To me, go is a game of respect. It is the "right" thing to do to respect your opponent, and to be humble. This might be a philosophy I have in life, too. It's good to pay others respect, and give them the benefit of the doubt, and to assume humility yourself.

When it comes to learning, I have thought in the past that, once people start to assume a confidence in their proficiency in a particular area, the rate at which they improve slows down. I think people have brought it up before, but an example is that people typically do not constantly improve their typing skill. They reach a certain degree of aptitude, and feel that they've reached proficiency. Then they stop speeding up.

So I have come to think that this is a good attitude to adopt in go, too. Why not keep telling myself that I am *not* proficient at something. Then, just maybe, I won't hit a limit due to the satisfaction I have with my current level. I'm running into two issues with this train of thought:

1.) Always thinking that I am not good seems to be harmful to confidence. If confidence is important to strength, how does one balance between being confident and keeping from reaching an acceptable level of proficiency?

2.) Though I want to feel that I am not good at the game, have I really convinced myself that I am not at an acceptable level of proficiency? Is it just a facade? I can tell myself with words, "yes, I suck", or "yeah, I'm not reading that well". But at what point have I really convinced myself that I need to achieve a higher level of proficiency?

What do you all feel about this topic?

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be immersed

My personal feeling that improvement probably has less to do with whether you think you are good and more to do with how much you challenge yourself in games. I suspect things like how much you are willing to actively search for moves rather than playing out sequences you know and assess the validity of your moves in reviews will impact improvement much more than confidence. Confidence may impact growth by influencing some of your choices (e.g. choosing to allow/kill a deep invasion rather than protecting beforehand/seal inside, which can lead to more complex variations and more challenging games on average). Being overconfident to the level of thinking that there is no need to consider any "unknown" moves certainly can't be good for improvement.

Besides, I'm not convinced that it is possible to "fool" yourself that easily. But even if you can, I'm not sure it is good to purposely try to do it. Seems like a bad idea though I cannot express why.

Disclaimer: I haven't gained a stone in probably a year now, so I wouldn't trust the above too much :p

I don't think that when it comes to GO, You can't really settle for a certain level of play, if You are the "competing" type of person. After all, You can always play an even game with a person 1-3 stones stronger than You, and most probably to be defeated. That shows You that You are not "comfortable" to play with those stronger players, so it won't be easy to accept it:P

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Formerly Gorim

One nice thing that separates go (and games in general) from other pursuits is the fact that you get an objective number that tells you how good you are. Oh, sure, ratings aren't perfect, but I'd be willing to bet they're much better than, say, the review system at your company.

So: we have this number that tells us how good we are. This number also tells us how confident we should be!

Yes, fight the number, but never by lying to yourself. If it's 2d, don't pretend to be 5k and don't pretend to be 5d *. Lying to yourself is a really bad habit to have; how could you ever know when to stop?

Humility is to take steps to prevent error; if the 5d hears the 10k give the 20k bad advice, humility is for the 5d to mentally take 2 seconds to verify the badness of the advice, to check his first impression before correcting the 10k; humility does not demand that the 5d pretend to have an equal amount of knowledge as the 10k.

Thus far in life I've held many of the ranks on the scale, and I've noticed that the feeling provided by asking "how good am I?" doesn't correlate at all to the number that ranking systems give me. Trust the number; the part of your brain handing out the feeling doesn't understand about aggregated statistics. It only knows that you did something stupid/great in your last game.

Yes, fight the number, but fight it honestly: win your next game.

[*] Although, confidence is a weird thing, and can be a self-fulfilling prophecy if you actually have the knowledge to back it up. Bill Spight has mentioned here before how he gained a dan rank just by deciding to; YMMV.

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
--
My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

I believe it is safe to say that Kirby is erring on the side of humility (or even self-humiliation). Remember his study blog thread name, "Kirby's weakness trends" or sth.

If you play seriously your opponents will humble you all day long, in fact, the more ambitious you are the more humiliation you will suffer. But as important humility might be in a well rounded player to get there you need ambition and passion. Everyone can teach you a lesson in humility (by cutting the unprotected cut, laying waste to a position, killing your overconfident invasion, dominating you all game long whatever) but nobody can give you the passion and the ambition to progress if you don't find it in yourself or killed it by self-humiliating for too long. Leave humiliating you in games to others, don't inflict it on yourself.

