I Quit My Job to Go Full time Chess?! Part 2: The Magic of Small Steps
So I recently quit my job to go full time chess (& cornhole), but how did this happen? Well, I'm glad you asked so thanks for that. lol
I've sort of been dreaming of doing this the past year or so, but it always felt pie in the sky, like it would never really happen, but one of my favorite things to do with dreams or goals is just to take one small step in that direction. Something could seem really impossible and really far away, but if you take a small action step towards that something, perhaps several times a week, then sometimes things start to "magically" fall into place. The dream seems a little closer over time. The dream seems slightly more doable even. It becomes more real, just ever so slightly.
Sometimes as you go along the path you learn more and refine your goals; sometimes other opportunity arises as a result, and sometimes the dream starts to come into focus and goes from classification "obviously impossible" to "holy crap there is a chance this could work???" I didn't necessarily expect the holy crap option, but I think I'm close!
I guess I'll start by defining what my even dream is. I think "full time chess" can mean a lot of things, but probably the first thing that one would conjure is becoming a professional chess player. Sounds dreamy I must say! As someone who loves working on my own game, and playing, and studying, I must admit that if I could do that alone as a profession and perhaps travel the world? I would say that sounds pretty awesome! But of course as mentioned, I'm a new player and I'm 1700 rated (aka patzer lol) so anything like that would be way down the road, and well, that's going to be extraordinary for someone my age with a full time job to even get to 2200, but that's just it. I imagine that life as being not quite for me.
There would be tons of pressure to play at the highest level and to perform well at tourneys (rent depends on it? yikes, not as fun). So that didn't appeal to me as much as realizing that I could work in the chess world. Teach kids? Take on students? Do some coaching? Maybe volunteer for a chess organization? Engage in the chess community somehow? Help with tournaments? It seems the chess world has all sorts of opportunities that can generate income. And could it be enough? It always seemed that "unlikely" was the answer, but maybe it could be some fun side money?
So early on I imagined not a life filled with those things necessarily, but I had to ask what if my life started to include those things slowly? So I started a chess only twitter and YouTube channel (below)! And I started asking around about teaching kids chess. Is that going on in Cleveland? Would I even like it? Could I even do it? All valid questions.
And so in this way I identified those small but concrete steps that I could take action on. And little did I know, I had begun a journey...
To be continued in Part 3!
Stacia <3
Follow my adventure on Twitter: https://twitter.com/StaciaMelinda
Check out my YouTube Chess Channel
