably get 80, 90% of what there is in the course. But you get it in hundreds of hours instead of these, well, the first week is actually like six, seven hours. So you're way quicker when you buy something. And this is the main benefit. And this is why for me, it's so mind boggling that especially these opening courses can be so huge.

Because, well, wasn't it the whole point that you buy something to save time, but then you buy a opening course? I saw this one course. It was 108 hours of video footage. And this was part one of three. So there were three parts to this white opening repertoire. It was like 1. e4, part one, and you had to buy part two, part three as well if you wanted the whole repertoire.

So that was 108 hours. Let's round it up three times. That will be 300 hours to get a white repertoire, like in 300 hours, you can also do it. You can also watch 300 hours worth of YouTube videos. Probably get together a repertoire that is decent. So [00:16:00] you're not saving time anymore, and that's so important.

That's the whole point in my opinion.

And something I'm actually thinking about as well for myself as a creator is that I want to work on making my information more crisp and simple. Not for engagement's sake. I don't want to make just YouTube short videos or whatever. I don't want to leave out important things. But to find the shortest possible way to bring across the key point.

For example, now this podcast episode is soon touching 20 minutes. If I can do the same podcast episode in five minutes, that's amazing. I think that is more value for you guys listening to this. So as a creator, I need to think about this as well, but I just realize that with marketing and so on, there is kind of this connotation or this feeling that most of us have that, well, oh, this is short, that is not valuable enough.

No, no, no. It's the opposite sometimes.

And just one more thing [00:17:00] on these opening courses. I think this is very interesting for you guys to know. So when a grandmaster, or let's say a titled player works on their openings. Again, it is very simple to create huge opening files. Actually, it's really pretty straightforward when you've played over the board.

If you, you've had maybe a coach once in a while you know how to do a big chaotic file, that's not a problem. You basically have the computer on, you have an opening database, and you can work very quickly. You can build out a big file, a huge opening repertoire very quickly.

What takes a ton of time, that was for me as well when I worked on my repertoire. What was the most valuable thing, but also the hardest thing to do was doing something that I called must know files or tournament files. So I created those with my coach and the idea was let's condense everything we've [00:18:00] analyzed in this one opening to a file that I can go through in let's say five to 10 minutes.

And know the key things. So if I would play a game and I would say, okay probably I'll get the French Tarrasch variation. I want to have a file that I can go through, click through in five to 10 minutes and get everything I need to know to play this game decently, or get out of the opening decently.

And so creating that file, which looks super tiny, is so much more work, so much harder than to have this huge, insane opening file. But also the value of it is so incredibly high. And so sometimes, mastering a topic means first building up a lot of knowledge, creating this big thing, but then cutting out.

A lot of times, authors writing books are crediting their editors for making the book way better. 'cause they have the idea. Sure. But they [00:19:00] give it in 200, 300, 400 pages, maybe even more. And then the editor manages to bring it down to a very readable book that you can stick with and everything is crystal clear.

That's the editing. So that is a high value thing as well, I think, for YouTube videos. And so it is the same.

And so especially if you are an amateur, you have limited time and you want to work, let's say on your openings. Keep that in mind. It could be that for you, an opening course that is just a few hours has way higher value. And that would mean that you should also be ready to pay more money for this course rather than something that has a hundred hours of footage.

'cause it's not going to be easy to go through all of it, or it's just taking way too much of the most important resource you have, which is your time.

So I hope this made sense. And just to close this [00:20:00] thought here is I'm super aware that a lot of my stuff, I tend to be more long winded, I think. I like to go deep into a topic. So there is always a point for me and I think for many of us where we have to say, okay. I know I can still make it better.

I can still make it shorter, I can still make it crisper. But when is it good enough? And that ties into another principle I like a lot, which is the 80 20 rule. The Periodo principle. It's also called. So 20% of your work make 80% of your output. And so, I try to not get too perfectionist. And I try to focus on keeping things short for myself, for others, but not to iterate so many times that I can only write one article a month because I have to do it shorter, shorter, shorter.

At the end, you get two sentences. So yeah, this is just my kind of brainstorming for myself, but also might [00:21:00] help some of you outside. Even if you know you can still improve something, it might not be the best shot to still improve it. Maybe you did 20% that amount, for the 80%. But yeah, this is where my thoughts are at for bigger equals better equals more expensive.

This is just very, very dangerous. I still fall for it myself. I still feel it in business. I kind of have the tendency to calculate the hourly and think, nah, I'm not going to pay this marketer, or whoever it is this much money per hour, and why should I? But then when I think back, often when I think about the value that I would get or that I got I have to say sometimes it's really worth it to go with the expert that condensed their knowledge down to just be able to execute in a very short amount of time.

That's it for me. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Let me know if that was clear and if you see that tendency with [00:22:00] yourself, and I hope you don't buy courses, opening courses that are over a hundred hours, but even like over 20 hours, what? How are you going to understand all of this? It just seems like it's so much just for an opening course.

Okay, see ya!

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