The Pursuit
The pursuit of excellence can sometimes be overwhelming. Whether it be in sports, your career, games.
An Unpaid Competition
One of the blessings and curses of the last couple years was my rekindled love and playing of chess off the back of the tv show The Queen's Gambit. It made me recall why I loved playing it in the first place, and I quickly learned that I wouldn't fair too well playing against even level 2 stockfish engines without some more general thoughtfulness around the openings that I was playing.
This led me to ChessTube, led in part by a really personable and accesible teacher/international master Levi / GothamChess.
After starting watching him I found more and more incredible channels of which I will list my other two favourite players to watch:
Both of whom I would really recommend checking out, despite what I am about to say.
As I was shutin most of the day (as most people were in 2020-22) let's just say that I played a lot of chess. Some great and some bad; but enough that I was able to get reasonably high (just north of 1700) on lichess after probably hundreds if not near a thousand games.
I know some will scoff at that rating as it can go insanely high to even over 3000 for some of the grandmasters, but that's the point. The wins started to feel less and less rewarding, and the losses or blunders just felt much worse. So I was the guy chasing the redemption which some of these guys all recognise as being tilted.
I am not and will never be paid to play chess, so why did I take it so seriously? Because it is a fun game and I think there are elements of taking it as a slight against your intelligence when you don't see the loss coming until it's too late. Sure there are games that I knew that I was worse and tried to claw back, but the greater recommendation I have is to know when to stop and try other things.
Life isn't about being the best at everything, these people have dedicated their lives (some of them) by giving up weekends and evenings since they were in elementary school to play and make money doing this, yet I had the audacity to imagine that I could just keep climbing and climbing until I was seeing them come up in games. While learning should be encouraged, so should the balance of life experiences when it comes to things that you aren't either:
A. Using in your day to day life, i.e. knitting, woodworking, etc... B. Using to make a living.
Now I am not saying not to do these things, because I too enjoy competition, just don't let it get you so inflamed upon the inevitable defeat - that will come - that it puts you in an awful mood.
The same thing happened to me with Halo and Elden Ring this year, though not to that extreme, but I often thought to myself that instead of banging my head against a wall, it would have been better if I just read a book, or learned something about engineering that I didn't know about but would help me in my career, or just to go on a walk with my wife and yam about the day!
I am not really sure if I am being coherent in this post or whether it is just another rambling, but I just wanted to allow myself to know that it's perfectly fine to enjoy your hobbies, just don't get so damn worked up about it when someone else is better at it than you or you made a mistake. It happens and there is nothing you can do in the next game (plenty of 8-12 move wins in the stafford gambit) to make the loss go away. So instead, just be more like this dude.
