Friday, October 1, 2010

An exercise

I have written alot on thinking. Many of you have spent alot of time reading this blog. I will give an exercise at this juncture. Take some time to go over the information. You now have very powerful sets of tools that you can use to improve your chess. But yes it has come in what some have called an abstract form and others have said that it resemble riddles.

There are good reasons why the information comes the way it has. In my years as a business coach helping American entrepreneurs online, I learnt this: Information is useless unless you own it. In chess terms, you cannot learn to play chess just by reading a chess book. You need to ruminate and apply the information.

Let me describe a phenomenon that I have seen again and again. If I was to discuss a complex 3rd person problem and ask my coachees to analyse, many will display remarkable ability to solve the problems; showing high IQ. But when I ask them to solve a much simpler problem and make them responsible for the result, many break down. So it really was "business counselling". Think on this. And ask why?

I'll give you a clue. Read or re-read: join the dots, the spirit, emotions the tool, goal setting, and also read musing below. The key there is the hypothetical model. If you can join the dots and apply the knowledge there to chess, you will be able to take your chess to the next level.

I'm assuming here that you have already gone past basics in your chess level. Actually if you extrapolate my thinking you will realise that technical is a very small part to your success in chess. Think on it. It has very few variables compared to what I have been talking about. Much of the information you need to improve your technical is already found in books, chess engines etc.

Think on this also. If you have been honest you will see that almost all your loses have been caused by how you think. There are very very few loses due to a lack of technical knowledge. Do you see that?

Almost all your loses comes from your laziness to think; how you think. Part of my training for Mark now is that I do not explain again if he already has the knowledge to solve the problem. I tell him to use his own mind. Dont borrow mine to use. God has given us a mind for a purpose. I mean this sincerely. One of the big original sin is sloth.

You have almost all the information you need now. I will later apply these lessons to chess directly. See how many dots you can join in the meantime. I wish you fun in this exercise.

4 comments:

  1. "Actually if you extrapolate my thinking you will realise that technical is a very small part to your success in chess."

    Raymond, you just proved you know nothing about chess.

    Its like saying "Aerodynamics have very small part in building an airplane".

    Stick to what you know.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You are confusing terminologies. Aerodynamics is the science of flying. Mind coaching encompasses the science of thinking. Technical chess is a small, very small part of that equation. Relook at your defintions. Then relook at what I have been saying.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Let me place a caveat here. I am not saying that technical is not important or putting down technical trainers. In my mind, technical training recede in role after basic training and the coachee has been taught how to think instead of being spoon fed. Neurology and psychology are still considered as new sciences. And I believe that the estimate is that we are only using about 5% of our brain. So I am looking at a larger canvass. I do realise that this is difficult to stomach. That is a problem we face. In business I realised that the engineer, the architect, the lawyer, the accountant all think they have the solution to a business problem. But actually they are only looking at a part. A little like the guy who touched the elephants tail and think it looks like a snake. So dont be offended. Instead try to see the bigger picture. We just want answers towards getting our own GM. I feel there is no harm in exploring this. The other way has not worked for too long.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Your blog rejected by overly long comment again. I give up.

    Here is a link to my comments:

    http://thechessninja.blogspot.com/2010/10/too-much-thinking.html

    ReplyDelete