First, apologies for my long silence… more than two weeks! I know that there isn’t anything else worth reading on the Internet except for my blog, so I know you guys were suffering. 😉
This morning I had an interesting experience, being interviewed by a UC Santa Cruz student, whose name is Miranda, for an anthropology class. The assignment was very simple: they are supposed to interview a complete stranger who is over 70 and write about the interview.
“Wait a minute!” I know you’re saying. “You aren’t over 70!” Last time I checked, I was still only 57. If I’m wrong, I must have spent a whole lot more than two weeks away from my blog… Nevertheless, Miranda got permission from her teacher to interview me anyway. So now I’m an honorary 70-year-old!
To get special permission, Miranda must have really wanted to interview me. I don’t know how she found my name originally (probably through Google), but I think she was interested in two things: I’m a writer and I’m a chess player. She played on her high school’s chess team, and she even wore a chess t-shirt to our interview! That was cool.
The students in the class were given several suggested questions to ask in their interviews, but as far as I could tell, Miranda didn’t ask any of them. To be honest, I don’t blame her. I interview a lot of people for my work, and usually when I come to the interview with a prepared script and stick to it, it turns out to be a pretty bad interview. It’s much better if I ask one or two questions and the interviewees take over from there.
Even though she didn’t ask any questions from the script, I did answer one of them (because I had seen it on the paper). The question was, “If you could talk with your 20-year-old self, what would you say to them?”
I had two pieces of advice for my 20-year-old self. The first was: Don’t be afraid of failure. Before I was 20, all I did was succeed, succeed, succeed. (Except at things like sports, where I failed early and often. However, it is socially acceptable for a nerd to be bad at sports.) But three of my most formative experiences, the things that taught me humility and forced me to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, were failures. One was my divorce, one was not having kids, and one was not getting tenure. (For those who aren’t familiar with academia, being denied tenure is basically the same as getting fired, but with velvet gloves.) Maybe if I hadn’t had so much success and been so afraid of failure early in life, I would have taken more risks and tried more things. I’ll never know.
The second piece of advice was one that I came up with just today. As we talked about her assignment, it dawned on me that when I was in college, I had absolutely no concept of what an adult’s life was about. The only adults I knew were my parents and teachers, and I didn’t really know them as people. I didn’t know their previous life experiences, what made them happy or sad, whom they had loved or whom they had lost. Those questions were just beyond the pale. It never occurred to me to ask. So for me as a 20-year-old, this would have been a really great assignment. To just sit down and listen to a stranger who was two generations or more older, and talk about those things … it would have given me a lot of perspective.
That’s why I think that this was a wonderful assignment, and it explains the second piece of advice I would give to my 20-year-old self: Talk with older people. Ask them questions, ask them anything. They’ve been around. They’ve been through the same things you have.
There was only one interview question that I’m afraid I really messed up on. As I’ve mentioned, Miranda was interested in my life as a chess player. She said she had read online that I’m a Life Master, and she asked me, “How did you get to be a Life Master?”
I’m afraid I gave her the absolute worst answer. I answered, “You have to get your rating over 2200, and then you need to get five master norms,” and I followed that with a rough explanation of what a master norm is.
After I got back home, I smacked my forehead because I realized that wasn’t what she was asking at all. She wanted to know what any amateur player wants to know, “How does one get to be a master?” You know, what are the steps in improving your game to that point?
Well, of course, volumes and volumes have been written about that, and probably every master has a different opinion. But at least I could have tried. I could have said something like this:
- Eliminate tactical mistakes. Of course no one, not even grandmasters, can do this completely, but class-B players and below make simple tactical mistakes in most of their games. If you get to the point where 75 percent of your games are free of major tactical mistakes (and I mean also that you spot your opponent’s mistakes, not just that you avoid your own), you’ll be a class-A player for sure.
- Learn strategic planning. I somehow made it to expert without doing this, but you can’t get much farther. Once you get to the point where neither you nor your opponent are making gross blunders, you can actually start painting coherent pictures. Start with Jeremy Silman’s Reassess Your Chess and learn about imbalances. It also helps a lot to talk with good strategic players; I’ve learned so much from Mike Splane and his chess parties (and put a lot of it into this blog). If you can form good plans that are based on concrete positional factors, not wishful thinking, and if you can execute them without changing your mind fifteen times, you’ll be an expert at least.
- Develop an identity and a strength. Figure out something that you do better than most people at your level, and play to it. Maybe it’s a particular opening that you like (although I’m on record as saying that openings are fool’s gold). Maybe you have a special talent for bold sacrificial attacks. Or maybe you are good at patient defense, grab a pawn and hold on to it. Maybe you are good at rook-and-pawn endgames. Whatever it is, find something that is your “ace in the hole,” and use it whenever you can. This will separate you from the other experts and make you a master.
- Eliminate your weaknesses. This is something I haven’t done yet. I haven’t eliminated my time pressure, or the lack of confidence that causes it. I haven’t learned the art of saving lost games, not just occasionally but regularly. A real master never crumples. I also haven’t learned the art of winning drawn games, not just occasionally but regularly. A real master doesn’t settle (unless, of course, he is playing another master in the last round…). Although I can’t speak from experience, I think that really eliminating your weaknesses makes you a professional. It should take you to 2300 or 2400.
- Develop more and more strengths. I think this is what characterizes the guys who get up to 2500 or higher. They become more and more multidimensional. They might start knowing rook-and-pawn endgames, but then they turn into virtuosos in all endgames. They might, like Tal, start as an attacking wonder and then morph into a player who never loses. Magnus Carlsen is, of course, the classic example of a player who can beat you in any type of opening, any type of game (though of course he prefers winning drawn endgames).
It’s also possible that, when Miranda asked, “How do you become a Life Master?” she was asking from the point of view of a non-chess player. That’s also a perfectly reasonable question. My answer would be:
- Start playing chess young.
- Play in lots of tournaments.
- Study your games (losses even more than wins).
- Play stronger players and talk with stronger players (of course a chess coach can help, but so also can a strong peer group).
- Just don’t quit.
Notice that I didn’t mention anything about talent. I think that a lot of “talent” boils down to how young you started, and how motivated you were when you were young (or when you were just starting in tournaments). There may be some kind of innate chess talent, but I don’t think that there is any empirical test that could discover it and therefore, from a practical point of view, I think talent is a useless concept.
Quite a lot of thoughts to come out of a one-hour interview! At the end of the interview, Miranda made a flower for me out of balloons. That’s also something that she learned in anthropology. This is why I love Santa Cruz. How many other colleges teach you to make balloon flowers in anthropology class?
