Magnus Carlsen, the world chess champion, many believe, the greatest chess player of all time gave an interview to Joe Rogan a while ago. I watched it recently.

He explained that the reason he is so good at chess is because he thinks about it all the time, non stop, even when giving the long form interview he was, in the background, analysing a game he had earlier that day.

The reason nobody can “work harder” to beat him is that he doesn’t work. It’s fun and obsessively so, he couldn’t stop thinking about it even if he wanted to. When Joe says, don’t you ever want to take a break. He replied, “From what?, I’m doing what I love”.

He did give some nuance to this. As a teenager, his father realised his talent so hired a chess coach. Magnus enjoyed sessions with the coach until he was given “home work”. Home work, even in chess, it turns out isn’t fun. He refused to do it. Even as a teenager, he realised that forcing himself to do things wouldn’t work and that he had to find his own way.

He was later interviewed by the Botez sisters, successful chess vloggers. They asked him about his thoughts on a standard “square” defence. He’d never heard of it, but after he googled it, he realised he’d worked that out as a child and had built it into his game style ever since. He told them later, I found my own way and didn’t do anything anybody told me, which was the agreed best approach, because I knew it wouldn’t work for me.

I can’t stop thinking about Bitcoin, but when I say that, I mean every rabbit hole it opens up. In the early days it included banking, politics, economics, psychology, philosophy and many other “life sciences”.

Now, through NOSTR, it re-opens past lives like mesh networks, called LoRa a technology I was involved in around 10 years ago and my original industry, data centres and hosting, which I now find myself having to study CORS, critical in self verified NIP-05’s.

I’m struggling to revisit my past and trying to postpone my investigations, so I’m instead watching anti Bitcoin vlogs and articles to understand the non Bitcoin and anti Bitcoin communities position better. It’s still something I don’t like to do, but unlike Magnus as a teenager, I’ve finally reached a stage of having to do “work” to continue my Bitcoin journey.