I’ve been solving chess puzzles as an exercise to improve my tactical intuition (read: stop blundering away pieces). The method comes from a highly influential book by Axel Smith and Hans Tikkanen, aptly named “The Woodpecker Method” (“tikkanen” means “little woodpecker” in Finnish, and the repetitiveness of the approach also fits the name very well.)
I find it somewhat difficult to work on the puzzles, though. Not because of their complexity, but because of my default result-oriented mindset. I see puzzles purely as training, rather like lifting weights to build muscles, without any potential for creative content. I feel similarly about solving the Rubik’s cube – it is a nice way to spend time and practice concentration but ultimately, the solution is already known, and it has been done many time before.
But it is the process itself that is valuable in puzzles, not so much the final result. Somewhat unexpectedly this fundamental insight comes from the same chess tactics book. I’ll let he quote speak for itself:
“‘Life puzzle’ is a Swedish expression which originates from a political campaign and points out the difficulty of organizing work, social media, household work, ‘quality time’ with family, and ‘time-when-you-do-things-for-yourself’ – another common expression which is shorter in Swedish (just seven letters). The essence is the core of the Swedish mentality: life is a puzzle to be solved, rather than chaos to be endured.”
” that is so brilliantly funny that I cannot resist capturing it here as a note for myself. The idea is that a bishop pair (the light- and the dark-squared bishops) are more powerful together than their individual point values (~3.5 points per bishop, one point being equal to the material value of one pawn) added together. It is intuitive, of course, because the strength of the piece, and therefore its relative value, changes depending on the position on the board). Still, in the case of the bishop pair in particular, there is an inherent power of the two of them being able to control all the squares, while one of them is capable of only controlling the squares of one colour. To illustrate the point, Rowson evokes Plato’s book Symposium, which describes a banquet attended by Socrates, a philosopher, Alcibiades, the politician, and a comic playwright Aristophanes. In the book these characters give speeches in the praise of Eros, the god of love and desire (strange enough for a chess textbook yet?) I am pretty sure that this classic text would not be able to stand against the modern tides of political correctness and such, but in it Aristophanes argues that men and women were originally not separate beings but hermaphrodites – creatures joined back-to-back and having eight limbs. They perfectly complemented each other and were so powerful, that Zeus feared that they would challenge the gods. So he bisected them and thus created men and women. Since then, they have been searching for each other in order to re-unite, according to the legend. The chess-related metaphor is that the light- and the dark-squared bishops should also be thought of as originally being one exceptionally powerful piece. In this poetic sense, the bishops are in love for each other and need to find a way to be together.
. The main concept behind deciding whether to keep an item or to throw it away is asking the question of whether it “sparks joy” for you. My personal main takeaway was that it’s worth physically picking up and paying close attention to each item that you are evaluating as a potential candidate to be discarded. Kondo-san argues that the things that we accumulate take on some features of live beings, because we invest our emotions in them. Even the stuff that was an impulse purchase and has been long forgotten since then had served its purpose of sparking joy in you at some point. Therefore it deserves to be thanked for it by being mentally acknowledged for its service. I find that taking time to go through my old stuff in this mindful, unrushed way actually saves time in the long run by clarifying the degree of my emotional attachment to various things and making the decisions of whether to keep them or not easier. Oh, and by reading this book I learned the therapeutic value of talking to my socks (and, as my daughter would say, “this is a compliment” for the book) and a practical virtue of not to rolling them up in balls in the drawer.
(audiobook). I liked the idea of having one “highlight” activity during each day. It could be anything, from making progress on a work project to eating a delicious meal. The key concept is to plan for it beforehand and to be aware of it when it’s happening. This avoids the feeling that the day has slipped through your fingers without leaving anything to show for it.
(audiobook). The title is almost self-explanatory: small changes are easy to make, and they compound into significant results over time. I am a fan of the idea of evolutionary progress, rather than revolutionary one. I don’t recall whom to attribute the quote to, but one of my favourite expressions is that we tend to over-estimate what can be done in a day and under-estimate what can be done in a year.
(audiobook). A rather obnoxious title and a controversial text that is just what you’d expect from a controversial author. I think it’s an inevitable pushback on the recent trend of taking political correctness to ridiculous extremes. All this to say that I enjoyed the book. It reminded me of Jocko Willink’s way of giving advice (see his excellent 
, for example): “if you want to do more pull-ups – do more pull-ups!” This might not be an exact quote, but the gist of it is hard to miss. Makes matter seem simple, which is quite refreshing.
. I heard about this book in some podcast (probably, the Tim Ferriss Show), and after looking at the reviews it became apparent that it was widely regarded as a masterpiece of modern literature. I must say, it’s not an easy read, and it’s almost unapologetically weird for my tate, but somehow I really liked it. So much, in fact, that I got the second book in the “My struggle” series by Kanusgaard, 
. Here is the conundrum, though – I liked it even better, but haven’t finished reading it, being distracted by faster-paced, more entertaining stories. I left it at 42%, according to my phone. It does give a really curious insight into the (relatively) modern lifestyle of the Scandinavia. Maybe, I’ll pick it up again.
. Ah, this is what I dropped “A Man in Love” for! It’s a proper page-turner of a detective novel, the second in the series about Harry Hole (the first on is 
, which is equally good).
. That was my favourite book of the year by far – a hard science fiction that is both entertaining and educational. Dynamics of moving chains and whips with applications ranging from launching and retrieving space vehicles to hand-to-hand combat – if that’s not a worthy research topic, I don’t know what is! I also unexpectedly picked up one of my favourite productivity tips from the main character, Dinah MacQuare, who decided to dedicate fifteen minutes a day to her pet robotics project in the face of a global crisis that apparently demanded her entire time and attention. She did it because the alternative would have been to let the project die, and fifteen minutes a day was better than zero. As one would expect, that particular project turned out to be uniquely important, completely validating her decision.
. Just before the COVID lockdown, my daughter participated in a piano festival in Vancouver. After the performance, we stopped by an Indigo bookstore, and this book was recommended to us by a store employee. We got the hardcover version, illustrated by John Rocco. This book has been quite influential for us. It fanned my daughter’s interest in Greek Mythology and prompted us to read more of the Percy Jackson series (Percy is short for Perseus – just to give one spoiler to those who are new to this). I also used this book as a reference in one of the first videos that I made for my Energy Conversion course, when we were abruptly plunged into the online teaching mode in March.
. We simply had to read this book after the “Heroes”, and it did not disappoint.
. As an adult, I personally really enjoyed this book. It has all the components of a good adventure story – fast pace, historical references and just the right amount of humour, which is equally aimed at the millenials (maybe even early generation Z’s), their parents and all the way back to the ancient Greeks themselves.
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. In parallel with other books, my daughter and I have been slowly making our way through the Harry Potter series. These books need no introductions, and I can just echo what everyone probably already knows – they are practically perfect in every way, to paraphrase Marry Poppins. 
. The original concept was that achieving the flow state is possible by focussing one’s attention on the activity in question (the process itself, rather than the goal) and consciously increasing the complexity of the activity over time. If you are studying chess, for example, it would be necessary to play higher- and higher-rated opponents and learn more opening theory to avoid stagnation when your level of understanding of the game increases.
” by Herrmann Schichting. It is one of the first technical books I bought as a grad student, because I knew that it would remain a classic.
