Knowing Me Knowing Yusupov 6

"Being passionate about - or, perhaps better put, a slave to, the achievement of an external result that you cannot control creates a volatile and fragile sense of self-worth."

- The Passion Paradox

It’s been a good week. I completed Build Up Your Chess: The Fundamentals and my lichess blitz rating continued to inch upwards.  I’ll come back to Yusupov in a bit. First I need to remind myself about the (in)significance of ratings.

I read The Passion Paradox at the weekend. Principally because I wanted to read something and I had enjoyed the authors’ first book Peak Performance a few weeks ago. I'll write more about Stulberg and Magness soon enough. For today I just want to focus on their suggestion to set goals but not to get overly hung up on achieving them.

"… rather than serving as endpoints, concrete achievements and failures become more like information - markers of progress and exposures of weakness - that you can use to improve …."

- The Passion Paradox

I was feeling pretty pleased with my blitz rating improvement. It had gone up a little from last week (KMKY 5) and I had just taken my biggest scalp to date - a guy rated 2156*. Although currently rated 2070 and only ever just slightly over 2100 at best, and even that for merely for a day or two, I was now frequently playing guys in the mid 2100s range and comfortably holding my own. I felt there was scope for my rating to keep going up quite a bit yet.

Well that’s pretty motivating isn’t it? What’s not to like?

The problem with focusing on rating - an external result as Stulberg and Magness would put it - as a motivator is that it’s very hit and miss. Leaving aside the fact that an online blitz rating means nothing anyway (KMKY 4), what happens when times get hard?

The other side of the coin of getting motivated by rating increases is getting demotivated when your rating goes down or even just doesn’t go up. And it’s not a question of if that happens but when.

That’s what chess improvement is. You can work as hard as you like but there’s no guarantee it will translate to a higher rating. You can work and work and work … and get nothing in return. Then you work and work and work some more … and if you’re lucky you’ll get a little rating bump. But maybe you won't.

These periods of plateau are when you - or at least I - can get demotivated. They are when you (I) can be tempted give up.

The Passion Paradox, amongst many other things, was a timely reminder for me not to get caught in this trap. To work against it right from the beginning. To keep ratings in perspective.

So, yes, the scalp and the small increase were pleasing but they mean little. What really matters from this week is that I enjoyed working on Yusupov, that I enjoyed finishing book one and that I enjoyed marking out the chapter trackers in my notebook and getting ready for book two.

BOOK ONE IS DOWN

BOOK TWO IS READY TO GO

* After writing this post I beat a 2178 ... and promptly followed up with three consecutive losses including one against somebody rated in the 1920s. Which rather proves the point that you shouldn't worry too much about ratings, I suppose.