Nova Daily - 24 April 2025
Hi!
If you're going through hell, keep going.
- Winston Churchill
In his podcast "10 things the martial arts should have taught you about life" karate instructor Iain Abernethy talks about exactly what the title suggests. Whether or not you're into practicing martial arts yourself, it's worth listening to the ideas and philosophies that are ingrained in the martial arts. It might be fun for some of the upcoming blogs to briefly touch upon these ten ideas.
1. Improvement takes time and effort.
Within one of my old training groups a boy joined in; let's call him George. George was new to the game of chess, and he showed a lot of potential. He soaked up the chess lessons quickly and he was motivated to show his skills. I really liked him for this, and hoped that he'd get far.
He joined his first youth tournament. It went well, and he went home with a nice trophy. In his second tournament, however, he had to face off against much stronger opposition. He finished bottom of his group.
The next training session he wasn't there. The week after, he wasn't there. When I asked with the coordinators, I learned that George had given up on chess. I've never seen him again.
A story like George's isn't even remotely unique. As Chapter 8 from The 50th Law by 50 Cent and Robert Greene proposes, the fools want things quick and easy. When results aren't immediately forthcoming, people have a tendency to abandon the process. But if you abandon everything as soon as it becomes difficult, you're never going to achieve anything substantial. Improvement takes time and effort, and many people don't have the patience to take the necessary steps to get where they want to be.
The game
Today I've started with my new training plan of doing more tactics. I haven't started with my first cycle of the Woodpecker yet, but I've read the introductory chapters and I'm ready to go. From tomorrow I'll spend an hour on the first set of puzzles. After that I'll wait for an amount of time before I kick off my daily rapid game.
Speaking of which: I suffered a painful and remarkably quick defeat in my daily rapid game today. I was faced with a Anglo-Dutch setup, and I clearly haven't studied this variation properly yet. I thought to get a setup with Nf3, but it turned out that my opponent's plan went off like clockwork.
Occasionally when I've suffered a bitter defeat like this, I feel like a failure. I spent a lot of time on my repertoire and I still feel like I lost like an idiot, almost straight out of the opening. I realise that this is how George must have felt when he decided to throw in the towel and excuse himself from the world of chess.
Suffering losses like this might make quitting chess a valid option (even though it isn't, and I've never even considered quitting chess). It can take a bit of time to get my head around what happened. It's much easier to show straightforward wins, but for the purposes of learning, defeats are more useful. I've realised from my past blogs that I've actually been less likely to finish a blog when I've lost, and that's no work ethic to be proud of. It felt bad, it felt very bad, but there's only one way forward: through hell.
I'll take a bit of time for a breather and enter my thoughts later today.
