Nova Daily - 19 November 2025: Streaks

Hi!

When do you have the idea that you're really improving on your journey? If you're working harder than anyone else? If you remain consistent for a certain amount of time?

Everyone has their own ideas of what it is to be improving. The strange thing is that it's always something that you can only see in hindsight. When you learned one small new thing, how much have you improved?

I don't believe in quick success, at least not in the sense that quick boosts will effect a lasting change. When the 1227-rated Armann Petursson caused the greatest upset of the Reykjavik Open 2017 by beating the 2134-rated Martin Wecker in 11 moves with black, that didn't catapult his playing strength to astronomical heights. It gave him a quick boost in rating and (evidenced by the fact that this is still talked about, at least by me) a long-standing degree of fame. However, Petursson hardly touches any chess-pieces these days. He's played 17 FIDE-rated classical games since Reykjavik Open 2017, while Wecker has played over 330 games since. And with a few hiccups, Wecker has maintained his overall playing strength. 

Streaks

Many improvement regimes start with the beginning: building up the habit from scratch. Usually this means a daily effort to get you to incorporate the new habit into your day-to-day routines. Most games work with a daily bonus to keep you coming back and reward you for showing up.

These targets can have a great motivating effect, especially in the beginning. You want to reach the milestones that they set for you, so you want to keep working, keep showing up. Those gems that you get upon your Duolingo streak. Chessable work with routine streaks. For what it's worth: so do Snapchat, Overwatch and Candy Crush.

But let's presume that you found your initial spark to learn a new language on Duolingo. You've recently met someone online or irl and want to learn their native language. So you start learning, say, Polish from English. It goes very well, you can actually say a few words in Polish, and it's fun to do. You seem to learn a lot early on, and you can almost say "Dzień dobry" correctly. Quick success! You want to keep going.

But it becomes harder, and your native language doesn't actually provide you with a good basis to fall back on. The languages are very different, and you find that it's hard to learn, but you don't want to give it up. So you keep at it. Or, to be more precise, you keep your streak intact. It's not that you're learning Polish anymore. It's now only forming the sentences "Ja jem jabłko," "Mężczyzna je chleb i pije wodę" and "Dziewczynka lubi ciasteczka" for the sake of keeping your streak going.

If you were honest with yourself, you'd admit that you actually couldn't be bothered doing anything past your level 1 comfort-zone anymore. You created the routine of keeping up the appearance that you're serious about learning Polish. And maybe that real spark will come back in the near future, but until that point you just keep your login streak saying "I eat an apple," "The man is eating bread and drinking water," and "The girl likes cookies" (because that's what those lines mean).

And then you miss a day in your training regime. What will you do now? Will you work harder tomorrow to compensate for the lost day? Will you give up on the routine in its entirety? Or will you just get back on the same foot as yesterday, knowing full well that last time this happened it started with one day off, but the routine collapsed completely within a matter of one week?

The most important thing with learning and training routines is that you're honest with yourself. Why are you doing it? What are you doing it for? Does your current training help you to achieve your goals?

If you lose your Duolingo streak: tough luck. But remember: Duo isn't a real companion. You're hopefully doing it for a different reason than impressing a green owl. Forget about your practice streak. And forget about reaching or staying in the Diamond league. Focus on what matters. Same with the Chessable streak: this is an arbitrary success criterion that in itself is not worth pursuing.

You know what is worth pursuing? Mastering your craft. It doesn't have to be daily to be consistent. And it doesn't have to be 29 hours a day to be intense and productive. And if you really want to improve, you don't need a built-in activity tracker and a fable animal avatar with an inferiority complex to keep you going.

The value of building up streaks is in the habit and consistency rather than the strict regime of the streak itself. If twice a week works for you, then that's much better than forcing yourself to go to all kinds of lengths to burn yourself out over an arbitrary consistency that's actually counterproductive.

The secret of success is in its cumulative nature. If you take all kinds of small baby steps, they mount up and cross large distances. 

Puzzle time!

Today I had another very busy day but I still managed to get some work done on my puzzles. In fact I crossed 2600 puzzle rating again. 400 points to go for a cool goal, although I care more about doing them correctly and learning to calculate them well than I do about the rating that comes with them.

Here are today's two puzzles.

Puzzle 1: Black to move

Puzzle 2: White to move