How to Master Anything—at Any Age: Lessons from World Chess Champion Viswanathan Anand

0:00Being an entrepreneur is a 24-7 job. And when you're hiring, you need a partner that works as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share with your network, get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. For one thing, you can post a job. LinkedIn's new feature can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people. You get qualified candidates. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your business is the quality of the candidates.

0:30And with LinkedIn, of course, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of small, medium businesses say using LinkedIn helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. That's linkedin.com slash altature to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. This message comes from Capital One. The Capital One Venture X Business Card has no preset spending limit, so the card's purchasing power can adapt to meet business needs.

1:09Plus, the card earns unlimited double miles on every purchase, so the more a business spends, the more miles earned. And when traveling, the Venture X Business Card grants access to over a thousand airport lounges. The Venture X Business Card. What's in your wallet? Terms and conditions apply. Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash VentureXBusiness. Maybe the very thought that I have to keep improving kept me going. You hit that thing and you don't know what to do next. You can never separate psychology from the technical details, but sometimes they cause each other. The nature of chess is very restless.

1:43Styles change, the approaches people have changes, or suddenly new engines and new perspective. Something which is working now can be out of date in six months. You try to keep on pushing everything to zero. Even if you'll never get there, you keep on trying to improve. and over time, without you even realizing it, you'll start playing better. I think maybe even inaccurate self-confidence that youth gives you is a treasure.

2:09This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show.

2:22You know, they say you should never meet your heroes, But the other day, I met one of my heroes, and I got a chance to interview him. And then later on, we got a chance to analyze some chess games together. So I'm talking about Vishwanathan Anand, five-time world champion. But let me tell you this one story. This is what made him my hero. When I turned 40 years old, I was feeling kind of down. I was feeling like, oh, it's too late for me. It's never going to happen, whatever it is. It's like something's supposed to happen by some point, but it hadn't happened yet for me. By the way, you feel this at all ages, but I was particularly feeling it the day I turned 40.

3:05And I remember in order to cheer myself up, I figured, oh, well, let's just look at the list of the top chess players. There's got to be a lot of old people there. It's chess. That's an old man's game. Well, by that point, it started turning into a young man's game. And on the top 50 chess players, there was only one person the age of 40 or close to the age of 40. I think it was 39, was Vishwanathan Anand. And he's still in the top 20 chess players. He's my age almost. He's like 55 years old. And he's still among, I think he's number 15th in the world. Five-time world champion. The nicest guy on the planet.

3:41And it took him a while to become world champion. He wasn't like an instant world champion like Magnus Carlsen or Gary Kasparov. He played quite a few matches against Kasparov, against others that he didn't win. But then he just started winning and winning. He won five times. And then finally in 2012, Magnus Carlsen defeated him and became the world champion after that. But I asked Anand, when did you have moments of doubt? How did you get over those moments of doubt? What's the nature of talent? What's the nature of skill? How do you keep performing at such a high level, world-class level? And we would all like to perform that way into our older ages.

4:20And it's not just about chess. It's about everything in life that we try to succeed at. So I was fortunate enough to sit down with him for 15 minutes at a conference. I interviewed him on stage. And then, by the way, another highlight was two days later, we were commenting for TV on one of the games being played by Magnus Carlsen. And there was one point where I made a calculation that it took Anand a few seconds to see. So it was maybe the highlight of my life to calculate something a little bit faster than Vishwanathan Anand. But that's not the important thing here. The important thing is skill and mastery, how to overcome doubts, how to overcome fears, how to overcome age, and so on.

5:08Oh, one other thing I will mention is finally at the end of that day, when I turned 40, I called up a friend of mine, John Papajohn. He was not the founder of Papajohn's, but still a billionaire. and I called him John and I said, John, I just turned 40. I'm feeling a little down about it. And he's like, James, I just turned 80. And he hung up the phone on me. So anyway, here's Vishwanathan Anand. So I just want to tell a quick story. When I was a young chess player in 1986, I went to a tournament in Philadelphia, the World Open, and everyone was telling me, check out this Indian kid who's there.

5:45He's an international master, not a grandmaster. He's an international master. All the games that back then were about like two, three hours. And supposedly the story was this kid is like doing all his moves in just five minutes and crushing everyone. And so that, of course, was the then international master, later world champion, Vichy Anand. Spent the next four decades, you know, being at the top of the game, currently number 15th in the world. And to be at that age and 15th in the world. I'm older than him by the way so I'm not saying he's old to be at that age and 15th in the world is certainly quite an accomplishment we're going to be covering all this in hopefully the next 15 minutes so we'll see thanks once again for coming here too why do you come here?

