Creating a Baseline
Whenever you see a commercial for some kind of diet or exercise program, there's one trope that the ad writers will always use, and this is the "before and after" picture. They have a picture of the person before the diet plan, or before they start working out, and typically they make the picture out so the person doesn't look so attractive. And then they have a picture after the plan, and you can see that the person is skinnier, or they've gained more muscle, or whatever. And the point of this is to provide proof that their process works. If you just saw the person after you'd be like, well maybe they were skinny to begin with.
Today we're going to talk about how this approach can be useful in the learning process.
One reason why you might get frustrated with learning is that you feel like you aren't improving. You can go weeks on end grinding and trying to get better and at the end of it you wake up and you're like, "is this worth it? Am I actually improving?"
This is why it's so valuable to take a snapshot of yourself right at the start of your training or study as a reflection of "this is how good I am right now." When you're struggling or feeling demotivated, you can take another snapshot of yourself at the present moment and compare to that "before picture" and you can really see the tangible progress.
To kick off my attempts to relearn chess, I went on stream last month and recorded myself playing 25 games, which I'm going to call my "baseline games". In the next few weeks I'll be posting a number of clips about these and writing articles about them. But I'm going to keep them around for a long time to reference like "hey, this is what my chess used to look like." It'll be evidence for me that I'm improving.
Obviously the baseline you set is going to be different for different subjects. If you're learning a language, take some random article or book in your target language, read a couple pages and write down everything you understood. It might be nothing, which is important!
Then after you've spent some time learning, re-read the passage and write stuff down again, and you'll see how you've improved. If you're learning an instrument, take a video of yourself playing some song at the start even if it's just like "Mary had a little lamb". Then you can compare at the end where you'll be playing something very difficult, or at least you'll be playing the most incredible rendition of "Mary had a little lamb". Tangible progress is an important motivator, and these kinds of comparisons are a great way to do that.
But you do want to have the right mindset when you're making these "before" pictures. The point isn't to shame yourself and say "look how bad I am right now." There's nothing wrong with not having a skill before you've practiced that skill. The point is to motivate yourself later, by seeing the progress you've made.
So in the video below, I'm going to show a couple of my "before" games. These two games will showcase some of the good and some of the bad in my chess playing at the present moment.
But before we get to that I'm going to make a short plug for my Learning Checklist. If you want a high level overview of the process and techniques I'm going to be using to learn chess and several other subjects, you can get it by downloading this list and best of all, it's totally free!
Now without further ado, let's get to the chess! You can skip to about 5 minutes into this video (the first part is a narration of this article).
You heard me making some notes in my post-game analysis and my accuracy and all that. In my next video I'm going to talk about some of those metrics I'm taking and why those are important, so stay tuned for that.
