“I’m Giving A Lot of Effort. Why Am I Not Seeing Success?”
We want to believe our success or failure is a direct result of our actions, but sometimes, it’s not
For the past year, I have been playing chess on and off. I have been at the exact same level, and have had almost the exact same rating. If anything, I have gotten slightly worse, not better, over the course of the last year. In my downtime, I have played a cumulative 20–30 hours of chess in the last year. I have played it in class when I am not paying attention in class as a law student, or just a game at lunch as a special education teacher. For anyone who is curious, my rating on Chess.com has consistently hovered around 750, which is just not very good.
I want to be good at chess. I fall into the tendency, like many others, to see my chess ability as an indication of intelligence, which would naturally lead to the conclusion that I’m not very smart if my chess ability is naturally correlated with intelligence. My counterargument is that being good at chess just means being good at chess, and that there are many more indications of intelligence. Even if my chess rating is not great, I certainly have the work ethic and drive to succeed as both an educator and law student, which I have.
