Why Basic Moves Will Change Your Life

Introduction

In the Netflix Original, The Queen's Gambit, when asked about her amazing chess ability, fictional character Beth Harmon reveals that she relies mostly on "intuition." And while intuition could be taken at face value, such a term is hardly practical for anyone serious about learning new skills. How do you go about gaining such intuition anyways?

On the other hand, for Hikaru Nakamura, who at the time of writing this, holds the title as the youngest American chess grandmaster, it might be surprising to learn that he did not feel particularly special growing up. In fact, surrounded by other chess players, champions, masters, he understandably, felt quite intimidated. Here, he speaks url quite highly of other players at tournaments, many of whom he thought were more gifted than him. But, how is it then, that Nakamura would go on to earn the title as the youngest American Grand Master? Why didn't anyone else achieve this feat? What was it that separated Nakamura from the rest?

Many newcomers think that chess is a high level game where players plan multiple moves ahead of their opponents. On the sidelines, beginners often think, "wow that player must be a genius." Sonke Ahrens, however, author of How to Take Smart Notes url, argues that putting expert players on such high pedestals can prevent us from really appreciating the game ourselves. In fact, as he explains, "[Expert] Chess players seem to think less than beginners. Rather, they see patterns and let themselves be guided by their experience from the past rather than attempt to calculate turns far into the future." In other words, while beginners tend to view chess as an incredibly complex game, experts do not see it as such. Faced with such complexity, experts rely on their learned patterns of experience, which provide them a much simpler game sense.

What makes Hikaru the best?

To explain the apparent genius of grand masters, scientists have been studying chess players since the late 1920s (Djakow, Petrowski and Rudik url). Interestingly, what these early researchers found was that top chess players do not appear to have general recall abilities much different than you and I. In fact, we have come a long way in demystifying the the widely held belief that some individuals possess certain hidden abilities. Having studied over 400 chess players at various tournaments around Canada, the United States, Germany, and Russia, a paper url published in 2005 by Neil Charness url and his team at Florida State University determined that chess ability was primarily decided by external factors.

When asked about students training activities, coaches were divided. Some coaches favored serious study whereas others had leaned more towards tournament play. Many training schedules included both. The question Charness and his team wanted to answer was this: which one should you focus on if you want to become an elite chess player?

When the researchers went back and analyzed the data, what they found was shocking: "Cumulative hours of serious study alone... was the single most important predictor of a player’s current chess rating." Tournament play on the other hand, seemed to grant no additional advantage. Counter-intuitively, the best players did not spend a great deal of time with other players. Instead, they owned more books, studied them, and did so in solitude. These findings led to a major shift in perception across the chess network, and many coaches revised their training schedules to align with this new study centric approach.

The differences between expert performers and normal adults are not immutable, that is, due to genetically prescribed talent. Instead, these differences reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance.

— K. Anders Ericsson Deliberate Practice is Key The authors suspect two reasons for this surprising finding. First, on the surface, tournament play may seem like deliberate practice; a term coined by the late Swedish Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson url, but dig a little deeper, and what you'll find is that two games played back to back can look completely different. One game is easy, and the next game is hard. Difficulty and play-style are variable. While it's true that practice conditions should mirror test conditions as close as possible, the gains from practicing against real players cannot substitute for the weaknesses in one's play.

The second reason for serious study is that when done right, it is a technique that sidesteps one of the many obstacles that students inevitably face on the way to the top. Learners from every discipline inevitably hit a wall in their journey. This period, where learning begins to produce diminishing returns, is often referred to as the plateau. During serious study however, materials can be picked out ahead of time either by the player or the coach with increasing difficulty. This reduces the chance of plateauing and ensures that players remain optimally engaged, a characteristic required for building rich and meaningful neuronal connections.

Steve Lundquist photo taken by Horst Muller | Source: Swimming World Magazine url In his 1989 seminal paper url, Hamilton College faculty member, Daniel F. Chambliss url, observed swimmers from various leagues across America in an effort to determine the qualities that produced excellence. Chambliss was interested in the same thing that later engrossed Charness and colleagues. What is it that leads some people to become champions in their field? Unlike chess, a swimmer's success comes down to one thing: how fast or far one can swim.

In The Mundanity of Excellence, Chambliss points to one swimmer who viewed every swim as an opportunity for deliberate practice. Steve Lundquist url, he writes, "made an early decision that he wanted to win every swim, every day, in every practice. That was the immediate goal he faced at workouts: just try to win every swim, every lap, in every stroke, no matter what. Lundquist gained a reputation in swimming for being a ferocious workout swimmer, one who competed all the time, even in the warmup. He became so accustomed to winning that he entered meets knowing that he could beat these people."

While he didn't know it at the time, what Lundquist identified was a basic move, one that would later win him two gold medals in the 1984 summer Olympic games held in Los Angelas.

Excellence is Mundane

Many people believe that in order achieve great results, an equally significant behavior change must take place, but Chambliss disputes this idea:

"a willingness to spend ten minutes a year writing a Christmas card can maintain an old friendship for decades; a faulty telephone system, which cuts off one-quarter (or even one-tenth) of all incoming calls can ruin a travel agency or mail-order house; [and] a president who simply walks around the plant once in a while, talking with the workers, can dramatically improve an organization's morale -and its product (Peters and Waterman, 1982)."

Indeed, the accumulation of small improvements and errors seem to account for many of the great waves we experience in life. He goes on to write:

"At the lowest levels of competitive swimming, simply showing up for regular practices produces the greatest single speed improvement the athlete will ever experience; and at the lower levels of academia, the sheer willingness to put arguments down on paper and send it away to a journal distinguishes one from the mass of one's colleagues in the discipline... the simple doing of certain small tasks can generate huge results. Excellence is mundane."

What Chambliss puts forth is a set of predefined moves that will lead to some of the greatest gains ever experienced. I would agree here, but like to add that, similar to the coaches mentioned earlier, many students are often blind to these basic moves and may not even know they exist. Finally, Chambliss concludes, "in the pursuit of excellence, maintaining mundanity is the key psychological challenge. In common parlance, winners don't choke. Faced with what seems to be a tremendous challenge or a strikingly unusual event such as the Olympic Games, the better athletes take it as a normal, manageable situation."

Conclusion

What makes Hikaru so great? The journey to the summit is certainly not limited to one path. In this article, we've uncovered a basic move to add to your arsenal of tools, one that narrows your focus: deliberate practice. And while deliberate practice is instrumental to success in any domain, maybe there is a larger takeaway here. Before Charness's 2005 study, many naive but well intentioned players continued to focus solely on tournament play. Like the players in the study, how many of us continue hammer away at our craft through well intentioned but unproductive means? Better yet, are there universal laws associated with learning that we have yet to uncover? In an information economy where the need for focused attention is greater than ever, come explore the implications of deep work.

👋 Thanks for making it to the end!