Brian Johnson's son Emerson won the San Antonio City Chess Championships and earned his first $200 as a pro player. Johnson uses Angela Duckworth's formula to show how effort multiplies at each stage: talent times effort makes skill, skill times effort makes achievement, and achievement times more effort equals mastery.
Questions this video answers
The San Antonio City Chess Championships.
$200 (his first $200 as a professional chess player).
Achievement × more effort = mastery (summarized as 'Effort counts thrice').
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Arete plus one degree, a micro chapter from my new book, Arete, activate your heroic potential. 451 ideas. Many of them feature my beloved son, Emerson. This is one of my favorite ideas in the book. Biased, but I like the way he extended this idea from Angela Duckworth. I hope you do too. The idea is called Effort counts thrice. Emerson on mastery. Now, in the first micro chapters of our book, we had fun using Emerson's passion for chess and the inevitable glitches he faces on his quest for grand mastery as the context for us to explore some important themes of our work together. We talked about conquering fear and laziness while closing the gap between who we're capable of being and who we're actually being. As we remember the fact that as per the discussion about my tattoos on the trail, arete equals heroic. I repeat, the moment we choose to do our best and live with Arete, we are heroic. Period. We don't need to wait 25 years until we check off all the heroic things on our vision board one more time. The moment we close the gap and do our best to live authority right in that moment, we are heroic. That's a really powerful truth that I hope you can feel, my dear friend. Now let's focus on another chat I recently had with Emerson. This one was after Emerson played in the San Antonio City Chess Championships. It was an amazing weekend. We had fun going on one of our epic boys only adventures. Stayed in a hotel, which is always epic for Emerson. Fell asleep holding hands, which is always epic for me. Worked out of the Alamo before the first match of the weekend, which was amazing. And he did really well. In fact, he won his division and not only became the San Antonio City champion, but became a professional chess player earning his first 200 bucks playing the game he loves. I laugh with pure proud dad joy as I say that. So on the drive home, he and I had a great chat about how he is cultivating mastery in chess. I leaned on some Angela Duckworth wisdom from her classic book Grit. Angela tells us that there's a formula for achieving great things. It goes like this. Talent times effort equals skill. Skill times effort equals achievement. Angela tells us that talent, which she defines as the speed with which you can pick up a skill, definitely matters. And effort counts twice. You can have all the talent in the world and still never develop any skill and never really achieve anything. I repeat, effort can counts twice. Now, after sharing that with Emerson, I wanted to create a little video with him in which he shared the formula so we could share that with our community, as we've gotten a lot of feedback that parents really love sharing wisdom featuring Emerson with their kids. So we did a take. Oops, we goofed. We did a second take. Almost there. Then we did a third take. And Emerson spontaneously came up with an additional line. He said, talent times effort equals skill. Skill times effort equals achievement. Then he continued adding, achievement times more effort equals mastery. To which I say what? He said Effort, my dear heroic master, counts not once, not twice, but thrice. Here's to maximizing our heroic potential by leaning into our natural talents with a ton of joyful effort. It's time to move from theory to practice to mastery. Today.
