Look, 2020 was a rough year for pretty much everyone.

I'd quit a tech manager job that owed me money and had very little left to work with, got a hospitality and retail job to get some quick cash in, then Covid promptly hit Melbourne. No more hospitality or retail work for a while.

On the side I was trying to start a different business, but, in hindsight, that one was never going to work.

And while it felt like everything in my life was unhooking itself and floating off into space, Chess found me.

It was the first Pogchamps that did it. YouTube thought I might be interested in it, and it was correct.

I hadn't played or really thought about Chess since I'd been not-very-good in my primary school lunchtime Chess club. But here I was watching a bunch of streamers I'd never heard of (wasn't much of a Twitch guy either) play each other and I was captivated.

I think what made the first Pogchamps special was a combination of players playing the sorts of moves I might play myself, and exceptional commentary from titled players who clearly had empathy for their beginner audience and knew how to bring things to my level. Danya (RIP) especially.

So I made an account on Chesscom and started to play. And I sucked big time. Of course I did.

I started to put some work in. I got an openings course, studied tactics and checkmate patterns, looked up how to do a basic king-pawn endgame.

I got a little bump to my rating initially, and that felt good. It felt like I needed it. Like really needed it. It wasn't long before that little number next to my name took on identity-level importance.

On reflection over the years, I can see it was doing something very important for me. Perhaps not entirely healthy, but important. I felt stagnant, stuck in place, and I was struggling. The never-ending lockdowns and the financial stress and various challenges in my personal life added up, and I felt entirely trapped by the load of it all.

The thing about that little number next to my name is that it was objective. If it went up, even a little, I had objective proof that in at least one area of my life I was still growing. And I needed that so desperately at that time.

So as the number did its initial little jump, it felt good. Then the number stopped going up. A plateau, very early in the journey. Whether it was my emotional state or simply my experience learning other skills, a plateau this early felt wrong.

Something felt off. Most of the stuff I was learning wasn't showing up in my games. And I kept feeling like something was missing, like I'd missed the math class about addition and now I was trying to multiply.

No matter what you're trying to learn, those sorts of feelings mean there's something wrong with your method. Not with you, but the way you're approaching your learning.

For the several years before that, I'd learned a few new skills. I loved the work of Josh Waitzkin long before I got into Chess, and between his book "The Art of Learning" and Tim Ferriss' article on how to learn languages, I had become a disciple of deconstructed learning. If you're unfamiliar with the term, it's the process of taking skills apart, charting your own path through them, and learning them faster than you are "meant to".

In previous jobs I'd used deconstructed learning techniques to rapidly learn marketing and some basic code editing. In other areas, I'd used these techniques to climb from silver to high diamond in Halo 5 multiplayer, and I was quickly becoming handy with Japanese.

So I thought, why not? Let's see what'll happen if I apply those techniques to Chess.

The first stage is research, really trying to get a handle on the skill you're trying to learn. In particular, I was looking for the assumptions that flow through how the skill is taught. Every skill has these general assumptions around what's important or how to go about it, and it's often in these assumptions that inefficiencies hide.

By chance, I had two experiences very close together. First was a video that sadly I can no longer find from a top-level Grandmaster like Anand or Hikaru. In it, the player said quite matter-of-factly that visualization was the most important part of Chess.

(While I can't find the original video, GM Fabiano Caruana has since said exactly the same thing in an interview.)

I was shocked, because it seemed no one at the time was talking about visualization at all, let alone calling it the most important thing. It wasn't in the YouTube videos I was watching, or the courses I was doing, or the books I was reading. Nowhere.

Second was a stream from IM Levy "GothamChess" Rozman that I joined at a rather auspicious moment. He calculated a long line with a stunning tactic at the end. Someone in the chat asked "how in the world do you do that?" Levy's response was, "Oh, that? That's visualization. You just learn that by playing thousands and thousands of games."

There it was. I'd found an assumption I could dig around.

While I'm sure Levy was being intentionally flippant, his response highlighted the reason I'd never seen visualization discussed seriously in my training materials: the Chess world assumed that we improve visualization passively while we do other things.

But if Hikaru (or whoever it was) is saying visualization is the most important skill in the game, surely we should be pointing some actual focus at it?

I doubt there's a single skill on the planet that could be learned more efficiently by never focusing on the most important bit.

I now had a target for my research. My theory was that I would get better, faster results than most adult improvers if I pointed some direct focus at visualization as well as the more standard training areas. But I had to work out how to actually do that.

Another back-pocket tool I have for learning is the idea of Isolate and Intensify. If there's a specific piece of a skill we're trying to learn, we'll get best results if we can find a way to isolate that piece so we can point our full focus at it, and practice it at an intensity higher than the skill strictly requires.

Isolate and Intensify isn't applicable to every piece of every skill, but it felt like there had to be a way to use it for visualization.

More research led me to another video, this one definitely from Hikaru but unfortunately also lost to time.

