Achieving the Impossible

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Achieving the Impossible
by Brad Bollenbach
All I want to do, ever, is
play chess.
Bobby Fischer
Between the ages of 14 and
18, I wanted nothing more
than to be the next Bobby
Fischer. Sure, I started a bit
late by World Champion
standards, but I wasnt going
to let that slow me down. I
read several books on
Fischers life and games,
including the most famous one
written by the man himself,
My 60 Memorable Games.
When I was at school, I
thought about chess. When I
was working, I thought about
chess. And during the rest of
my waking hours, I was
studying or playing chess.
I never became a World Champion, unfortunately, but I did enjoy a great
deal of success. I won my section of the 1994 Canadian Open. Within a
couple years, I was beating my uncle, a National Master, with increasing
regularity. I even scored a tournament win over FIDE Master Jack Yoos,
who was and still is one of the top players in the country. Rating-wise, I
ascended to the top two percent of all competitive players.
Ive found myself able to repeatedly make this leap into the upper echelons
of almost anything I do. This might sound like bragging, and if I were issuing
these examples in a look-what-I-can-do-and-you-cant sort of way, it would
be bragging. But the truth is, youre probably a lot more intelligent,
disciplined, articulate, and talented than I am.
The only thing Ive got going for me is the thing that matters most, the thing
that can turn any dream into reality, and any Clark Kent into Superman. The
key to achieving the biggest, hairiest, most audacious goals in life is
obsession.
The Genius Myth
Genius. Its a word. What does it really mean? If I win Im a
genius. If I dont, Im not.
Bobby Fischer
I dont believe in genius. I do believe in talent, but I think its an entirely
optional component of achieving the impossible. In my opinion, the idea that
some people are just supernaturally gifted is a fear-based model of human
achievement; it gives second through last place a convenient safety net to
avoid having their egos bruised too badly. Instead of taking responsibility for
an inferior work ethic, a weaker effort in learning from their mistakes, or
even the completely wrong choices theyve made to pursue dreams theyre
not really passionate about, they can simply say that the guy who won is a
genius.

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But lets consider this rationally. Continuing with the chess example, an
obvious question arises: How can you be a natural-born chess player? How
can nature equip you at birth to excel at something as completely artificial as
chess?
And even if nature somehow did equip certain people to excel at an artificial
invention like chess, what are the odds that, generation after generation,
those extremely rare talents also coincidentally keep stumbling on what
nature built them for? Of all the possible fields of human endeavour, and the
supposed rarity of the geniuses that inhabit the top levels, shouldnt we see at
least some sports in some generations where the top levels take a huge dip in
ability, because none of the extremely rare talents of those generations
found what they were really talented at?

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Of course, that doesnt happen. The highest levels of almost every discipline
in which human achievement can be objectively measured (e.g. competitive
sports) are actually increasing, year after year, generation after generation.
But theres yet another astounding coincidence. Not only does every
generation apparently give birth to these amazingly rare talents, and not only
do these superachievers somehow keep figuring out what theyre good at,
but they all seem to discover their talent as a young child and follow a
strikingly similar path of single-minded devotion.
For example, Bobby Fischer is considered by many to be one of the greatest
chess players who ever lived. But consider how he got there:
1. He started playing chess at age six.
2. By age seven, he already showed a lack of interest in all but those who
shared his passion for the game.
3. He became so preoccupied with chess at an early age that his mother
took him to a mental hospital to have him looked at.
4. He was constantly getting in trouble at school for studying chess
during class.
5. At 16, he dropped out of high school to focus entirely on chess.
6. When he started living on his own, he devoted 10-14 hours a day to
studying chess, and did almost nothing else.
He wasnt a genius. He was a maniac.
Its incredibly hard to do what Fischer did, but its not incredibly hard to
imagine that superhuman effort equals superhuman results. Indeed, every
World Champion since Fischer started playing chess between the ages of
four and eight years old and they all followed a similar work ethic, with
perhaps a little less eccentricity than Fischer himself.
Even more interesting is the well-known story of the Polgar sisters, Susan,
Sofia, and Judit. Their father, Laszlo, a Hungarian psychologist, believed that
genius was made, not born. He set out to find a wife to help prove his
hypothesis and thats how he met Klara, a schoolteacher. They had three
daughters, all of whom were homeschooled and trained from the beginning to
be chess champions.
The results were nothing short of amazing. In 1989, at age 14, Sofia won a
strong grandmaster tournament in Rome, with a score of 8.5/9, producing by
far the highest tournament performance rating of any player ever, man or
woman. Susan Polgar became a Grandmaster and a Womens World
Champion. The youngest sister, Judit, became ranked among the top ten
players in the world, making her by far the strongest female chess player in
history.
As Carlin Flora asks in her article The Grandmaster Experiment, What are
the chances [...] that three girls destined for stellar achievement would
be born to a man convinced that geniuses are made?