And, I don't see how any go player can have the feeling to be proficient in anything, as long as there are better players around. I mean, do you really have to trick yourself mentally to see the flaws in your game? Aren't they glaringly obvious in every reviewed game? Probably you can have the feeling as 20 kyu, but as you progress the self-satisfied "I am so good." never really comes back. At least it did not to me.

True.

Also true.


The above two points are not that hard to combine:
- Know what you know, and be confident in that knowledge.
- Know what you don't know, and be humble enough to admin it.


When you know the limit of your knowledge, you can try to expand that, so you won't run into a blockade.

But it's also equally important to know what you are good at, otherwise you will run into a motivation issue. Humility should not go as far as pretending to be worse than you really are, especially to yourself.

That's a very good question, the answer of which could help you reach a high dan levels in life.

It is even more applicable for artists than for competitive game players. A musician must feel constantly the need for improvement, but if he exaggerates this feeling he can never play in front of audience. How to find the balance point???
While I like the question, I don't have any answer, so this post can be regarded as useless but still expresses my sympathy for the question.

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If you say no, Elwood and I will come here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week.

In a way what you're asking is: "How can I want to improve if I don't want to improve?" You've just layered on the ideas of confidence and proficiency on top of these. The real problem, a problem human beings have been struggling with for millennia, is how to want what you want to want rather than what you already want.

As for your first question: confidence is indeed connected to proficiency, but (self-perceived) proficiency is not related back to confidence in the way you assume. You assume that if you think you're "proficient enough", that is the same as thinking you're proficient enough to beat your regular opponents. And that's true, if the only thing that can ever motivate you to play go is beating your regular opponents. But what's more standard is, as you get better at an activity, to identify more and more strongly with the virtuoso, and less and less with the bungler. --- So what I'm saying is you can perceive yourself as a lowly worm in comparison to Lee Changho, but be contemptuous of people at your own level and downright disapproving of people who are weaker. That way you will have the confidence you need to beat your peers, as well as the gap between reality and aspiration to motivate further improvement.

But it sounds like what you're saying is that you are unable to change what you want (being just good enough to beat the people you already play), so you are instead trying to trick yourself into thinking that you haven't achieved what you want. That seems like a bad idea, not least because it entails false beliefs ("I can't win this game, I'm not good enough") which, like many false beliefs, leads to undesirable outcomes.

Humility and humiliation aren't the same thing. Whenever some says about themselves, "I'm humble." it strikes me as a contradiction and I feel that what they mean to say is, "I lack self-esteem". I believe that in order to be genuinely humble, a person needs to have confidence in themselves and be at peace (and ease) with who they are. When you talk about being humble, and point out that you are, you're probably not.

There is also a difference between being genuinely content with where, what and who you are, and settling for less out of fear of disappointment and unmet expectations (extrinsic and intrinsic). After all, if you don't try, don't have ambitions and aspirations, you can't fail. Safe, but potentially boring. (I ponder this quite often and how I feel about it depends on the given day. )

This is a very interesting thread!

Kirby's questions:



Fl0vermind said:


I would phrase it a bit differently:
-Know what you know, and be confident in that knowledge
-Realize that no matter what your level is, there is a lot that you don't know that you don't know. I think that realizing this second point is the essence of humility, in go and in life.

So although you can do your best to play well with the tools at your disposal, you are kidding yourself if you think you understand something completely. Even professional players are humble about their knowledge (I think), and are constantly reinventing fusekis and josekis, etc.

At the same time, your quantity of knowledge in go should not be correlated with your confidence in yourself!!!
But if you have confidence issues, of course this could have negative consequences in your go (and in your life)..

but abandon these mental barriers!! just try to keep your mind clear, try your best, and try to understand your mistakes after the game so you can improve!! As long as you are genuinely enjoying the game and carefully reviewing it afterwards, you will keep improving!
Don't tell yourself you are not good, be comfortable and peaceful in your humility and the knowledge that you only know a small part of the picture!!

