The other day I was in an online Chess community I check in on from time to time.

One post in particular caught my eye. It had oodles of likes and comments, people echoing its sentiments. And I've been thinking about it since.

The post was clearly heartfelt, a product of pain. Written by a player, let's call him Sam, who was recently brought to his knees by the game of Chess.

The post was titled, "I'm Done with Laziness".

In it he described his frustration. The pieces he hangs. The threats he misses. The advantages he throws away. The obviously bad decisions and soul-crushing oversights.

Sam said he was done with all of that. He was going to be better from this moment on. It was a vow to the other members of Sam's community that he would stop making these stupid mistakes.

His strategy for achieving this instant improvement was simple: he was going to stop being "lazy".

Sometimes, he explained, he plays great. Way above his level. He feels on fire, totally in his element.

Other times, he's foggy, distracted. He often goes with the first move that comes to his mind. He doesn't look wider than his initial impressions of a position. He misses key things his opponents' moves do. He forgets things.

The difference, he reasoned, lay in his self-control.

If he makes a mistake, Sam identifies the issue as laziness. A lack of self-control. Not enough inner strength to make himself do the things required for good Chess.

Sam's mistakes indicated, to him, a moral failing. Something wrong with him and how he goes about life. The problem lies with him as a person and it just happens to be causing these issues in his Chess.

I don't think this is an uncommon thought for adult improvers. I was certainly a victim of it early in my own Chess journey. And it struck a chord with many others leaving comments on Sam's post.

Perhaps there's something about Chess that draws us into this kind of thinking. Maybe it's because Chess teases us with the possibility of seeing it all.

There is no hidden information in Chess; it's not Poker with a bunch of face-down cards. It tricks us into thinking we could see everything there is to see on the board. And if we could, then we should.

So when we inevitably miss something, we have to admit that it was right there in front of our eyes to see. We just missed it.

It follows that if the thing we didn't see was "obvious", then there must be something wrong with us. We didn't look deep enough. We don't have enough willpower. We must be lazy.

It's an understandable line of thought. Especially when you add in the pain some of these mistakes can cause. But it's incorrect.

Sam's mistakes are not because he is lazy. Willpower is not the solution.

In fact, strangely, willpower is part of the problem. Applying more will likely make the situation worse, not better.

This is because most of these 'silly' mistakes Sam's referring to are conceptualization issues. They're not about his knowledge or skills, but instead how his working memory is juggling the information of the game.

Our working memory resource is limited. And Chess places extremely high demands on it.

As we're playing a game of Chess, our brains are trying to squeeze all the pieces, variations, ideas, and plans into just seven slots of working memory.

The sorts of mistakes Sam's referring to are a result of running out of space in these slots. Of overloading them.

Willpower will not fix these mistakes. Because the drop in willpower Sam describes as "laziness" is itself a symptom of the overload.

As the legendary researcher Daniel Kahneman put it in Thinking, Fast and Slow:

"It is now a well-established proposition that both self-control and cognitive effort are forms of mental work. Several psychological studies have shown that people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation."

If there's a tray of Oreos (or TimTams for the Aussies in the audience) sitting in front of you while you're doing difficult mental math, you're much more likely to reach for them.

In our case, the temptation is rarely to reach for sweets mid-game, but instead to play the first move that comes into our head, go for that risky sacrifice, or to skip the part where we really look at what our opponent's move did.

Sam was overloaded and his self-control slipped. He reached for the cookie. He blundered his queen.

It's not laziness, it's a normal human brain function. A feature of a miraculous brain that was not designed to play Chess.

And responding to this by applying more and more willpower will only make things worse. Because the very act of controlling yourself takes up more space in your seven slots.

If your brain is already struggling to keep track of everything in the seven slots you have, using up another one of those slots for extra self control just gives it even less space to do what it needs to do.

But, even knowing all this, I can see why so many people applauded Sam's decision in that comment section.

Applying more willpower to your Chess certainly feels like it helps in the moment.

I'm sure we've all done it.

We feel our attention slipping so we do a quick stretch, maybe shake our body in the chair a little to wake ourselves up, and we hone in on the position. We focus up.

And things do feel a little clearer, sharper, when we do this.

The problem is that the little boost our willpower gives us is temporary, and very localized.

A classic study by Roy Baumeister concluded that willpower is a depletable resource itself. We only have so much of it in any given day. While there are ways to restore willpower throughout the day, it's hard to do any of them in the middle of a Chess game.

So there's only so long in a game that the willpower approach will actually have any effect at all. Eventually the lid will slip off and the blunders will spill all over your nice, clean Chessboard.

But the chances are that we'll make a mistake before we run out of willpower anyway. Because the boosts willpower can give us are localized to one area at a time.

Baumeister's studies also show us that application of self-control in one area will likely cause it to slip in others.

It's hard to start going to bed earlier, using social media less, eating better, and exercising more all at the same time. Habit change in each area requires self-control, and improving in one area often causes a reduction of self-control in the others.

In something as cognitively demanding as Chess, these issues are amplified. Applying extra willpower in one area of the game makes it more likely to yield in another area.

Using willpower to do a blunder check could mean you are more superficial in your choice of candidate moves. Using self-control to ensure you use the clock well could mean you don't look very deeply at the second order effects of your opponent's moves.

Obviously self-control is an important part of Chess. It's the piece that holds back the tide of our intuition, structures our thinking, and lets us focus.

But the idea that we can be instantly better by applying more willpower or self-control is false. And the idea that your mistakes are somehow caused by laziness is equally misleading.

Sam, or anyone who identifies with Sam, I'm talking to you directly now. Your mistakes are not a moral failing. You are not lazy. You are human.

You are hitting a foundational limit in your human brain. You're asking it to do things it's not designed to do. And it's performing admirably considering.

Resolving these issues in your game needs a longer term solution, one that's respectful and aware of your human limits. Beating yourself up for something that isn't your fault solves nothing. Accusing yourself of laziness solves nothing.

I won't go deep into what you should do instead here. I have devoted my last five years, this entire business and website, and my entire backlog of articles, to answering that question in different ways.

(Start with this series on intuition and this series on calculations for more on that.)

For now, Sam, just sit with this article for a little while. Let it sink in.

When us humans sit down to play Chess, we enter a dance with our own brain.

Sometimes it disappoints us, sometimes it surprises us. The way it operates is rarely convenient or exactly what we'd like from it.

But it's what we have. It's what all of us have.

And it's doing its best.

Work with it. Don't blame yourself.

Laziness is not the cause of your mistakes.

Here's to the journey,
Aiden