To Become a Master: We Must Start as a Beginner (Heroic +1 #1,417)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic plus one. Today, Emerson and I played chess as I ate breakfast. Here's him in the morning. Daddy, will you play chess with me while I eat breakfast? Me? Yes. As I remembered my heroic commitments that I made that morning to respond to a bid from Emerson and play with the kids and create a micro moment of awesome with Emerson. Target, swipe, target, swipe, target, swipe. And he destroyed me. And I've never been happier to lose at anything in my life. I'm incredibly proud of how hard he has worked and played to get better and better, such that he can now easily beat me. Parent tip. Chesskid.com is amazing. All right. So today Emerson told me he would like to be a chess master. To which I said, awesome. I'd like to support you with that and all your other goals in life. Then I said, what specific level of mastery would you like to achieve and by when would you like to do so? It's important to get clarity on your goals. In fact, that's rule number one of effective goal setting. Once we know the time target, we can plan accordingly. Know this specificity is the number one thing Heidi Grant Halvorson says successful people do differently in the most popular blog post in The Harvard Business Review's history called 9 Things Successful People Do Differently. Check out a link to that and check out our notes on her great book Succeed as well. So Emerson and I looked up the different titles the International Chess Federation bestows upon different tiers of mastery. Emerson decided that he would like to be what's known as a national expert or candidate master. By the time he's 12, he's now 10. Perfect. Now we have our wish. Then I asked him why he wanted to achieve that, to which he said, it would be fun and I'd be able to beat almost anyone. It's true, he says. I believe him. Perfect. Now we have our wish and our outcome or the benefit we'll experience. We when the wish comes to fruition, it's the first part of whooping and turning our dreams into reality. I dare say Gabriel Oettingen would approve. See our notes on rethinking positive thinking. Now we'll need to run that wish and outcome up against reality and see what obstacles will arise and what plans will need to be put in place to see what price he will need to pay and whether or not he wants to pay that price. And if his goal is doable, etc. We'll consult with a chess coach to walk through that process. It's above my pay grade. But that isn't quite the point of today's plus one. This is as we looked at the range of rankings, we saw that the lowest ranking is called National Class J, which includes people who only have a 100 to 199 ranking. Emerson saw that and said something along the lines of, that's not a very good ranking. Although that is, of course, true on one level. I told him, buddy, that ranking is actually the most important ranking. Then I said, you know why? And he said, I don't know. And I said, because if you don't have the humility to be that bad, you'll never get that good. And that's today's point plus one. You want to be a master? Be willing to be a beginner. Day one all in. Let's go, hero.