Dogfooding

Three reasons why I'm working on my own chess

In product development, dogfooding refers to the practice of using your own product. According to legend, it started with the CEO of a dog food company who ate a can of his own product at annual shareholder meetings.

As a chess coach, it’s hard to set aside time for working on my own chess. I don’t get paid for that! In the short term, it always seems more valuable to work on content or coaching. But I’ve come around to the idea that I need to be working on my own chess. I need to eat my own dog food.

Here are the three reasons why:

Be more experimental

A virologist successfully treated her own breast cancer by injecting herself with research-grade virus preparations. In the history of science, there are many cases of scientists initially testing experimental treatments on themselves.

As a chess coach, I’m reluctant to recommend something to a student unless I’m pretty sure it will work. Would I tell a student to play ten blitz games where they must sacrifice material in every game? Maybe. Would I tell them to yell, “I am Mikhail Tal!!!” before every game? Probably not.

But I would absolutely do that myself. And it might work!

Remind myself how hard chess is

When all you do is sit on the sidelines and solve puzzles, everything seems pretty simple. Make a list of candidate moves, analyze them, and choose the best one. Easy!

But when you play in tournaments, you typically make many mistakes that are difficult to explain, even to yourself.

I want to study, and play in tournaments, to remind myself how difficult chess really is. And that the biggest challenges are usually not related to chess knowledge, but to emotions.

Prove it works

There are many plausible ways to work on chess: solve puzzles, analyze your games, learn openings, etc. etc. But what actually works?

I’m in the same position as many of my students: trying to juggle chess improvement with work and kids. Rather than offer a grab bag of chess study techniques and hope something sticks, it’s much more powerful if I can say, “I did X, and gained Y points.”

Conclusion

They say you shouldn’t hire a fat personal trainer, or a social media coach who doesn’t have any followers.

What do you think? If you are looking for a chess coach, would it matter to you if your coach actively plays chess?