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BGonline.org Forums
How to motivate yourself to improve
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: a gnu forum poll? (jm)
Date: Thursday, 15 October 2009, at 12:30 a.m.
Let me resist the strong temptation to join others in ridiculing jm's unfortunately posed request and try to answer what might be the real question underneath: How do I motivate myself to improve?
Note that this is a slightly different question from: How do I improve? Quite a bit has been written on that topic; Backgammon Galore has a nice collection of articles. The question is, how do I motivate myself to improve when I have difficulty noticing any progress? Those darned dice mean that I might lose more often during the next session I play, even if I have just worked hard to master some particular aspect of the game. Even if I look just at my error rate to try to factor out the luck, it might go up because I happen to get myself into a bunch of games that I don't understand very well, and can't apply the knowledge I've just gained.
jm seems to be trying to reassure himself (herself?) that he is improving at least as fast as most other people are. This is not a particularly good tactic, in my opinion. Even if jm could get others to cooperate, what if he found that he were, in fact, improving less quickly than others? There is, after all, a 50% chance that he will find himself in the bottom half. If this is a demoralizing fact then it might have been better not to know.
There are two pieces of advice I have.
1. Devise goals for yourself that are not subject to the luck of the dice. For example, you might work on studying opening moves. Test yourself on your knowledge of the opening in various ways; e.g., take a blank sheet of paper and try to reproduce my chart or Nick Ballard's chart of opening replies from memory. With practice you are sure to do better at this task, and the luck of the dice can't interfere with your progress. Or, get a bunch of positions and count pips, timing yourself. Or, work your way through a (bot-era) book of problems repeatedly, until you can get every single problem right. Or, record all your mistakes in a notebook and repeatedly review the notebook. The possibilities are endless. The main thing is to create smaller goals where you can guarantee progress, instead of focusing unduly on seeing immediate progress in your match results/rating/ER, which is "noisy" due to the dice.
2. This piece of advice came to mind when I was reading somewhere about the best books to read in order to improve, depending on your level of play. People had good suggestions except for the top bracket: What books should Top 100 players read to improve? Nobody seemed to know how to answer this question. I don't have a full answer, but I am confident that I have part of the answer. You might wonder, how can I possibly answer that question, since I am obviously not a Top 100 player myself? The reason is that part of the answer is common to all intellectual endeavors. If you are an expert in some field, and you want to deepen your mastery, then a big part of the answer is always to do original research. In other words, you shouldn't be reading books to improve; you should be writing the books. You are an expert, so you know what areas are still poorly understood or poorly explained. So remedy the situation. Use your expertise to advance the frontiers of the subject. Perhaps you can come up with a good formula for a situation where even most experts still rely on guesswork, or maybe you can compile reference positions for a type of situation where good reference positions don't currently exist. Or you could try to write an article explaining something that is not currently well explained; in the course of doing so you will probably learn something yourself. By doing original research you are guaranteeing that the subject will remain fresh and exciting to you.
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