On Greatness

I'm currently listening to Magnus Carlsen on Lex Fridman and I feel like he's flipping the whole productivity/success/discipline industry on its head.

Magnus Carlsen is the #1 rated chess player in the world (and has been for 11 years now), 5x world chess champion, and often considered one of, if not the greatest chess player of all time (alongside Kasparov & Fischer).

Here is Lex Fridman trying to decipher his keys to success:

Lex: "What do you do for exercise?" Magnus: "I don't know, I like playing football or tennis with friends. I don't like the gym, so I don't go. I just try to stay active, but in the winter I often slack."

Lex: "What's your diet looking like?" Magnus: "When competing, I like eating omelets with salad. I just try to not eat too much sugar because I feel better and have more stable energy."

Lex: "How do you practice? How many hours a day?" Magnus: "I've never been good at deliberate practice. I can't do it. You know, the stuff where you sit in front of the computer for hours and analyze positions, do puzzles, learn lines and openings" Lex: "So what do you do?" Magnus: "I like reading chess books, I could do that all day. And then I just think about the positions I read about." Lex: "Is that difficult to do, like is it hard?" Magnus: "No it's fun" Lex: "What do you do when you run into a difficult position in your head?" Magnus: "I don't know, then I do something else. If I get stuck, I just do something else."

Lex: "You had the chance to be personally coached by Garry Kasparov some years back, one of the greatest chess players of all time, why did you turn down the offer?" Magnus: "I just didn't like it. The first exercise Kasparov wanted me to do was to analyze 4 games he picked out where I lost and made blunders, and he wanted me to analyze the games and tell him what I could've done differently and what mistakes I made. I just didn't enjoy it. I'm bad at deliberate practice."

Lex: "You said you will not defend your world champion title in the next world championship, why is that?" Magnus: "I just don't enjoy the games anymore. It's very stressful and long drawn out. It's not fun anymore. I know that I'm much better than the other guys, but then you just play a small sample size of games and you make one blunder and lose the championship because of that. It's too stressful and not fun. I liked playing the 2018 world championship because Caruana (his opponent) was on an up-streak at the time and I was on a down-streak so our ratings were almost the same and he was an even opponent." Lex: "So you like playing when someone is as good as you, but you don't like playing when you know you're better than your opponent?" Magnus: "Yep"

A good reminder next time your local success guru tells you that the only way to become great at anything is to have iron discipline and the ability to force yourself to show up every day, even when you don't want to.