Episode 94 - The Worst Advice I Ever Got
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[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome back to Next Level Chess Podcast. I'm Grandmaster Noël Studer, and today I have a very personal episode for you. So if you want strictly chess advice, this is not very strictly chess advice, but I believe it will help you probably in chess and outside of chess as well. So I wanna talk about the worst advice I got in the past five years of being a professional chess coach.

And this one advice has come in many different flavors and ways, but the essence of it was something like that. "Don't tell people it is hard. You need to make it fun. You need to make it easy. Otherwise, they'll never buy anything from you."

And I truly [00:01:00] believe that the people who told me this were well-meaning. It was just like, "Hey, if you're..." Let's put it this way, from my perspective, "If you're too honest, if you tell them how real chess improvement is actually going to be, if you put clear boundaries on what to expect and what not to expect, you won't make a living from it."

Nobody will buy this, and so you need to make some trade-offs, let's put it this way, to be able to sell things. And this really confused me and wasn't making me that happy to hear.

Because it put me in a clinch as well. Like, I always wanted to be myself, to go deep, to tell the truth, to say the uncomfortable thing as well. But I won't lie, obviously, I also wanted to grow my audience. And at the beginning, when I started, actually, I didn't want to make a living from it. It was just like, "Okay, [00:02:00] let's give this knowledge away and then move on."

But when I decided, "Okay, I can actually make this a business. This is super cool. This is what I really enjoy doing in my life," obviously, I wanted to make sure that this is something that gets in the finances so I can keep doing it.

And then sometimes I would think of this advice when I would look at bigger creators with millions of followers, and I would think, "Hmm, yeah, maybe these people were right telling me this." Because if you package things better, if you maybe soften some things, if you make some things easier to digest and swallow, you can reach a much bigger audience.

And so I also dabbled in it for a few times. For example, I made two opening videos on my YouTube channel, and while they were very different from the usual quick promise, "win with this opening immediately" type of opening stuff you see on YouTube, and they had plans and ideas, and it [00:03:00] was more slower paced, I just felt like this still isn't me. I tell my students, "Don't worry about openings."

And, just to make clear, I'm not saying never study openings, but I don't think the world really needs another YouTuber making opening videos. So it wasn't me. And, that's why at the end of the day now I unlisted both of them. Even when they did well, even when people were happy with it, because it just wasn't me.

And I started realizing that really every time I try to be someone else, it made me miserable. And here's the one thing that is so important for you to know, and nobody tells you this. You can't be yourself and optimize for the algorithm. Those two are clearly at odds. And, as a creator, you need to pick.

Personally, while I was always more in the direction of being [00:04:00] myself, I only recently made a very clear decision to fully commit to my choice. So on February 20th this year, I published a newsletter and article called The Price of Admission. And that's where I was really leaning in hardly into this chess is going to be hard philosophy.

Like, this is a skill-based game. Uh, You're going to have to do things that you might not like if you really want long-lasting and real improvements. From then on, I cut out even the minimal sugarcoating there might have been. And every article, every YouTube video, everything I create is straight what I believe to be true.

And here's the amazing thing. What happened, I was basically bracing for impact. Like, oh, I'm choosing being myself over having more reach and all of these things. But what happened?

The replies to newsletters and articles and these podcast episodes got much more personal, much more [00:05:00] thoughtful. I do reach completely the right audience now. Like, everybody that actually listens to me or reads my stuff is aligned with what I'm teaching, so that's way more fun for me. And also, instead of people walking away, when I launched Real Chess Training in March, so a month after writing this article, 400 people since then have joined up for this training that every time I talk about it, I say, "It's going to be hard.

It's the whole point to put you in a difficult situation. It's the whole point that you make mistakes." The whole point of Real Chess Training is that it feels really, really difficult, and, sometimes I get emails of like, "Hey, my brain hurts after doing this, but it's the right way of doing it.

I really enjoy that my brain hurts after doing this." But there is no like, "Oh, this is quick and easy." Absolutely not. And more people have signed up than I expected.

And so this is amazing, and I just wanted to share this message. There is a [00:06:00] way where you can be yourself and still have an impact, and maybe, if your goals is to be a billionaire, maybe, well, that's difficult. But if you have a niche like I have, you can fully be yourself, and it might even work better from a results perspective than just, three-quarters being yourself.

And much more importantly than the results, I just feel super alive. I really enjoy that I can sit down, I can think about something, and I just write it out exactly how I would say it to my wife or exactly how I would say it to a friend. That's it. There's no, "Oh, that might be a little bit too hard.

Maybe I have to soften this." No, no, no, no, no. It's just however I think things are in the chess world, well, that's what I'm writing. That's what I'm publishing on YouTube. And you might have seen that recently I published a video on [00:07:00] chess reps, on YouTube, also calling out grandmasters Kerilo and Caruana.

So, it's just if I think something is really not what people promise it is, then I'm ready to just say that out loud, and it feels so liberating. Highly recommend it.

Hey, guys, just two quick things before you take off. If you enjoyed this episode and want more structured chess improvement tips from myself, check out my newsletter at nextlevelchess.com/newsletter.

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So thank you, thank you so much for listening, and thank you for spreading the word about the Next Level Chess Podcast. Now, that's all from me. Thank you for listening, and see you next

[00:09:00] time.