I often joke to my students that little children teach us a lot about fluid mechanics. Of course, parenting teaches many other useful things too, mostly, I find, in terms of communication skills. One particularly useful observation is neatly summarized by Gretchen Rubin in her inspiring book “The Happiness Project”. She makes a point that children are looking for acknowledgement of their frustrations and negative emotions more often than for actual help with the task or the situation that causes them. Following up the validation of the reality of the negative emotion and the subjective difficulty of the situation with a constructive suggestion is, of course, the best practice. For example, if a child is upset, because she cannot put on socks by herself, saying to her something like: “Putting on socks can certainly be tricky; why don’t you try pulling on the heal instead of the top” would be more helpful than dismissing the child’s frustration with “Come on, this is just putting on a sock! How hard can it be?”
What is even more interesting is that acknowledging the difficulty of a problem even makes adults more likely to persevere with it, rather than abandoning it in frustration. Probably, the prospective of feeling a certain pride for completing something challenging serves as a reward for sticking with the task. It’s another Jedi mind trick to play on the students (or on myself), I suppose.
There is a saying that anything worth doing is worth doing slowly. Certainly, there is a lot to be said about being able to focus on the details of the process, instead of rushing through it under the threat of a deadline or even under the awareness of the fact the the might be better spent doing something else. I’ve come across a technique for tricking myself into a more methodical working mode in a book “The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin. She describes using a mantra “I am in jail” when working on a side project like setting up a website for a blog. The idea is to invoke a state of mind where it seems alright to spend as much time on the task at hand because there is nothing better to do at the moment and you have all the he time in the world to do it. It seems like simplistic mind trick to play on myself, but I find it surprisingly effective.
Motivation is a tricky thing. For example, it is easier to attain motivation than to maintain it. Also, motivation can be extrinsic, e.g., if what drives us to do something is the expectation of a praise or a reward, or intrinsic, e.g., when we do the thing simply because we like it, or because we enjoy the process.
To get started at something, both types of motivation would do the job, but to persevere through the task, it is important to develop intrinsic motivation. That is why psychologists say that it is counter-productive to pay children for reading, for example. If children start reading for the reward, there is a danger that they would stop doing it for fun.
This is the basis for a strategy for maintaining the motivation for practicing a complex skill like martial arts, chess, conducting scientific research, studying a difficult subject at school or playing music. The idea is to convince ourselves (and periodically remind ourselves) that we are doing it for your own reasons, e. g., curiosity and pleasure. This frees us from the expectation of an external reward in the form of gratitude, tournament victories, stellar grades or applause from the audience. Instead, we can simply do what we need to do, because we really like it.
My ten-years-old daughter is a continuous source of cheerfulness in our lives. If earlier it was mostly due to her inherent childish cuteness and positivity, now that she is becoming more mature, her humour and personality start to come through more and more often. I sometimes feel preemptively nostalgic about these moments, because I know that this stage of her childhood is fleeting. Some of the jokes she makes are just too hilarious not to record. I know that they would make me laugh even years from now.
Here is a conversation that we had in the car the other day, on our way from school. A song by Andy Grammer was playing on the radio, and his name was displayed on the dashboard monitor.
“Andy Grammer,” my daughter said, “he must be a really good writer, with a last name like that.”
“Why?” I asked, to play along.
“He is probably very good at grammar.”
“But ‘grammar’ has ‘-ar’ at the end, not ‘-er’.”
“Well, his name is not ‘Speller’, is it?”
“…”
I have to admit, it’s hard to argue with this logic.
“The hardest thing is to win a won game.” — Frank Marshall
This is a popular quote in chess, and some internet sources also attribute it to Emanuel Lasker, who must have made a similar observation. It is not strictly true, of course. It is much easier to win if you have an objective advantage, either material or positional. But the point is that when you realize that you have a decisive advantage, it is easy to fall into a false sense of security and become complacent.
This is where it becomes very interesting from your opponent’s standpoint. It is useful to know about this tendency if it is your opponent who has an a superior position, and you are forced to defend. It becomes your advantage that can be exploited. If you have a losing position, it will lead to the actual loss of the game only provided that the opponent plays correctly. In practice, it is worth to put up resistance as long as possible in order to give him or her ample chances to make mistakes. The more difficult decisions the opponent is forced to make, the higher the chances of them getting something wrong.