(Honestly, if I'd known I'd be writing about this stuff half a decade later, I'd have downloaded a few things.)

In it he said the best way to practice visualization was blindfold Chess. So I tried blindfold Chess. And it went just about as well as you'd expect. I instantly lost track of what was going on, completely out of my element.

As I was doing it though, I realized it's not quite right. Blindfold Chess is certainly an intensified form of the visualization we need during Chess, but it's not isolated. I still have to play a full game of Chess and do all the things that requires. I just want to focus on the visualization bit, so I needed to isolate it more. I decided to do blindfold Chess, but remove all of the decisions.

I recorded myself reading the moves of a 25-move game into the Voice Memos app on my phone. Then I sat in a chair, closed my eyes, and listened back to them.

On each move, I paused, and gave myself the time to work out what exactly the move did. I wanted to understand the move as well blindfolded as I might if I could actually see the board. What's attacking or defending what? What lines are opening and closing? What's the threat?

My first go through, I lost track of things on move 2. The knights came out and I was lost. But I stopped, restarted the audio, and tried again. And I reached move 3, then 5, then 6, and finally after about 10 minutes of work, I reached move 7.

I thought it was a failure actually, because I got nowhere near the 25 moves. And I honestly didn't feel that different. It was a fun thing to do for 10 minutes. Maybe I'd do it again at some point, I figured.

Then I did some Chess puzzles, and I felt like my brain was just giving me stuff. I got a great streak and it felt effortless. Curious...

And I joined a ranked game online and I felt the same thing again. I felt clear, sharp. I wasn't hanging pieces and my spidey sense of my opponents' mistakes was on point.

Maybe there was something to this blindfold training after all?

So I committed to spend 10 minutes at the start of each session of Chess following along with the audio.

Within 2 weeks, I had jumped 250 rating points. In the next 4 weeks, I went up another 250. 500 elo in 6 weeks, and the only thing I changed was adding in this audio work.

I didn't even know if that was good improvement, so I started looking through Reddit. 500 points in 6 weeks isn't unheard of, but it looked to be very rare. Maybe I was on to something.

The next step was to see if I was simply lucky or if I was actually on to something.

I lined up coaching sessions with a number of titled players on Fiverr, but with a twist. When they joined the session, I was already screen sharing. I didn't really want coaching, I just wanted their thoughts on this audio-based blindfold training technique, and I would be willing to pay them for a session's worth of time of course.

To my surprise, of the five masters I spoke with, one said they'd use the technique with their students, and two immediately added audio training to their own tournament prep regimen.

What in the world?

It was then that Don't Move Until You See It was born. Named after the classic film/book "Searching for Bobby Fischer", following the early career of my learning inspiration Josh Waitzkin, it felt fitting.

(It meant I could also do one of those funny domain names where the end bit of the domain is part of the name itself. I had to find a registrar that would let me create an Italian domain to get ".it" but it was worth it!)

I had a website and I had a technique. I had a few beginners using it and a couple masters as well. And I had the idea of Isolate and Intensify to explain how I got to the technique.

But I didn't really know why it works. It was getting results, but why?

And I've spent the last half-decade now working to answer that question. I've pursued that quarry through dozens of books on psychology and neuroscience, numerous meetings with experts, and hundreds of hours of one-on-one coaching, getting to know the brains of adult improvers.

It eventually led me to realize "visualization" isn't strictly the correct goal anyway. For many adults, there's nothing "visual" about it. So I adopted a new term, "conceptualization".

It's not about the pictures, but the concept of the position in your mind. If you understand what's happening, pictures or not, you're conceptualizing correctly. It's been such a joy to hear "conceptualization" in the wild here and there. The term appears to be slowly catching on.

It's been the biggest five years of personal growth I've ever had. The things I've learned, the people I've got to speak and work with. And the mental health breakthroughs that having the firm base of this business finally allowed me to tackle.

And it all begins with a little number next to my name, and my desperate need to make it go up.

These days, I'm not worried about that little number at all. A Grandmaster friend of mine helped me to realize I had a choice: I could either pour my effort into becoming a pretty good Chess player, or I could pour that same effort into becoming the world expert in Chess visualization/conceptualization. I chose the latter, and I have not looked back.

I love to help adult improvers actually improve. To break through plateaus and feel the confidence that comes from that. I understand how much a little Chess improvement can impact a life.

But, deeper than that, in that first day of blindfold training, I felt something extremely special. When my brain was firing on all cylinders, spotting threats and ideas and patterns, feeling supercharged... Well, I impressed myself. I was impressed by something my own brain just did.

Nothing will bump your self-esteem and your sense of your own capability faster than being blown away by something your own brain just did. It is one of the coolest experiences we can have as humans.

That's my passion. Helping adult improvers understand how they think, feel confident and clear in their Chess, actually get the results their work deserves, but above all to get to experience how freakin' cool that weird lump of electric meat in their skulls is.

Brains are awesome. Yours included.

Here's to the journey,
Aiden