In go and in life, you are just a molecule dancing in an ocean of possibilities... but you don't need to be an insecure molecule!! It just makes you suffer and helps nothing!!

hehe i hope you enjoyed these metaphors

peace and love to all,
dave

+1


Also, note the difference between being content with where you are right now and wanting to stay there forever.

I heard it several times that shodan is the most common rank at which people stop playing. Could it be they think they're finally good, and correspondingly lose all interest in the game?

I keep challenging myself by getting thickness in my games, but it doesn't seem to have led to any improvement.

Here's my own personal opinion about this. When I first started playing Go, I was 30k. All beginners are, I guess. So I'll go with my first solid KGS rank which was 21k. Since then, I've gained 14 ranks in improvement. Is this a proper way to measure development? For me it is since I, for the most part, have only used one account and really only played on KGS.

So If I look at that development, I can rightfully say I am better than I was a year ago, and can also add that I am a "good" player. Reaching SDK was one of my biggest goals awhile back, and I'm quite proud of what I have accomplished. And of course I'm grateful to the many players who helped me to get to where I am today.

And while I recognize I still have a lot to learn, I can still recognize that what I've done so far is pretty good. Also, if you're constantly berating yourself and telling yourself you're bad, that strikes me as self-defeating. Instead, I'd go with the mindset, "I'm good, but how can I be better?" It is possible to believe in your own ability without being arrogant. And I believe a positve outlook will garner you positive results.

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Slava Ukraini!

From what I've seen, nearly everyone progresses more slowly as they increase in ranks. Of course this isn't steady, and I imagine most people experience inconsistent speed at some point, even if they're playing and studying patterns are unchanged. For example, someone might take months to get from 7k to 6k, but then jump to 5k just weeks later.

Anyhow, there may be other things at play: if a person becomes more confident and their progression slows it isn't necessarily cause/effect. But I definitely agree that confidence can lead to stubbornness/lack of humility and consequently inhibit learning.



Of course many people have reaching 1 dan as their goal as soon as they learn what ranks are (myself included). And the way things are set up, people do not perceive another clearly-defined significant goal in terms of progression. The kyu/dan division is often given the most emphasis, and it is also easy to define. After reaching 1 dan, some people may set 5 dan as a long-term goal, or 6 dan, or 7d, 8d, 9d...1p.

In other words, I don't think it is because people "think they're finally good" upon reach 1d. Keep in mind we're both making generalizations. It's just that there isn't another goal that is as clear and widely recognized. It isn't that people who work toward 1d are simply trying to impress others, but there is an element of validation through recognition.

Finally, I apologize--I just realized I used a lot of words and really said nothing.

There is an apparent paradox implicit here. One presumably wants to improve, but to do so, one must remain both confident and humble. Is this really a contradiction? I don't think so. Go strength is a continuum, and it is not unreasonable to be humble in regard to what you have achieved, and at the same time to be confident due to your sense of forward motion. Your experience and knowledge are continuing to grow. You have reason to believe that you can defeat your opponent. At the same time, your sense of respect should show you that a defeat is no reason for your confidence to diminish.

Perhaps also, the two virtues come to play at different times. Before a game, confidence is important; our chances seem to improve when we sense that we can find good moves. After a game however, humility becomes valuable - either to put a loss in perspective, or to prevent one's confidence from mutating into overconfidence.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Many of you seem to be thinking in very black and white terms: "I'm good" or "I am useless". There are many skill levels in go, and humility and confidence alike come from knowing where you are. You can certainly take an honest pride in whatever progress you have made, but that must be balanced by recognising how much more you have to learn. You don't have to become the best in the world to enjoy the satisfaction of being able to do something better than you could before.

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Learn the "tea-stealing" tesuji! Cho Chikun demonstrates here:

I tend to play the board, and not the person behind it, and certainty not the rank. Too much frustration comes from trying to "beat" my opponent and be good enough, which I am never going to be, so, now I just enjoy the beauty of the game and let the purdy patterns my effort makes more apparent motivate me. Greater appreciation and motivation through better understanding.

I don't like ugly moves on my part, nor from my opponent. Sullies the board, dammit.