The reigning world champion Magnus Carlsen is known for being exceptionally skilled in defending and turning around inferior positions. Of course, he is also exceptionally skilled in other aspects of the game, so he doesn’t get into inferior positions that often. But it does happen even at his level, which is what makes chess so fascinating. I remember reading (but cannot find the source) that Magnus mentioned distributing his effort of mental concentration in inverse proportion to the winning chances of the position. If he thinks that he has only 1% chance of winning, he would put 99% of energy into finding a way of doing so. Whether this is factually true or not, it is certainly an admirable goal to aspire to. It is also an illustration of warrior’s spirit, a concept that permeates chess as much as it does a martial art like kendo, which I find quite remarkable.
“ – What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered? – That about sums it up for me.” — “The Groundhog Day”
I complained recently that life became so busy that I hardly ever re-watch my favourite movies anymore. Watching a good movie multiple times is something that I used to enjoy, but now it feels like such an enormous waste of time that I find it difficult to justify it. Yet, the other day, I’ve proven myself wrong by enjoying a bit of “The Groundhog Day.” This movie has a mixed affect on me. It’s funny, of course, and it’s entertainment value is tremendous. But the dialogue between Bill Murray’s character, Phil, and a town resident named Ralph, which I quoted above, hits a bit too close to home.
Still, the fact that I did watch a bit of an old movie – something that I normally wouldn’t do because of being caught up in routine – felt quite positive. That’s, of course, part of the moral of the Groundhog Day’s story – Phil broke out of the cycle starting to pay attention to things he cared about and being deliberate about what he wanted to do.
It seems easy to suggest that one needs to read books in order to become more knowledgeable and, generally, a well-rounded person. But these days, “reading” can mean many things, from turning the pages of physical paper volumes to listening to audiobooks to watching instructional videos online. Of course, movies and books have coexisted for years, but nowadays the boundaries between the media become blurred. The amount of content available is also remarkably huge. It actually makes it difficult to digest the information effectively. The over-abundance of material in almost any field makes the experience of learning similar to drinking from a fire hose.
Take chess, for example. As far as hobbies go, there is an incredible amount of literature available for those who want to learn the finer points of the game or to teach it to others. Reading chess books, particularly collections of annotated games of masters has been traditionally viewed as a necessary, and perhaps the most efficient, training method. Anders Ericsson, the author of “Peak”, who introduced the proverbial 10,000-hour rule, identified reading and playing through annotated games as the common and defining practice method of top chess masters. But similar to other fields, chess books come in a variety of forms. As far as analyzing positions, reading from a paper book and setting them up on a physical board sounds like a horrendous waste of time, when interactive versions of the same books can be read and played through on any electronic device. E-versions of chess books not only save time, but also, perhaps more importantly, allow us to read and practice almost everywhere, in small chunks of time throughout the day, since we constantly carry our smartphones anyway.
Yet the physical aspect of the game still has value. For my nine-years-old daughter, for example, it is the the wooden pieces themselves, setting up and moving them on the board, what provides motivation to play. To my daughter, chess is not an intellectual practice or a philosophical model of human life. It is simply a board game. Of course, once you start doing anything, it is much easier to continue. She also enjoys solving “mate in one” puzzles from László Polgár’s enormous collection called “Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations and Games“. It is a physical paper book, which in combination with a physical board and pieces provides just the right pace that prevents information overload for someone, who takes her her first steps.
Beyond hobbies or entertainment, e.g., in the area of academic learning, reading books have conventionally been the way to acquire new information. In my experience, recent forced transition to remote teaching resulted in an abundance of online material in the form of recorded lectures, examples, tutorials, course notes, etc. Like in chess, the most effective type of practice is the one you can sustain regularly. So if you are taking a university course and going through a textbook with a highlighter is not your thing, chances are there are video lectures that you can watch as a change of pace, if nothing else.
In the context of learning, an important thing is that reading needs to be active in order to be effective. This means taking notes. Ideally, you would paraphrase and summarize what you’ve read, but even copying passages verbatim is substantially better than doing nothing. This goes back to well-established concept in education that actively engaging with information is necessary for transforming it to knowledge. Interestingly, how exactly you do it doesn’t matter much, statistically speaking. So taking notes is an easy way of accomplishing that.
