The second half of this post was rather disappointing. You certainly changed my mind on the seemingly orderly progression of learning from simple to harder with your example about chess. This reminds me of an explanation Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson made about intentionally putting himself into a class of motorracing above his (then) abilities[1].
However there was little detail or actionable advice about how to develop advantages. Such as where to identify situations that are good for learning, least of all from perceived losses or weaknesses. For example:
...where we genuinely have all the necessary resources (including internal ones). At the very least, it’s useful to develop the skill of finishing tasks quickly and decisively when nothing is actually preventing us from doing so.
I would be hard-pressed to list any situations where I do have the necessary resources, internal or external, to finish the task but just not the inclination to do so promptly. Clean my bedroom maybe? Certainly if I gave you a list of things found on my bughunt, none of the high-value bugs would fit this criteria.
I also find the "Maximizing the Effective Use of Resources" section feels very much like "How to draw an owl: draw a circle, now draw the rest of the owl". I am aware that often the first idea we have isn't the best.
Except for me... it often is the best. I know because I have a tendency to commit quota filling. What I mean is, the first idea isn't great, but it's the best I have. All the subsequent ideas, even when I use such creativity techniques like "saying no- nos" or removing all internal censors and not allowing myself to feel any embarrassment or shame for posing alternatives - none of them are demonstrably better than the first. In fact they are devolve into an assemblages of words, like a word salad, that seem to exist only for the purpose of ticking the box of "didn't come up with just one idea and use that, thought of other ideas."
Similarly role-playing often doesn't work for me because if I ask myself something like
“What resources and strategies would Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres / Professor Quirrell use in this situation?” If the answer is obvious, why not apply it?
There is never an obvious answer which is applicable to me. For example, I might well ask myself when on a music video set "How would Stanley Kubrick shoot this?" - and then remember that while he had 6 days at his disposable to a single lateral dolly track with an 18mm lens, and do 50 takes if he wanted. I have 6 hours to shoot the rest of the entire video, only portrait length lenses (55mm and 77mm) and don't have enough track to lay run a long-enough track to shoot it like Kubrick.
I suspect though that this needs to go further upstream - okay, how would Stanley Kubrick get resources to have the luxury of that shot? How would he get the backing of a major studio? Or perhaps more appropriately how would a contemporary music video director like Dave Myers or Hannah Lux Davis get their commissions?
But if I knew that, I'd be doing it. I don't know how they do it. That would involve drawing the rest of the owl.
With this in mind, how can I like Heinemeier Hansson or your hypothetical chess student push myself into higher classes and learn strategies to win?
And if his 2013 LeMans results are anything to go by: it worked, his car came 8th overall, and 1st in his class. Overall he beat many ex-Formula One drivers. Including race winner Giancarlo Fisichella (21st), podium placer and future WEC champion Kamui Kobayashi (20th), Karun Chandok and Brendan Hartley (12th) and even Indy 500 winner Alessandro Rossi (23rd)
When we talk about rationality as systematized winning, we often discuss how to turn a loss into a victory or how to create a victory from scratch. However, an equally important question is how to avoid turning an apparent victory into a loss.
Recently, I watched a video on how adults can learn to play chess. It covered elements such as tactics, strategy, and game thinking. One particular idea about game thinking caught my attention.
The core idea of this approach is as follows: Instead of starting at the lowest difficulty level, we set the chess engine to its strongest setting from the very beginning. To compensate for this, we give ourselves the maximum possible handicap — a queen advantage. As our skills improve, we gradually reduce this handicap.
Why is playing against a weak opponent without a handicap worse than playing against a strong opponent with a handicap? First, when training against a weak opponent, we learn to play against poor tactics and strategy, which won’t help us much when we climb to a higher rating. Second, we may start picking up bad habits from weaker play. While these habits might work at low Elo, they become detrimental at higher levels. And unlearning bad habits is always harder than learning to play correctly from the start.
When we play against a strong opponent with a handicap, we are learning to compete against someone who is doing everything they can to escape a difficult position. On one hand, this allows us to discover effective ways to turn a losing game into a win. On the other hand — which is the focus of today’s discussion — we learn how not to throw away a victory, even against a strong opponent.
Now let’s consider another game — League of Legends. At low Elo, we often see a winning team, instead of capitalizing on a successful team fight to extend their advantage and close out the game, start acting chaotically, following a scenario more like “panic and scatter.” It’s no surprise that this quickly leads to losing their entire advantage, and their opponents often end up taking the victory.
