Everyone wants to improve at something. This desire has no ceiling. It’s true that, at times, the urge to boost our rating or win tournaments overshadows the pure intention to improve — but deep down, no one can honestly say they don’t want to get better.
So, if the goal is clear — to improve — why doesn’t everyone do it?
The answer is a little more complicated. While qualities like discipline, consistency, persistence, and hard work are all important, we often lack clarity on how to improve. If we understood the process better, we could try to replicate it — but most of us don’t.
Two Key Problems Block Progress:
- We don’t know what exactly to do in order to improve.
- We know what to do, but don’t do it — usually because it’s hard.
This article will focus on the first problem: understanding what improvement looks like and how to pursue it effectively.
You might be wondering, “If you know all this, why aren’t you a World Champion already?”
Fair question. My problem lies more with the second issue — doing what’s required. But that’s for another day.
Three Areas That Affect Improvement
Let’s divide improvement into three broad areas:
1. Technical/Chess Skills
This may not be the most important factor, but without technical skill, the rest doesn’t matter. You can have the best mindset, but if your moves are weak, you won’t get far.
2. Mental Strength
Many players I know have solid skills but underperform due to mental blocks — pressure, confidence issues, tilt, etc.
3. External Factors
Your commitments, lifestyle, family environment — all of these affect how well you can focus and train. Favorable conditions can enhance performance, while unfavorable ones can hold you back.
For now, I’ll focus solely on the technical aspect.
Breaking the Myth: Repetition Alone Doesn’t Lead to Mastery
A common belief is that doing the same activity repeatedly over a long period will make you an expert. But that’s not always true. The key lies in the details of how you practice.
Example 1: Sam the Commuter
Imagine Sam, who drives to work every day and has done so for 20 years. Given this, would you expect him to compete in an F1 race?
Probably not. He’s been driving, yes — but he’s never trained in the way a racer does. His driving wasn’t designed to improve speed, control under pressure, or advanced maneuvers. It was routine.
Lesson: Simply repeating an activity — without challenge or intent — does not guarantee improvement.
Example 2: The Chess Beginner
Let’s say you just started chess and want to reach a 1600 rating. Your coach gives you mate-in-one puzzles, and over time, you become lightning fast — solving them in 5 seconds. You do this for 6 months.
Will that alone take you to 1600?
Definitely not. At first, those puzzles were appropriate. But once they became too easy, continuing with them was no longer useful. What you needed was a transition to harder material — mate-in-two, mate-in-three, and tactical patterns.
Lesson: Improvement requires constantly adjusting the level of difficulty to push your current limits.
The Power of Deliberate Practice
I first encountered the concept of Deliberate Practice in the book Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool . The authors studied world-class performers and asked: Were they naturally gifted, or was it their training that set them apart?
Their conclusion: Talent matters far less than people think. What really makes a difference is how someone practices.
What Is Deliberate Practice?
When you start any skill, your progress is fast at first. But soon you hit a plateau. At that point, continuing with the same routine stops producing results. Deliberate practice is a way to break through that plateau.
It involves:
- Working with specific goals in mind
- Isolating weaknesses
- Receiving feedback
- Pushing slightly beyond your comfort zone
Almost every elite performer began with passion. But at some point, they had to work in a structured and focused way to get better.
What About the 10,000-Hour Rule?
Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea in Outliers that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. While catchy, this number is a generalization.
Peak clarifies that how you spend those hours is far more important than the number itself. If you spend 10,000 hours practicing the wrong way — without challenge, feedback, or adjustment — you won’t become an expert.
Applying This to Chess Training
Your training should reflect a few key principles:
- It should be challenging, pushing you just outside your comfort zone.
- It should be structured — targeting both your strengths and weaknesses.
- It shouldn’t be so hard that it becomes demotivating, nor so easy that it becomes automatic.
Working on Strengths and Weaknesses
Improvement can happen by working on either — or both — your strengths and weaknesses. What matters is that the process challenges you and pushes your capacity.
There are two major schools of thought on whether it’s better to double down on your strengths or fix your weaknesses — something I’ll explore in a future article. For now, just know that both approaches can work as long as your training is intentional and effortful.
How Can Training Be Challenging?
There are two main ways people introduce challenge into training:
1. Difficulty-Based Challenge
This is when the material itself becomes more complex.
Some examples:
- Selecting a tougher chess book
- Trying to solve puzzles blindfolded
- Analyzing grandmaster games without engine assistance
These are not strict recommendations — just examples to illustrate what increasing difficulty might look like.
2. Time-Based Challenge
This is where time pressure adds intensity.
Examples:
- Beating your high score in a 3-minute Puzzle Rush
- Solving as many exercises as you can from a book in a 1-hour window, then trying to improve on it later
Again, these are illustrations — not one-size-fits-all solutions.
Why Not Make Training Extremely Hard from the Start?
Imagine a 6th-grade student trying to learn from a 10th-grade physics textbook. It wouldn’t work — not because the book is bad, but because the foundation isn’t there yet.
The same thing happened to me. I once wanted to understand how the universe began, so I picked up Stephen Hawking’s The Theory of Everything. Just 10 pages in, I gave up — not due to a lack of interest, but because I had zero background knowledge. The concepts and terminology were completely unfamiliar.
Lesson: Learning must be progressive. If it’s too hard, you’ll burn out or lose motivation. The goal is to operate at the edge of your ability — not beyond it.
Key Takeaways
- Challenge is essential — You need to constantly push your boundaries to make progress.
- But not too much — If the training is overwhelming, it becomes counterproductive.
- Structure matters — Your training should be intentional and designed to target both strengths and weaknesses.
- Repetition isn’t enough — Mindless repetition leads to plateaus. Improvement requires deliberate, mindful practice.
Coming Up Next
I want to dive deeper into this in my next article — including more methods, tools, and principles to structure your chess improvement effectively.
If you’re interested in the books I mentioned, here are the links again (these are affiliate links — using them helps support this content at no extra cost to you):
- Peak by Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool
- Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
- The Theory of Everything by Stephen Hawking
Here are my other articles for you to read
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