I’ve been playing chess a lot lately. It’s what I do in my free time where I put no pressure on myself. Sometimes, I go on streaks where I win right or nine consecutive games. But sometimes, I’m actually getting worse. I’m not winning and make mistakes I wouldn’t have made five games earlier.
Instead of just stopping, I play an extra couple games and keep losing. The consecutive losses and increasing amount of sloppy mistakes are a major hit to the ego and my sense of identity, in the moment, as someone who has good strategy and some intelligence.
I want the path to improvement and greatness in chess to be a straight path to the top. Unfortunately, it’s not. It’s actually a roller coaster of victories and defeats where I gradually get better, not nearly at the pace I want and with a lot more time and hardship involved.
I’m not too into the self-improvement space and self-improvement articles much these days, but don’t get me wrong — I’m always trying to get better at what I do, no matter what it is. As much as I hate to say it, it’s a lot of fun to be a better version of yourself day after day, even if it’s just in a small and trivial sector of your life like chess.
Chess is a bit complicated because there’s a lot of temptation to read more into the game than there actually is. There’s a lot of temptation to correlate chess skill with how intelligent you are, when reality is way more complicated.
Real life improvement is a roller coaster, not a linear path
Photo created by the author on Adobe XD — How self-improvement actually goes
If you are anywhere near as impatient as me, you want the path of improvement in anything to be a straight line. You want it to be easy, to be fast, to be a simple story where “I put in a lot of work and got better.”
But reality is anything but that. As a runner, I wished my path to running a 4 minute mile or 14 minute 5k was as easy as “I worked really hard and got better.” Sometimes, I would work incredibly hard, burn out, push myself too hard, and actually get worse. Sometimes, I would scale back and go by how my body feels and get better. But also sometimes, I would go by feel, listen to my body, not overexert, and stay stagnant or get worse.
I realized there were a ton of factors that weigh into performance that don’t have anything to do with how hard I work or how much I try to better myself. These include the weather, how hilly the course is, whether or not I need to use the bathroom or not, and the same applies to other areas of life.
Sometimes, we stagnate and don’t improve despite applying the same amount of effort. Sometimes, we plateau. Sometimes, we actually fall off the plateau and periodically get worse for a litany of reasons — we’re working too hard, or there’s something wrong with us that we need to get treated (injury or illness, in most cases).
I don’t mean to sound overly preachy, but as a teacher, I’ve also seen students stagnate and test scores actually get worse. This happens for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, it was just a bad day or a more difficult than usual test. Sometimes, the student wasn’t taking the exam seriously. And sometimes, I have to confront there’s an issue in my teaching methods that stopped the student from progressing like I wanted them to. One of those methods was that lecturing and talking at students did not work — I had to release responsibility to each individual student.
According to counselor Joyce Marter at Psych Central, therapy is often the same way. When clients start therapy, they often have some sort of major breakthrough that was the reason they accepted their need for help anyway. But eventually, clients experience setbacks, have major stressors and transitions, and regress. As a therapist, Marter notes her job is helping clients see challenges as opportunities for growth and healing rather than just setbacks.
The important thing is that you have good intent and you’re doing the best you can. But a lot of the times, working harder isn’t the answer and there is simply nothing you can do to stop the setback — you just have to move forward.
You can’t self-improve all the time
As I write this piece, the Eastern Conference Finals of the 2023 NBA Playoffs is 3–1, in favor of the eighth seed Miami Heat and a looming upset of the second seed Boston Celtics. The Heat have executed in crunch time and improved their team significantly under pressure. Much of that comes at the heels of their star player, Jimmy Butler. Their team willed their way to a 3–0 lead against the Celtics, which no team in NBA history has come back against. But Butler and the Heat lost the fourth game in the series against the Celtics.
When Butler was asked what his team would do to recover, he said:
“Just stay consistent…Do the same things that I do, that we do after every game. We’re going to listen to some music, you know. Going to drink some beers back there. Going to have some wine. I don’t think you can just focus on basketball at times. You have to be able to get away from the game a little bit.”
Like basketball, we can’t self-improve all the time in our pursuits, whether that’s our career, relationships, or education. I try to self-improve as a husband, now, as much as I do in the various pursuits of my law school education, my job working in special education, or my hobby as a runner. But sometimes, we have to get away from our respective pursuits and turn off the switch.
Not everyone should drink beer, have wine, and listen to music to recover and relax. But at the end of the day, each of us should realize that progress is progress. In chess, for example, I go back and forth and have winning streaks of eight games, then losing streaks of seven games. But my rating has improved from a low of 387 to a 628 right now, which is an improvement from horrible to less horrible.
I wish I could give a simple answer or solution like “don’t give up.” But I can’t. Life and improving at life are anything but simple, and sometimes, success just feels incredibly random, while failure feels personal and because we lapsed in some portion of our lives.
Reality is always a huge mix of both randomness and sheer luck as well as hard work, effort, and finding the right formula. We would be remiss to think it’s still supposed to be a linear path.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
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