The Importance of Boring Skills

I started playing soccer when I was about 13 years old, so like I was still a kid, but most kids who play soccer in America actually start a lot younger, so I had a lot of catching up to do. But I remember the first year I was playing for my school team I wanted to learn like a spin move. And my teammate who had been playing for a long time and was quite good was watching me and in a polite way just said "dude there's no reason to be practicing that, you'll never use it in a game."

And this turned out to be very accurate for my brief soccer career. Obviously I should have been practicing some of the more basic skills that I was still clearly lacking like passing the ball, receiving the ball, trapping the ball, heading the ball, etc.

There's a common problem in learning where the thing we want to practice or focus on really isn't the most important area or the most important skill. And in fact you can often make a huge amount of progress just by focusing on a few key areas, but they might be the more "boring" things that you don't want to spend time on. But it's really imperative that you focus on these! Today we're going to talk about one of those key areas in chess.

When I was a young chess player, I loved this book: Modern Chess Openings, or MCO. I would spend hours looking through different openings. I could tell you the names, moves and even some basic ideas of dozens of obscure chess openings. Everyone knows about the Queen's Gambit, and the Italian game and the Spanish Game, but I also knew about Owen's Defense, the Basman Defense, the English, the Grob, the Blackmar Diemer gambit, the Ulvestad variation of the Two Knights Defense and on and on. And you know how much of that knowledge I used in tournament play? Almost none. I mostly restricted myself to a few specific openings when the games mattered.

And later on I would hear multiple times from different master players that you can get to expert level only knowing a very basic opening repertoire. Josh Waitzkin writes about this phenomenon in The Art of Learning where he would see other young kids learn opening traps. These are variations at the start of the game where if your opponent makes a seemingly intuitive move, they actually end up losing. And so these kids would win lots of games using these kinds of traps. But as they got better, they faced players who knew enough to not fall into the traps and they didn't really have the rest of the skills they needed to compete at that level, so they ended up quitting.

Pretty much any strong chess player will tell you that really there are two things you need to study well for long term success in chess: tactics and endgames. Now I liked tactics. Tactics are exciting. Tactics are how you win your opponent's queen and stuff like that. So I studied those when I was growing up and was pretty good at those, but you can always get better. We'll talk more about tactics in a couple videos.

But I was never great at endgames. Endgames aren't as exciting to study. There are fewer pieces on the board, and yet, the ideas are surprisingly difficult to master, even though you might think to yourself, "Oh I can just calculate everything out since there are so few pieces."

But the reality is that most games go to the endgame without either side having an insurmountable advantage. It takes some amount of skill and technique to win an endgame, even when you are up a little bit of material. But if you don't properly apply those skills, it's very easy to lose half-points - to draw a game that you should have won or lose a game that you could have drawn. This happened to me very often in my chess career. I was a great middlegame player, but I often let winning positions devolve into draws and I rarely managed to salvage draws from losing positions.

If you really know endgames in chess, you might even be getting crushed in the middlegame but if you can sacrifice a bit of material to get out of trouble, you might be able to beat an opponent who isn't as adept at the endgame.

And this is true of pretty much any skill out there. There's some "boring" skill that you really need to master if you want to be successful and have a foundation to build on. In soccer, it's things like controlling the ball and making good short passes. If you're playing a stringed instrument, it's something like crossing strings smoothly with the bow. In a game like League of Legends, it's learning how to get the "last hit" on the minions so that you get the gold bonus and can buy better items. Don't ignore these boring skills or you won't achieve success. Make these boring skills your passion and pride, and you will be a much stronger learner for it.

So for my current chess journey I decided to buy an online course on endgames to try to shore up this really weak area of mine. Towards the start of the course there's this "basic test" to see where your knowledge is. I forgot to record the first time I took the test, so in the video below you'll see my second time taking it. And you'll see I still make some mistakes even though I've seen these positions before.

Once again, if you've enjoyed my content so far I encourage you to download my free Learning Checklist. It'll give you a lot more tips on how you can improve your learning process. As always, since you're reading the article, you can skip the first few minutes of the YouTube video.