|
|||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
Chessville
Advertise to Single insert:
|
Rose's Rants by Tom Rose EXCUSES and FEAR It has been said that chess players are good at two things, Chess and Excuses. It has also been said that Chess is where all excuses fail! Grandmaster Nigel Davies believes that by making excuses (for losing) players "Protect the ego, but inhibit the learning process". This is very important not only in Chess, but also in whatever you choose to do in life. Winners do not make excuses. There seem to be two types of excuse. I'll call them shallow and deep. Here are some typical shallow excuses:
These are obviously pathetic, even if they are true. They are bad for your development because they do not lead you to find and eliminate the deeper misconceptions and weaknesses that led to these particular errors. You might bolster the ego-protecting belief that you understand the game better than your opponent. Maybe you do. Or maybe your understanding is not that great, but you can't face up to simply being outplayed. We all understand chess better than we usually play it and that includes your opponent. A game of chess is a fight. A loss is a loss. If you turn up tired, uncommitted, or unfocussed, you DESERVE to lose. Just be grateful you took up chess and not boxing. I found out the truth about shallow excuses from a game between Jeff Horner and Otto Hardy in a local tournament. Jeff was a local superstar. He regularly won weekend tournaments throughout the Northwest of England. Otto was a well-known character in British chess and had been quite a strong player, though never in Jeff's class. In this game he had a crushingly superior position. So I was amazed when I saw them in post-mortem. "If only I had played xxx I would have won," wailed Otto. "Yes," said Jeff, "but you didn't play it". "This is unfair, I deserved the point". "No, Otto, I won the game, I deserved the point!" Deep excuses do not seek to blame a particular loss on unfortunate circumstances. They seek instead to imply that you have great talent, but that it it is under-developed. You hear: "If only I had devoted more time to chess / sport / making-money / music / exercise / relationships ... and less to chess / sport / making-money / music / exercise / relationships ... I'd be so much better at chess / sport / making-money / music / exercise / relationships ... " To quote GM Davies again: "People will claim that either they or their peers would have achieved such and such if only they'd done such and such or not had such and such a thing holding them back. The bottom line is that there's just no way of knowing if someone would achieve something unless they try. As it is, they're just might-have-beens. Period." Might-have-beens are pointless. All you know for sure is what you actually did, and how it has ended up. You can't go back. You just have to decide what future you want, and do whatever you believe is most likely to bring it about. You might try and still fail. But if you don't try you'll never know. When you show someone that their "balanced" approach to life is no more than an excuse for under-achieving it can hit an exposed and sensitive nerve. It can trigger excuses for excuses! The "balanced life" excuse for the "might-have-been" excuse:
I always worry when I see moralizing terms like "should", "vital", and "has to". I am not concerned with moral choices or with what is the "right" or "best" or "healthiest" way to live your life. I am only interested in what might lead to a high standard of performance, and what stands in its way. Who can say what, in the grand scheme of things, is trivial and what is not. Chess, like anything else in life, is as trivial or as important as I choose to make it. The dedication, single-mindedness, hard work, and ruthlessness of the very best performers in any field is frightening. When you look at what it takes to win an Olympic medal in swimming or athletics, or to place in the Tour de France, or to give a world-class piano recital, it becomes apparent that normal people are out of the running. It takes a degree of unreasonable fanaticism. Chess is no different. This approach may or may not be compatible with a "balanced" life, mental health, or a sense of proportion. To quote Nigel Davies one last time: "It's funny, but I never had a similar inclination to lecture people on how "balance" is detrimental to one's chess; it is of course, but I don't feel the need to tell them how they should run their lives. I'm happy being a monomaniacal, unbalanced fanatic; it gives me enormous pleasure to win my games if I can, and I'll do a lot to achieve that." We are all multi-talented. Most of us have the potential to become outstanding at many things. Given an adequate mind-body, a realistic* goal, and hard work, you can probably achieve ANYTHING that you want. But you almost certainly can't achieve EVERYTHING that you want. Life is too short. To achieve excellence in one pursuit means giving up some others that you also enjoy and in which, with time and effort, you could also excel. This is the meaning of making sacrifices for your art. [* Realistic? What is realistic? I suggest that a realistic goal is to move up to the next level of performance, from wherever you are now. So it is unrealistic for a novice to expect to become World Champion. But if you are already a super GM, then aiming to become a World Championship contender makes sense. If you have just achieved a national master title then the IM title would be something to aim for. If you are in the 4th team of your local club, maybe you should aim to get into the 3rd team. That does not mean that you set limits on your ultimate achievements. When you are getting close to your immediate goal, you can think about the next higher one.] And that brings us to my own problem, and why this subject matters to me. I have put in enough time and effort to achieve moderate skill at probably half a dozen things that interest me, and that I enjoy. One of them is Chess. There is nothing wrong with TRYING lots of things, but eventually the superficiality is unsatisfying. I feel a need to go deeply into something. So long as I never truly committed to a single aim I could always pretend that IF I had done, THEN I would have done better. That way the self-image could be maintained. Now that I have seen excuses for what they are that is no longer possible. I am past the point of making excuses, shallow or deep. I know that I can only get better at some things by consistently spending more time on them, and hardly any on the others. To be honest I have known this for 30 years! Why is it so hard to do? FEAR! Suppose I concentrated wholeheartedly on chess, studied seriously, and arranged my life around it? A frugal way of living, a base in a population center, good transport links, a non-demanding part-time job, a fitness regime to help concentration for long periods without tiring, correct and disciplined study, planned progress, regular tournament practice... And suppose then that after several years I did not become super-proficient, but got stuck at a not-very-high plateau. I would: a. have to
admit that maybe I just don't have what it takes, and Sven Goran-Ericsson (coach to the England soccer team) puts this very succinctly, in a statement with many levels of meaning: "In order to win you must dare to fail!"
|
The
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
