The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

Have you ever tried to solve a difficult problem and felt your brain really going at it? It turns out that the exhaustion isn't just mental — it's physical as well. It was absolutely fascinating to learn that the world's best chess players burn more calories during a match than NBA players like Steph Curry do in a game, despite having far fewer seven-footers to move up and down the court.  But there's a lot more to take away from this story, too.

Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters' stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.

"Grandmasters sustain elevated blood pressure for hours in the range found in competitive marathon runners," Sapolsky says.

How To Learn Stuff Quickly

This article is written for software developers, but I found that the strategies are broadly applicable to most professions or personal passions. The hardest part of learning is knowing where to start, yet by combining guided and unguided learning — experimenting with tutorials, making intentional mistakes, and extending project concepts — you not only improve your skills but also become better at learning itself. By following these rules, you should discover more ways to become an effective learner, regardless of the subject you want to master.

Broadly speaking, there are two categories of learning:

Guided: Reading a tutorial, taking a course, watching a YouTube video. Anything where you're following a guide.

Unguided: Creating your own projects from scratch, extending a tutorial, looking things up in the docs. Anything where you aren't following a guide.

If you only follow guided resources, you'll wind up in tutorial hell. You won't develop the problem-solving skills needed to succeed as a developer. When you try to build your own project, you won't know where to start. It will feel like you've spent so much time practicing without developing any tangible, practical skills.

On the other hand, if you focus entirely on unguided learning, it'll take forever. Without an experienced guide, you'll need to reinvent every wheel, spending days or weeks solving already-solved problems. This is a long and frustrating road. In the worst case, you might wind up quitting altogether, convinced (incorrectly!) that you just aren't smart enough for this stuff.

Take the pedals off the bike

I love any story where a simple change in mindset triggers a startling revelation, showing you that things can be much clearer if you just look at the world a little differently.

I recently was trying to teach my youngest daughter how to ride her bike without training wheels. I did so in the usual manner - have her sit on the seat while I grab the handlebars and run along side her, then release the bike and watch her panic, freeze, topple over, and kick the bike in frustration.

We just need to do this about thirty times and she’ll have it down, right?

I mean, that's the way I learned to ride a bike, as well as everybody else I know. Unfortunately, it wasn't working very well. My daughter was getting increasingly frustrated, and I figured we just had to power through until one day it magically clicked. My wife figured there had to be some better way that we were missing, so she started googling.

Turns out there is a better way: take the pedals off the bike.