It is fascinating how principles that apply to chess improvement show up everyhwere in life. Past Sunday I played football with a friend group and realized just how much one single skill makes a huge difference.
It is not how hard you shoot, how many players you can dribble or even how well you pass the ball. The skill is:
How quickly do you react after a mistake?
“This is impossible”
Whenever my team lost the ball, I realized a few players stopped, put their hands to their head, exclaimed something and just stopped playing. The opposing team made quick use of this and had a lot of counter attacks.
The exclaiming at one point got so bad that one player from my team missed basically a free goal because he was busy complaining about losing the ball (in the meantime, we already won it back and passed it to him, but he wasn’t paying attention).
A Mistake Rarely Comes Alone
In chess there is this saying that a mistake rarely comes alone. And one of the key reasons is that most of people are busy thinking about the past mistake instead of thinking about the current position.
Just like my teammate who was so busy telling everyone how bad his scoring ability was (he missed an easy shot) that he missed the possibility of an even easier shot a few seconds later. If he just put his head up, shook it off and focused on the present moment, he would have easily scored.
What Is The Best Right Now?
Whatever you do, the only thing you can influence is your action in the moment. That’s what should get all of your attention. There is a moment to look at your past mistakes – but that moment only comes when your game is over.
So whenever you catch yourself thinking about something that has happened in the past while playing chess, just tell yourself this one thing:
Focus on the present. What is my next move?
And to make every mistake sting a little bit less, let me remind you of one key thing:
You’ll always make mistakes. Expect them. What matters is how you act after they happen.
Keep improving,
GM Noël
PS: This article was initially sent out to my Newsletter list. If you want to get chess improvement advice for free in your inbox, join 17,000+ chess improvers by signing up for Friday Grandmaster Insights here.
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