Playing chess is stressful. Not just each individual game, but the activity as a whole. Many grandmasters noted that those who take chess seriously typically end up less happy overall because of it. This aspect has even been documented and closely examined in the “Chess Improvement: It’s all in the mindset” book by Barry Hymer and Peter Wells. Chess is highly competitive and aggressive. After all, the objet is to impose your will on the opponent and, figuratively speaking, destroy them. Winning is riddled with psychological traps like impostor syndrome and attributing your successes to luck, and losing is simply devastating for the ego and motivation.
One way to side-step this pitfall is to consider chess not as a finite game (the object being to end the game as quickly as possibly by checkmating the opponent’s king), but as an infinite one (played to keep the game going indefinitely), to borrow the terminology from James P. Carse, the author of “Finite and Infinite Games“. So if you play to keep improving, rather than to win matches, you’ll feel better.
Research in education shows that In order to improve at anything (chess, mathematics, art, kendo, etc.) it is important to engage with the activity on a regular basis. The good news is that it doesn’t matter how exactly you engage with it, at least at the beginning and intermediate levels. In other words, if you do anything related to chess – solve puzzles, read books, watch instructional videos and even lose some games – you will be getting better by improving your understanding of strategic principles and tactical sense. Whatever you do – it will lead to improvement, even though it might not be the most efficient route. Of course, quality od practice matters too, not just quantity. Nut nobody really knows what the most efficient route is, so it is all fine anyway – almost anything you do would be better than nothing.
I’ve recently come across an argument made by an established neurobiologist, Dr. Andrew Huberman, that it is generally beneficial for one’s mental health to maintain a sense of adventure in one’s life by consciously introducing new experiences. Apparently, those don’t have to be front-page-news worthy adventures all the time. In fact, the new experiences could be completely mundane from everybody else’s perspective. The dopamine system that is responsible for subjective perception of joy is positively reinforced by exploring new territory.
Curiously, the new experience doesn’t even have to be a “success” in the conventional sense of the word to have a positive affect on one’s well-being. Suppose, you take a new course as a student or pick up a new hobby as an adult, and it turns out to be a boring drag, which you are sure won’t be of any practical use for you in the future. Arguably, the experience could still be good for you, both in the short- and the long-term, simply because of its novelty.
I notice that children are naturally positively inclined to trying new things. It is not surprising, I suppose, since learning is what they are programmed do all the time. I should mention here that my observations are mostly based on a sample size of one – my nine-year-old daughter. For example, even though she knows (and even I know) that a fruit smoothie is her favourite item on a dessert menu, she would eagerly try a Root Beer float or something along those lines. And even though she would immediately decide that it is not her thing, she would still be happy that she tried it.
I’ve been a fan of a personal productivity tactic referred to by Robert Boice as brief regular session, or BRS for short. His research on work patterns of university professors from different disciplines shows that those who wait for large, uninterrupted chunks of time to do their academic work (mostly, writing) tend to be less successful according to various more-or-less objective metrics (ability to obtain tenure, publish highly-cited papers, etc.) Instead, a more effective strategy is to make regular, even if microscopic, progress by working in BRSs. This approach fits nicely with the idea of starting and stopping the work sessions before you are subjectively ready, but it flies in the face of another compelling tactic that calls for long, uninterrupted periods of time for doing deep work, which was popularized by Cal Newport. Newport defines deep work as a challenging activity, for which you are uniquely qualified.
I really like Newport’s uninterrupted deep work idea, but find the BRS approach more practical in terms of making consistent progress and avoiding procrastination. I think that there is a caveat to it, though: depending on the type of work, there is a lower limit for how brief a BRS can be. In other words, there is a minimum amount of time that I need to spend on task in order to make any progress. For example, when I am editing videos, either for classes that I teach or simply for fun, documenting the games that we play with my daughter (like the one below), I need to spend a finite chunk of time of watching raw footage, defining the cut-in and -out points and placing at least several clips together in the timeline. If I don’t do at least that much in a given editing session, I would effectively need to start from scratch the next time.
Finding this minimal effective dose for different types of work is generally not easy. In some cases, you might enjoy the activity so much, that you would enter the state of flow, where you literally lose the sense of time and blow through the time limit you might have set for yourself. A flow state, or more specifically, maximizing the time spent in a flow state, of course, is the goal, so if it happens regularly, there is certainly nothing to complain about.