In professional games, however, after gaining an advantage, players typically focus on securing objectives, recalling to base, restoring their resources, and converting their earned gold into items. This allows them to further increase their pressure and ultimately close out the game.
At the start of a game, we will have an advantage in roughly half of our matches, but by the end, we will have had an advantage in the majority of our winning games. And since our goal in LoL is to maximize our chances of winning each game, it is especially useful to master the tactics and strategy of playing from ahead. This is also important because a significant part of playing from behind boils down to: “play carefully to prevent the enemy from extending their advantage; punish their mistakes; turn a small, local advantage into a larger, global one; and once that happens, the game plan becomes the same as playing from ahead.”
Finally, a third scenario — one that is more applicable to real life — I came across in the context of personal productivity. A typical situation looks like this: one team unexpectedly finishes their part of a project ahead of schedule. It bring its work to the next team, only to hear, “We agreed on April! Wait until then.” As a result, the local advantage of finishing early does not translate into a global one—whereas a local delay can easily turn into a global delay due to bottlenecks.
Of course, it’s hard to imagine what it would mean to “play against the universe when it starts the game without a queen.” A more intuitive idea is that we want to quickly and efficiently develop our advantages in real-world tasks, bringing them to successful completion.
Let’s imagine we have a task in front of us, and we have all the resources needed to complete it successfully. How should we proceed?
I often notice that in such situations, I tend to relax and don’t rush to finish the task: “With these conditions, I’m definitely going to get it done, so why should I even push myself?”
But you remember how easily you can lose a won game in LoL by carelessly throwing away your advantage, right? In real life, anything can happen. For example (based on real events):
Keeping all this in mind, a different approach seems more reasonable. When we have everything we need to successfully complete a task or project, it makes sense to make full use of these resources to achieve success quickly and efficiently, before circumstances suddenly take a turn for the worse. And even if the task turns out to be harder than we initially thought, we will still have enough time to deal with it.
But even if our situation isn’t particularly favorable, if we suddenly get a good opportunity to improve it, we would want to seize that opportunity and make the most of it.
I see at least two approaches to “realizing available potential as soon as possible before Murphy’s Law has a chance to strike”:
The first approach is mainly about not postponing the task and fully focusing on completing it here and now. Of course, I’m not talking about situations where “only one step remains, but I have no energy left to finish it”. I mean the simpler case, where we genuinely have all the necessary resources (including internal ones). At the very least, it’s useful to develop the skill of finishing tasks quickly and decisively when nothing is actually preventing us from doing so.
However, I sometimes encounter a particular kind of internal resistance — "resistance that can be destroyed by the truth." And sometimes, I do manage to destroy it. To do this, I ask myself: “Is there any real-world obstacle preventing me from doing X?” What I mean is that if I lack internal resources or have an internal conflict, that is an objective fact of reality. But if my aversion is floating in the air without any real basis, this framing helps me recognize it — and when that happens, the internal resistance often magically weakens.
But, of course, it’s important to have a well-developed skill of self-reflection to distinguish the described situation from a real lack of internal resources or the presence of internal conflicts. Resources are best restored, and conflicts should be resolved, rather than trying to convince yourself that the problem doesn’t exist.
The second approach involves being creative with the resources we have and making sure we don’t overlook any that could be useful.
For example, we might ask ourselves: “What resources and strategies would Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres / Professor Quirrell use in this situation?” If the answer is obvious, why not apply it?
Or we can consider: “What do I actually have available [beyond the resources I typically use for solving tasks of this kind]? Could these resources also be useful? How exactly could I apply them?”
Our cognitive process usually follows the most obvious path: “I need to solve a task → How do I usually do this? → System 1 retrieves a standard solution from memory cache.” However, shifting our perspective to focus on available resources gives us a new way to approach the problem.
So far, in discussing the strategy of “capitalizing on an advantage”, we have focused only on using abundant resources to solve specific tasks. However, we can also strive to take advantage of favorable opportunities as they arise in our lives:
Broadly speaking, it’s useful to pay attention to the feeling that “this situation might offer me something I didn’t have before” and then deliberately think about how to make the most of what the circumstances provide.
And once we have successfully seized an opportunity and gained something valuable, let’s not stop there. Instead, let’s ask ourselves: “What can I do now that I have this? How can I develop my advantage even further?”