What is good and how does one get better?

After listening to a podcast with Lex Fridman and "Gothamchess" I heard about Chess.com and decided to join.  Prior to this, at age 45, I had likely never played a full game of chess except maybe against an app that annihilated me.  I was fairly certain how the pieces moved but couldn't explain how castling works. ELO?  Blitz? Rapid? Never heard of them.

Since then I've been playing like it is going out of style.  Winning is fun, losing on a stupid mistake sucks.  Now I'm curious, what is good?  Is 762 as a rating awful?  OK?  Right now most wins come at the expense the opponents obvious mistake, I assume at higher ratings those go away and games become battles of wit.  Is that still fun?  More so?  Can an average person get better without reading/watching chess techniques and games (not interesting to me).  

Posting this with full awareness that it is on the internet and therefore most responses may include some version of "you dumb shit I was that when I was three you must be descendant from the Lesser Apes/etc".  

Learn from your mistakes while playing chess, and analyze each move. Try to find out why you have to move something, as each movement is good to have a meaning

Dude, just give up at that rating!!!!! Only joking..... I started in Feb last year.... At the age of 42...apart from my dad teaching me when I was a boy I hadn't played chess till shortly before becoming a member here my stepson offered me a game .... I lost and had the right hump, so I started practicing. My first rating was around 5-600 and I remember being intimidated by the 800 players. Everyone seemed so good but the more you play and learn the more you see, it's like a foreign language... Anyway, move forward eleven months, over 6000 games and over 300 hours on puzzles and I just can't get enough. I have certain characteristics that likely help me with chess to a degree and some may say I'm obsessive about chess now (my missus) but I love it. I don't want to beat anyone, that's not what I get out of chess. I see it as a code or language that is becoming clearer as I go. I'm competing with myself. I love puzzles. In my second year I'm going to spend some time on openings and positional theory. Or maybe I won't ... As long as I'm enjoying myself then whatever path I take is fine. Just enjoy yourself, don't get too hung up on ratings as I did to start.... Oh, my stepson refuses to play me now. In all honesty if he did and I lost I would completely lose my s*it 🤣🤣

This gets asked a lot. The answer I like to give is it depends on two things: 1) your goals and 2) how good your chess playing acquaintances are. If you don't really have goals or know anyone who plays then 500 might be good to you. If you're ambitious and all your friends are masters then anything below 2200 FIDE might be bad to you.

A different (and common) answer that's also good is anyone about 200 points above you is "good" and anyone 200 points below you is "bad."

This might feel like I'm dodging the question, but you'll notice something funny... as you improve, your perception of yourself doesn't change much because you still feel that you do some things well and some things poorly. It's common that players never really feel that they're good, even when objectively they're extremely skilled... and with everyone being aware of their mistakes and looking 100-200 points ahead of themselves, there's never a consensus on what's "good."

During a Hikaru - Levy sub battle you can hear Hikaru complimenting players on finding moves. Sometimes he'll say someone rated 500 is playing very well for example. 

Then during Hikaru's main stream, when he's playing top rated grandmasters, you might hear him say a 3000 rated player is terrible and has no idea what they're doing etc etc.

So this is like the "what is good" answer... there are a few different standards. Like Hikaru I think of people who are competitive against me as good, but someone like you, if I see you started at age 45 and haven't been playing very long, I could easily call 700 a good rating.

Statistically, the 3 live chess ratings (bullet, blitz, and rapid) have an average in the high 700s.

Among OTB tournament players the average will be higher. Among smaller websites, the average skill level is likely lower (players on chess.com and lichess are fairly knowledgeable).

Yeah, 1 move blunders all but disappear eventually.

I wouldn't say it's a battle of wits. That's actually a common misconception. Chess is a skill like anything else. For example, if someone played guitar really well would you say they're witty? If they knew how to fix engines would you say they're very intelligent? Generally speaking no. If someone has been doing something for 10, 20... 50 years, then you simply expect them to be good, and being witty or not has nothing to do with it. It's the same for chess.

When I play, I'm drawing on knowledge and experience. Practically nothing comes spontaneously from my intellect or creativity. In any position there are certain long term strategic themes baked in, and so even when my opponent plays a surprising move, or a move I've never seen before, I can still analyze it in the context of certain fundamental ideas.

Yes

This is a bit of a long walk, but here we go... I like to say an artist is constrained by the canvas and their paints. A writer must put words on a page. A skilled chess player understands what a position can and can't allow... but it's from these constraints that beauty and pleasure arise. If anything anyone scribbled on a page was art then nothing / everything is art. When I play I'm not as free or creative as a beginner player, but even though I can predict the rough contours of how a game will play out, sometimes very early, that doesn't make it any less pleasurable to play, much like an artist or writer polishing a rough sketch or rough draft until it's something beautiful.

Yes, I think I have more fun now.

An annoying thing about chess is that improvement in the beginning is extremely tedious. On every move, the goal is to find all of the opponent's checks, captures, and threats. That way you wont lose anything due to a one move oversight. You also have to find all of your own checks, captures, and threats. That way when your opponent overlooks something basic, you're able to punish it on your next move. This sounds simple, and even beginners do it on some moves, but the goal is to do it in 100% of your moves in 100% of your games, and that kind of habit takes most people a few years to develop, and IMO it's a very tedious process.

Yeah, but progress will be slower, especially if you're not interested.

The very first great players had very few books and of course no videos. They improved by analyzing their own games, and occasionally analyzing with others.

I can't stress enough that you need to study hard to understand chess. Anything below 1700-1800 FIDE isn't even considered chess - it's more frivolously moving pieces and making combinations, hoping you'll come out better. The pro-levels are all about calculation. The fun starts coming from the understanding rather than the victoriousness. It's as if your human intelligence starts taking on alien forms - and that's why this is not for everyone.

762 is excellent for somebody who is just starting to take the game seriously.

ches

All humans suck at chess, no one is good. Even Magnus Carlsen (arguably the best human chess player ever) is bad. An average AI running on my phone will wipe a floor with him, not to mention the latest Stockfish running on a decent computer, which, by the way, also sucks compared to what chess engines will be like in a couple of decades running on more powerful machines.

But you can get better than most people.

You probably don't want to hear this, but here's how NOT to get better:
Play short fast games and quickly move on to the next game. Do not take time to think between moves and do not take time between games to do in depth analysis of your mistakes.

Improvement is a slow process involving lots of thinking, and then reflecting on that thinking to discern what part of the thinking was valid and sound, and what part was unsound and led to blunders. 

In my opinion, your rating doesn't have much meaning because it's not really a measure of chess skill. You're playing opponents in a competition to see who can make the fewest mistakes in the shortest time, rather than who can deploy the most effective tactics and strategies. 

Good is relative.

That Lex Fridman interview was interesting. Raised my estimation of Levy a bit. He gives out so much bad advice to build hos "brand" that I did not think much of him. In the interview, I saw a person who is sharp and witty.