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Skill Building Project: Chess in Italian

I started learning chess seriously around 20 years ago. During high school, I read a few chess books and went over hundreds and hundreds of games played by chess Grandmasters (GM). At the same time, I played rapid online chess (blitz) on websites such as Yahoo! Games. In blitz games, each player has less than 10 minutes to make all his moves. Some examples of blitz time: 2+0 (two minutes without increment), 3+2 (three minutes with a two-second increment after each move), 5+3 (five minutes with a three-second increment after each move).

Even though I enjoyed learning and studying the game, during a period of five or six years (my “formal training”) I only took lessons with a private tutor for a few months. I did most of my learning on my own, reading books, and going over Chessbase annotated games and tutorials. Also, I never played a rated (ELO) tournament. Later on, in my early thirties (as I’m writing this in 2021 I’m 34 years old) I would participate in a handful of semi-rapid chess tournaments that started and finished on the same day.

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Owning Your Own Learning

By Walter Freiberg

I remember the first time I felt I owned my own learning. It was almost 10 years ago. I was studying piano at a local music conservatory, and I was assigned a program to learn during my first year. I wasn’t excited about most of the pieces, but that was what I was supposed to play. Right there I felt it was the opposite of what I had been doing before.

Before enrolling in the conservatory I had been learning piano on my own for 6-8 months. And I was the only one in charge. I decided which pieces I learned (regardless of the difficulty level or the period), how I learned them, how much time that would take, and when and where I would perform them. Everything was up to me. Until I started my ‘formal’ piano studies.

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Attitude and Learning

By Walter Freiberg

The state of our mind has a lot to do with the results we see in the world. It’s not that our actions come from nowhere. They originate from our thoughts. Eventually, the thoughts become actions. Our actions involved in learning anything are thus connected to our thoughts and attitudes. Having the right attitude is key to have good learning results.

A good attitude

In order to be able to learn something, we need to believe it’s possible for us. Only when we believe we can do something we give it a fair try. Otherwise, we might not even give it a chance. Why would you spend serious time playing soccer if you think you can’t improve and get better? Or why would you commit to studying chess for hours if you think you don’t have any talent for that?

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Long-term Skill Investments

By Walter Freiberg

When we think about financial investments, long-term is usually better than short-term. The longer we hold to our assets, the higher the interests/benefits we might potentially earn in the future. As long as we learn and get educated about the investment instruments we use, most of the times we will be better off sticking to a ‘buy and hold’ strategy. We can think of skill-building in the same terms.

There’s a difference in learning something and using it during the next few weeks or months, and learning something and using it for years. Of course, many skills are not worth spending years with. We just learn the basics, get the job done and put them aside. But these are not the most important, meaningful skills.

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Active and Passive Idleness

By Walter Freiberg

The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

In Praise of Idleness, Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell wrote on the use of idle time in 1932. Back then there wasn’t even television or the Internet. Nevertheless, people still seemed to find plenty of ‘passive’ activities to fill their time. What would Bertrand write now? Almost 90 years after In Praise of Idleness, the options of ‘passive’ activities to spend our leisure time have grown exponentially. We watch reality shows, read status updates on social media, follow influencers, read about the lives of celebrities, and so on. Passive pleasures. We are mere spectators of what other people are doing and creating. We are professional watchers. [Read more…] about Active and Passive Idleness