I’ve taken a lot of lessons from chess. I’ve also taken a lot of lessons from masters of the game. One such master is International Grandmaster (GM) Vladimir Kramnik. In 2000, Kramnik defeated GM Garry Kasparov to claim the World Chess Champion title. He held that title until 2007, when he lost to GM Viswanathan Anand. During the period of Kramnik’s title reign, there were a lot of articles published on his life and approach to chess. Several of these articles covered how hard he continued to study and prepare, despite reaching the pinnacle of his profession. One of the reasons for his success was how much he studied. He spent hours each day looking over professional games that had recently been played. This is in addition to any work on his own to discover novelties to spring on his opposition. Sometimes his game study led to these novelties. Kramnik, at least during his title reign, never stopped trying to improve.
Another guy who is known for having obsessively trained and prepared was Kobe Bryant. One of the things acknowledged about Kobe is he didn’t have the physical skills that some of his peers did. However, he made the most of what he did have, focusing on technique and repetition to put together a Hall of Fame career. How did he get there? He got there by continually trying to improve. He talked about how much he worked on self-improvement in a TEDx Shanghai in 2016. The specific part about his practice routine and why he started so early starts about 13:50 in:
The message for us, of course, is to keep striving to improve. There are so aspects to our lives that we’ll never run out of areas to improve. Why not many of us can improve obsessively in one area like a Kramnik or a Kobe, we can still get better. The choice of whether or not to do so is up to us.
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