Nova Daily - 19 March 2025

Hi!

In two of my earlier posts I talked about perfectionism. One dealt with the difference between objectivity and practicality, in the other I talked about the limiting effects that perfectionism-induced paralysis can have on one's performance. There's a lot more to say on the subject of perfectionism, and in this blog I'd like to zoom in on one topic that has a lot to do with it.

Throughout the seven books of the main Harry Potter series, the main protagonist has a lot of admirers. One of them is Ginny Weasley, the younger sister of Harry's best friend Ron. Being from a family of wizards, she has grown up hearing the name of Harry Potter, "The Boy Who Lived," as a contemporary legend. After learning that she met him on Platform 9¾, Harry Potter became an obsession for her. She was so in awe of Harry that she wasn't able to hold even a simple conversation without embarrassing herself.

Gradually, as the years went by, the character of Ginny saw a massive development. From a giggly obsessed girl and a bit of a damsel in distress in Chamber of Secrets, she became a self-sufficient young female warrior by the end of her fourth year at Hogwarts. She had developed skin and nerve and was able to hold her own against the Inquisitorial Squad and on the Quidditch pitch. Notoriously she outperformed Harry's former love interest Cho Chang by catching the Snitch before the Ravenclaw seeker could. The symbolic value of Ginny's triumph over Cho can hardly be missed.

Without having realised it, Ginny had made herself fall in love with Harry before she even got to know him. Upon learning about this, Harry's close friend Hermione Granger secretly gave Ginny a few valuable tips. Ginny had to get rid of her obsession for Harry, because raising him on a pedestal would create a distance between them that couldn't possibly be bridged. She started to go out with other boys, which helped her get over the obsession that she used to feel for Harry. All of a sudden she found herself capable of holding an entire conversation with Harry. She could enjoy being in his presence without having the need to impress him, or even secretly hoping for an outcome. Bit by bit, piece by piece, the relationship between Ginny and Harry falls into place.

By the end of the series, Ginny proved to be a very capable young woman. Her relationship with Harry developed from a parasocial idolisation into a mutually respectful friendship and ultimately a marriage. And it all started by Ginny getting over her obsession.

Obsession

There are a few different definitions of an obsession, but they all have one thing in common: an enormous amount of attention to one single point of interest, typically in excess. To establish a workable definition for this blog, I consider an obsession to be something that gets more attention than it should. That goes for thoughts as well as actions.

Every chess-player has suffered from obsession. Whether you want that pawn to land on f6, take precautions against the threat of Rc7, or stay up all night to prepare all kinds of details for whatever your tomorrow's opponent might play, it all starts with an unhealthy amout of attention for something at the cost of being able to observe with clear vision what's happening in the moment. The attack can be rounded off without that time-consuming pawn push, white was firing blanks with Rfc8, and your opponent played the French Rubinstein instead of the Poisoned Pawn Najdorf.

Obsession has a lot to do with wanting to be in control of the outcome of things. But very often, things are so complex that it's extremely hard to predict anything accurately. That's even the case in a game like chess, where all possible variations are implied by the rules, and no randomness exists. Even in chess, the timeline of events is often so unpredictable that success can never be fully guaranteed. Even if you're fully prepared and make all the right moves. The only thing you can possibly hope for is a fair shot.

Another dangerous element of obsession is overstimulation. This can happen when during studying you don't give yourself enough time to let the material sink in. If you pot your flowers and give them too much water and attention, they die before they get the chance to blossom. You don't give the flower seeds the chance to take root and grow; that goes for learning too. In order to process information, it's important to allow yourself the time and mental freedom to detach from the work and zoom out. During your own OTB game, get up and walk around every now and then, just to reset your mental involvement. You may have missed an obvious threat that you see when you get back at the board. If you have a deep crush on someone, do as Ginny did and take a step back. Stop trying to obsess over the outcome that you can't control. You can only expect to get a fair shot, and obsession is the smothering of what could have been.

The game

Today's game was really fun. I don't know what had been going on in terms of theory, but I liked the flow of the game very much. There seems to be one bit of obsession with the own plans that white fell victim to, and I was able to capitalise on white's mistakes.

My thoughts:

Hopefully I'll be able to enter the analysis tomorrow.