6:32you're not playing in Norway Chess why did you come here? the weather oh perfect but also I like the landscape I like the peace and quiet and it's a great tournament a lot of friends here And so when I got this commentary gig, it was too good a deal to pass up. And now you have played in Norway chess before. I think in 2013 you played. But why isn't he playing now? Why wasn't he invited to play in the tournament? Do you itch to play in this tournament? Like seeing the players and the quality of the play and so on? I think the events of the last three or four days has convinced me that it was the right decision not to play.

7:11I mean, they did invite me 23 as well. I played in 22, and I just concluded that it's getting a bit much. It's just getting much too hard. Also, this question of being a part-time player doesn't work very well. It's much easier if you're just a full-time player and your life revolves around it, and your assumptions revolve that every day you need to work on chess and so on. Right now, I'm floating out of chess for a couple of months, then I have to yank myself back in, back and forth. It's very difficult for me to get into a state of preparedness where I feel ready to play. So there's on-off approach.

7:44I mean, even these hardcore guys going through events, like, well, we have noticed the last couple of days. And for me, that would be a bit too much. I actually enjoy the commentary side of things then. And look, I guess, and I'll ask you about Legacy in a minute, but I'm not quite sure I believe you about your level of preparedness because you still are number 15th in the world. And I know that's based on fewer games than a lot of these guys play, but clearly you're maintaining at a certain level. But I want to start like a few decades earlier. You know, for you, you competed in a couple of world championship matches before you were kind of hitting that top, top level.

8:24Was there moments, let's say in the early mid-90s or early-0s, were there moments where you, or can you share a time where you experienced some serious doubt in your ability to move beyond where you were? Were you ever scared you were at a plateau before you hit the top? I don't think I experienced that sensation while I was trying for the world title. Maybe the very thought that I have to keep improving kept me going. Definitely there were moments when it felt like, oh, I've blown the last two years of work and effort and now I have to start again. But it always kind of felt that that was my destiny and I had to keep trying.

9:03these existential moments started to happen more often after i became world champion which is also kind of logical you you hit that thing and you don't know what to do next there used to be this joke about people emigrating to the u.s that they thought the troubles were over when they landed in new york but in fact it was just beginning i mean that was a joke and it's kind of that you keep thinking oh i want to be world champion i want to be a champion you get there and suddenly the follow-up is i hadn't several good years as well as world champion, but definitely there were long periods when I was stuck.

9:32So in 2001, I was stuck for about eight months of pretty depressing form. It happened again briefly in 2006. That was the most positive because I felt I managed to apply a lot of the lessons from the previous times, course corrected much better and so on. The period from roughly 2009 till 2013, 14 was career-wise very frustrating.

10:28Candidates, at the end of the day, the most important thing to your business is the quality of the candidates. And with LinkedIn, of course, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of small and medium businesses say using LinkedIn helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash altature. That's linkedin.com slash Altature to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. There's a lot to unpack there.

11:01First, let's take 2006 as an example. How did you psychologically come to grips with this frustration and then motivate yourself to move beyond? Because I will add 2007 might've been one of your best years ever. You hit 2 ,800 for the first time, I believe. You won the world championship 2007. So in 2006, there was some transformation. You go from this frustration to this immense success. And many people can't escape out of that prison of frustration. So in 2001, one of the things that hit me very strongly was I had allowed a lot of problems, mostly technical problems. You can never separate psychology from the technical details, but sometimes they cause each other.

11:46If you are frustrated in a certain kind of position, then you eventually, that becomes a psychological problem and vice versa. So these things are connected, but I had allowed a lot of problems to accumulate and kept having the feeling that because I was escaping. Still, there was a period where I was escaping. But looking back, I look at that period and think, well, but the warning signs were all there. I needed to fix it and I didn't. What do you mean escaping? I'm sorry to interrupt. What do you mean by escaping? Escaping means despite deserving to lose a game, at the end, your opponent makes some small mistake.

