There was an article written in January 1985 Chess Life magazine by GM Andrew Soltis titled You're Never Too Old To Checkmate. This article, as you can probably tell, is about improving your game. However, there was a fact stated that really stood out to me. GM Soltis pointed out that the majority of players reached their maximum rating after playing for eight years. This disturbed me a great deal because I've been playing for over twenty years and my goal is to improve by over 300 points. Then this fact I realized transcended the chess world and is applicable to our lives off the chess board as well.

So why do people top out after eight years of playing chess. The answer I believe is you become comfortable with your game. It's like an old friend that you claim you don't want to hang around with any more, but every weekend you find yourself sitting on the couch eating potato chips and drinking beer with that same guy. As humans we like order. We despise chaos and discomfort to the point that we avoid change like the plague. This aversion to change is the kiss of death to us improving at anything.

A couple weeks ago my chess coach started going over openings with me. He asked me what opening I liked to play as white and I said, that's easy I like playing the Italian opening. Then he asked why. The truth is I didn't know why. For the last several years that is how I started my games and I was familiar with most of the responses so I continued with it, but the I didn't even truly understand the main lines of the opening. Was playing like this helping to make me a better player? Obviously the answer is no. How can I expect to improve if I don't understand why I'm even playing this particular opening? So why was I investing all this time and energy beating my head against the proverbial wall? It's because chess has the ability to create an illusion of improving. By playing this way I was able to win many games even some against players rated much higher than I was. I confused winning a couple games with getting better. And when I lost playing this way I could always blame it on not concentrating or being tired.

This is where chess shows that it is a great metaphor for life. The more I thought about this chess truth the more I realized that it's pervasive and infects all aspects of my life. I can't count the amount of times I've been at lunch talking about finding that dream job or pursuing a personal goal, but it's just talk and it goes no further. Why do I allow my dreams to be caged? The answer is simple and common to most people and that is that I'm in a comfort zone. We as a society have even given it a catchy name. We refer to it as Golden Handcuffs, but don't be fooled there is no luster to this gold. These handcuffs are not confined to your wrist they are around our throats and eventually they will squeeze away all of our dreams.

Now that you're good and depressed I want you to know that you don't have to be. I thought about this for a very long time and I reached the realization that the restraints we've placed on ourselves can also be removed by us. The good news is that we still have the key. We are not powerless to correct this situation. Inside each one of us we have the choice to either let our dreams fade into the ether or to pursue them with everything we have. Chess, like life, depends entirely on how much work we are willing to put into it. Nobody on the planet can make us continue to play an opening that we don't understand and nobody on the planet can stop us from pursuing our dreams but us. Change is not bad. It's not something that's to be avoided at all costs. Change is how we grow as chess players. Change is how we grow as people.