Small Changes – Huge Results

Give me 5 Minutes and I’ll convince you. Let’s start with numbers. Imagine you improve yourself by 1% every single day for one year. Doesn’t sound impossible, right? Not worth it either? Oh, you couldn’t be more wrong!

If you improve yourself every day by 1% at the end of the year you will be 37.78 times better than at the beginning of the year. On the downside, if you get 1% worse every day, you are very close to 0 at the end of a year.

Image by James Clear for the amazing book “Atomic Habits“

So now that we have the math out of the way, what is the practical benefit of this?

Start Small

When I have a burst of motivation I usually want to change everything in my life. I think “now is my time” and act like a super-human for 2-3 days (at best...). Then a small setback happens and before I know it, I’m back to the start.

Intuitively it seems that we need to change big things in order to achieve big things.
But that is not true. As you saw above, small consistent changes will make a huge difference Already in 1 year. So let us start small.

Small Chess Habits – Big Rating Gains

Have you ever felt that a short study time does not make a difference at all? Maybe you didn’t study the whole week and then you sit down on Sunday to solve some tactics. When facing the first tough position a thought comes to mind --- “does it even matter? Anyway it doesn’t make a difference, let me just watch some entertaining video”. In a way, you are right. This singular session does not make a huge difference. If you took a test before and after the sessions, the differences (if any) would be negligible.

But the sum of all these sessions makes a difference after a month, a year, or a decade!

The key is to start with something manageable and then build up a good chess routine. The process happens over time. That friend who “suddenly” got much stronger in chess? Every time you decide to lazily watch a video they take 15 Minutes to solve some Tactics.

Small changes – big differences (over time!).

Ideas For Your Chess Training

Many Readers have a busy life. Work, Relationships & maybe even kids. I get it. You won’t suddenly have several hours per day to study chess. But the beauty is: you don’t need such big changes. Consistency is key.

How about starting with 30 Minutes per week? That should be easy. If you do that consistently, this will be 25 hours of good chess study over the year. Not so bad!

Want more? OK. But only slowly.

If you add 10 Minutes every week, you will already study 1.5 hours weekly by Christmas. One year from now you will be close to 10 hours of chess study per week. All this by just adding 10 Minutes every week. That is only a little more than 1 Minute per day!

Just like watching your hair grow, you won’t see (or feel!) any difference on a day-to-day basis. But if you show up a year from now at your club tournament, everyone will see the bush on top of your head...
And be impressed by your “sudden” chess improvement.

This article was originally first published on my Blog NextLevelChess: Small Changes – Huge Results

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Keep improving,
GM Noël Studer