12:16And that's one opponent. And in that relationship, it's fine. You can say that opponent needs to get better in that conversion or something like that. I was getting more points than I deserved for a couple of tournaments. And then the urgency isn't there. It's not like my work ethics were wrong. I was still going back and working, but not working enough in the right areas. And I think also the urgency, the dire situation I was in in some areas, I hadn't quite appreciated. So you drift along without that urge to self-correct. Like what's an example of a dire situation you felt you were in that eventually you realized you needed to correct?

12:52You start allowing yourself multiple mistakes in your execution of something. Then you should be going back home and training every aspect of it and trying to keep on pushing that back up. Even though 100 % you're never going to reach, you still have to use it as a motivator to keep improving. And there was a time there where I got slightly careless about the execution. I was more interested in learning new things. and things. But what's the use of learning too much stuff? You need to learn to do the stuff you do extremely well. And like, what did you view for you as what you did extremely well that you still needed to improve?

13:26I was quite resourceful. As I mentioned, I was defending a lot of difficult positions. I tended to think of that as a skill set in itself. But ideally, you should have good defensive skills while driving the need down to zero. You should be able to, or at least aspire for that. And I think in 2000, when I became world champion for the first time, then there was a period when I became quite complacent. I mean, you can still work very hard, but you're not working hard in the areas you most need to. In the sense, it's actually fascinating to see that many companies, they keep on doing what they already did well, but the world is changing or the situation, it's a little bit like that.

14:04The nature of chess is very restless. Styles change, the approaches people have changes, or suddenly new engines and new perspective. Something which is working now can be out of date in six months. Now we are kind of used to that, but this process was starting out earlier. In 2006 specifically, I had one very scary tournament. I had not had any difficulty with the Black Pieces for like three years. And then in one tournament, I lost two games in one of my favorite openings to both Apollo and Kramnik, two days of each other. The only thing I did was, normally I would have gone back and said, well, now I need some rest.

14:41I need to clear my head. But this time I was panicked enough that I started to work on these problems, almost like Linares is going to start in two weeks. And if I don't do something, I've got to figure. It was 2006, so it was Amber, sorry. But I've got to make a good effort there and correct it. and even though in 2006 the results didn't come right away in 2007 it went much uh so that's sorry in 2007 i lost these games but the problems had been brewing earlier but i managed to keep working in 2007 before i went to linares i started to work hard again because there was this clear path and in linares somehow i was a bit calmer i was still not used to that i didn't have the confidence yet, but slowly my tournament opened up and I took the lead and then I won that.

15:32So then you already had a feeling that, wow, I learned something from my experience and I could apply it.

15:40Once you recognize the problem that was happening in your skill set in 2006, did you have faith that putting in the proper work would have ultimate results, even if you didn't see them quickly? Like, were you motivated by knowing that you had a successful process for working out your problems or do you have doubt? I think you always have a little bit of doubt about your ability to do something but I don't think till 2011 or 12 I really doubted my place in the world elite of chess. Somehow that felt where I belonged and I had no doubt that if I pushed a bit harder or did something a bit better I would be back there.

16:21And I think that's the difference that more recently I'm not even sure of that. So I work in it from a different perspective. But back then, I was completely confident that I would get back to where I belonged. And, you know, you're still looking up at that. And, you know, you mentioned 2012, 2013. When that next generation, you were always the young generation, right, against Kasparov and Karpov, who held on to kind of their respective world titles for so long. And then it was your generation. And then this new generation was coming up. And I know you're a very charitable person. you charitably gave your world championship title to the Norwegian Magnus Carlsen.

16:57So did that start to really affect where you felt your place in the chess world was? It's more a question of something you know is inevitable and is eventually going to come, finally getting closer and then happening. I did feel extremely frustrated in 2011 and 12, I understood. But then with the perspective that I have today, I would say it's this, that the nature of chess was changing quite a lot. Just the kind of approaches, the kind of openings people look at, the flexibility that was starting to be part of, you know, the nature of how chess is played. You had to be much more adaptable. You couldn't just sit on your favorite lines and say, I'm going to do this and specialize this and that.

17:47You had to be much more nimble. because again, computers, computers, computers, they're solving problems faster and faster. So you have nothing which helps you stand out anywhere. So then you have to move faster. But, and so the way I explain this to myself now is that I spent quite some time playing my own generation. I played Kramnik in a match. I played Topolo in a match. Then I played Gelfand in a match. And so a lot of the things that I would have dreaded from them, they didn't do either because they were also working in a sense in the old way. And then in my tournament results plummeted.