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In fields where the measures of success are subjective, like art, music,
writing, or acting, the word genius is thrown around even more liberally,
giving it even less reason to be taken seriously.
Im not claiming that anything I say above is scientific proof one way or the
otherits no more conclusive than anything that the Church of Sciencology
would try to sell youbut Im fairly certain that nobody ever became a World
Champion at anything by convincing themselves that poor genetics relegated
them to a life of mediocrity.
Your beliefs have a profound impact on your results. The most empowering
belief you can have for achieving any goal, and the one which will give you
the greatest results, is the belief that hard work is the true nuclear weapon.
The Power of Maniacal Determination
Action trumps intelligence. If you want to get smart, get doing. In my
experience, few things are impossible if youre willing to exert an
extraordinary, almost fucked up amount of effort to make your dreams come
true. True genius goes by the name of obsession.
But what is obsession, exactly? And how do you cultivate it to achieve great
things?
I define obsession as the intersection of passion and commitment.
Obsession provides the fuel to put in the necessary work to get where you
want to go. It leaves no opportunity for failure, and makes you work
extremely hard to learn from every mistake, even when things already seem
to be going well. Obsession gives you the courage to constantly venture
outside your comfort zone, changing your strategies and taking new risks
anything to gain a new level of insight. Obsession maximizes your
resourcefulness and can turn a hopeless position into a draw. Or even a win.
Id go even further and say that the only way you can ever know the full
extent of your potential in anything is by practicing an unshakable
commitment to achieve the desired result. If you give anything less than
every fibre of your being, youll never know if your business idea sucked,
your training methods lacked effectiveness, or if you just didnt try hard
enough.
Cultivating obsession requires understanding the forces that guide our
actions. In Awaken the Giant Within, Tony Robbins suggests that all human
behaviour is guided by our desire to avoid pain and gain pleasure. I can
think of many examples in my own life of how this principle has shaped my
results.
In chess, for example, I got a huge amount of satisfaction from winning.
There was a profound joy in working really hard on my game, gaining new
insights, and seeing my results rapidly improve. Elsewhere, my goal of losing
weight several years ago was made easy by the fact that I was so overweight
that I developed stretch marks. I was devastated when I found out what they
werepermanent scarsand my desire to avoid more of them was so great
that I felt no other option than to lose the weight. (If you have them, they
never go away, but the good news is that they fade to invisible when you get
skinny.)
An obsessive drive comes from setting goals in activities for which you
associate massive pleasure to success and massive pain to failing. For me,
this has always been a pretty natural process. I find my passions by trying a
lot of different things, and a natural polarity seems to emerge that pushes me
strongly towards what I want, and strongly repels me from what I dont want.
This is actually one of the few times where the ego can come in handy and
act as a catalyst for growth. The immense pleasure we get from winning,
getting promoted, or seeing our business take off, and the massive pain we

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associate to losing, getting fired, or crashing our startup into the ground, are
often fuelled by our need to protect our notion of who we think we are, i.e.,
our egoic identity.
In Awaken the Giant Within, Robbins offers a technique he calls NeuroAssociative Conditioning, where he teaches you how to consciously wire
the right kinds of pain and pleasure sensations into your nervous system to
create the drive and zeal that will carry you towards your purpose. I highly
recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a more structured, analytical
approach to personal growth.
My own latest obsession is the game of Go. Im deeply fascinated by the fact
that I have absolutely no understanding of how this game works. A Go board
is almost six times the size of a chessboard, and even the best computer Go
programs in the world are barely stronger than a good novice. This is much
different from chess, where the best computers can beat world champions.
But do I have the passion and commitment, the obsession to generate the
kind of results I want? Ive only just started, so I dont yet know. Ive
committed myself to learning Go for 30 days to see how it feels. No matter
what, I want to study the game for at least one hour per day, and play at least
one game a day. I believe that one month will be enough to show me whether
my interest in this game is more than skin deep.
So what are your goals? Are you obsessed with achieving them or are they
just nice-to-haves? If you still havent found that passion that lights you up,
what have you tried so far? What could you do next? Feel free to join me on
a 30-day exploration of something new.
Good things come to those who wait. Great things come to those who dont.
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(47) Comments

Comments

1.

bobcat says:
October 1, 2011 at 3:22 am
I better sort my spelling i meant toooops

2.

Jonathan Berry says:

April 17, 2012 at 8:59 am

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http://30sleeps.com/blog/2007/11/06/achieving-the-impossible/

Brad, we met at a chess tournament when you wanted to be Bobby

Fischer. Could you email me? Nothing to do with chess.
jberry@islandnet.com
Jonathan Berry
3. Lecciones de Julio 2010 Lo que le diga es mentira says:
June 25, 2012 at 8:10 pm
[...] La accin le gana a la inteligencia. Si quieres hacerte inteligente,
acciona. -Via Achieving the Impossible [...]
4. What Helped Push Me Over The Edge twoseventyeight says:
December 6, 2012 at 7:15 am
[...] Article Here Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:LikeBe the first
to like this. Published: December 6, 2012 Filed Under: Uncategorized
[...]

5.

pr0ginoskes says:
February 5, 2013 at 5:33 pm
this is an excellent article! thank you for writing it. tony robbins is a
pretty cool dude as well

6.

Jamie says:
May 15, 2013 at 1:32 am
Ha ha ha, I like those facts about Bobby Fischer! Such a cool guy.

7. Tea and Expertise | Lanky Diatribes says:

June 17, 2014 at 5:38 am
[...] (See this story about Kobe Bryant practicing for the Olympics.
Starting at 5am, he had a goal to make 800 baskets before noon. A
personal favorite blog of mine, 30sleeps by Brad Bollenbach, has a
great article about obsession and Bobby Fischer.) [...]
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