M2M Day 337: Is this dumb, naive, and anticlimactic?
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For October, my goal is to defeat world champion Magnus Carlsen at a game of chess.
“Doesn’t this seem like a bad way to finish your project?” says most of my friends when discussing this month’s challenge. “It seems like it’s effectively impossible. Isn’t it anticlimactic if you fail on the last challenge, especially after eleven months of only successes?”
These friend do have a point: This month’s challenge (defeating Magnus Carlsen at a game of chess) is dancing on the boundary between what’s possible and what’s not.
However, for this exact reason, I see this month as the best possible way to finish off this project. Let me explain…
There are two ways you can live your life: 1. Always succeeding by playing exclusively in your comfort zone and shying away from the boundary of your personal limits, or 2. Aggressively pursuing and finding your personal limits by hitting them head on, resulting in what may be perceived as “failure”.
In fact, failure is the best possible signal, as it is the only way to truly identify your limits. So, if you want to become the best version of yourself, you should want to hit the point of failure.
Thus, my hope with this project was to pick ambitious goals that rubbed right up against this failure point, pushing me to grow and discover the outer limits of my abilities.
In this way, I failed: My “successful” track record means that I didn’t pick ambitious enough goals, and that I left some amount of personal growth on the table.
In fact, most of the time, when I completed my goal for the month, I was weirdly disappointed. For example, here’s a video where I land my very first backflip and then try to convince my coach that it doesn’t count.
In other words, my drug of choice is the constant, day-over-day pursuit of mastery, not the discrete moment in time when a particular goal is reached. As a result, I can maximize the amount of this drug I get to enjoy by taking my pursuits all the way to the boundary of my abilities and to the point of failure.
Therefore, while this month’s challenge is a bit far-fetched, it’s the realest embodiment of what this project is all about. By attempting to defeat Magnus as my last challenge, I hope to fully embrace the idea that failure is the purest signal of personal growth.
Now, with that said, I’m going to do everything I possibly can to beat Magnus. I’m not planning for failure. I’m playing for the win.
But, I do understand what I’m up against: Even the second best chess player in the world struggles to win against Magnus.
So for me, it isn’t about winning or losing, but instead, it’s about the pursuit of the win. It’s about the fight.
The outcome doesn’t dictate success. The quality of the fight does.
And this month, I’m set up for the best and biggest fight of the entire year.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