18:23That was the first sign that something was seriously wrong. I mean, how can you be world champion but have essentially two years without a win or just one win per tournament or something like that. And in a sense, that problem manifested itself as Magnus Carlsen. But I'm fairly certain I would have lost the 2013 match to four or five people others or at least be in serious danger of losing to four or five others. including, in fact, that year when Kramnik and Carlsen were vying to challenge me, and they were both tied all the way and all that, I thought I would just lose to Vladi as well, because he had shown himself much more adaptable.

18:59His results were excellent, and I was envious. I mean, I kept seeing he's managed to change and play in new ways, and I'm still just unable to get into that thing. I mean, looking back now, it feels almost inevitable, and you can see our career arcs afterwards.

19:16I wonder about that inevitability. Obviously, now we're talking 12 years later. As I mentioned before, you've remained in the top 20 in the world this whole time. And I understand you haven't played as many games, but how do you think you have adapted and how do you think your mind has changed, your brain has changed in the way you play chess, in the way, is it more calculation? Is it more intuition? What's actually changed for you almost biologically as you play chess now? What I see now as someone in my 50s is that there are so many assumptions from my teenage years and thing about how chess is played and what's a good move and what constitutes a good way of doing things and so on.

19:58Even so many unspoken assumptions, even assumption I don't know till I actually see it happen at the board. And if I could lose a substantial bit of that, it would be much easier to take in a lot of the new material so to speak and the reason i say this that i would have lost quite a few people i don't think fabi yet he was getting close and hikaru is also one of the people i think i would have problems with they were just so flexible the way they started to play in the next few years between 2011 12 13 14 and so on they were adapting much faster. They were showing this flexibility, trying out a lot of new stuff.

20:35And then you realize, well, actually, I've been sitting there nursing this old stuff over and over and over again, but there were new ways of playing chess. But then you have to revisit everything. You have to change how you play the opening, but also how you play the middle game, how you play the end game. You specialize here. You try to keep on pushing everything to zero. Even if you'll never get there, you keep on trying to improve. And over time, without you even realizing it, you'll start playing better. But that's a harder process than I make it sound. And so on the one hand, your answer sort of says, oh, it's the chess world itself changed and players became more flexible, you know, in their use of computers and the openings and maybe the styles they would perfect.

21:13But I'm wondering also, was there anything that just from, let's say, from a raw skill or talent perspective, that does something change, let's say, between the age of 30 or 50 or 40 and 50 or whatever? Like, is it memory? Is it calculation? Is it positional understanding? How do these things, do you think, if they do evolve in you or in the brain? The general trend you could observe always was that your calculation worsens every year. You get a bit worse at calculation at some baseline level, but if you keep working at it, then you're also improving in other parts of that field called calculation.

21:54And so you can keep compensating enough for quite some time. But when I was younger, the older players had this advantage that their wisdom, the product of their experience, was very useful. They could catch a youngster in this or that in this little detail, this little corner street, catch them off guard. And that played a big part in longevity then. You had these obscure lines. You needed time to understand anything. So if you needed to study some area, you needed a week, you needed two weeks, and you couldn't work on everything. So the older people over years had accumulated a lot of these key moments of knowing, ah, in this kind of situation, that player did this, and you remember this as something you can apply in a situation.

22:39What has happened now is that the computer is killing everything so fast, a lot of the wisdom and experience is neutralized, whereas calculation remains the most important thing. And that's why the trend is getting younger. It's not just one or two people. If you look at the top 10, I remember looking at the top 10 in 1983, 4 or something. The average age was mid-30s. Yeah, and also I think Korchnoi was there. Was Smyslov still there? Yes. People who are significantly older. Yes, and the average age was mid-30s. I think already for 10 years, it's below 22. It's 21 or 22. And that's even allowing for some dinosaurs.

23:19So, you know, I'm floating around somewhere with my pulling up the average age. But there are so many youngsters. And every year, two guys will be even younger, will drop in and it compensates.

23:32Well, and then going in the reverse direction back when, like in 1986, what do you think? Why were you able to finish these games in five minutes? Like, what was the nature of your talent? Is it, was it calculation? Was it this extreme intuition on positional understanding? Like, what was your talent? I think just I had not had enough negative experiences. So I had this blind belief in myself. It was blind belief in a way because I could do some spectacular blunders. I would lose games that I'd been winning the whole time because I was too careless to keep double-checking everything. So many examples then of games I lost in one move just because I was too much in a hurry to stop and think once in a while.