Joshe

Not true after Rxh7. Look at the eval bar on the left. Black to move here: Nothing black can do other than take the rook, the bishop, or try to check the king. Probably best is to take the rook. But if they do that, there's no way to prevent e5 pawn promotion without taking the bishop as well.

I was just going over possible continuations. No matter the continuation, black can't win if white plays: a8 -> a7 -> h7. Is that not the solution?

I know how to win but not sure if it's optimal. Rook to a7 then a8, then take black rook on h7. Black only has 2 options if not in check. 1. Recapture white rook on h7 2. Trade b2 rook for white bishop and after a1 pawn recaptures rook, black king recaptures rook on h7, which liquidates everything but pawns. White promotes faster with option 1, which looks like this: But black can take the long way around losing with option 2. After liquidation, it looks like this: What am I missing?

A sequence that "is winning" or forced checkmate?

In that case, you'd recapture rook which would lead to white getting a passed pawn.

Rook a8 check -> a7 check -> take black rook w/ check -> black king recaptures on h7 -> push e5 pawn. Black can't catch it before promotion.

Same here. You might like the Stafford gambit for black.

I was never optimistic. As if they'd allow the release of evidence that implicates them in crimes people find most disgusting. Trump can't allow it to be known he's a tweedo because it would be his end. Which is why they'd stop at nothing to prevent this.

This guy has a good idea: Rather than doing random daily puzzles, stick to a set of roughly 100–300 tactical motif puzzles and use spaced-repetition software like Anki to drill them until they become second nature. Eventually, the patterns just show up without conscious processing, like magic. Pattern-recognition takes much longer if just keep doing random puzzles.

The position is probably close to equal if you move rook to e3 because black just moves pawn to d5, not only defending the knight but cutting off white's bishop mobility. You have to take night first then rook e3. Queen can't retreat and protect rook on e8, so you gobble up the cookie and make the chicken run to h7. Then black is down a rook and black's bishop can't come out without losing the other rook and the f7 pawn is weak and the entire position for black has collapsed. Could also calculate the line knight takes knight, sac the bishop on f7 check, queen h5 check. Stopping there because too much calculation but could be something there. Probably not. Black could just decline the sac.

That's only because you know that when you're presented with puzzles like "black to move and win" the solution is almost always counter-intuitive, otherwise it wouldn't make for a good puzzle. So you relied on a heuristic that doesn't exist in real games. Not so easy to find when the clock is ticking and you don't know you have mate in 2.

Nice profile pic 😉. Those eyes are doing something!

You should definitely seek out leverage and identify threats, but only while in an operable structure. If your goal is financial freedom and you're looking for leverage or protection outside anything you’re actually doing, you're delaying contact with the only thing that can teach you. I spent 15 years doing this and am much further behind than I'd like. I was supposed to be free by now, but I'm not. I've paid for these insights. Learn from my mistakes. Example, I have high self-efficacy, can figure most things out and have a cognitive edge over most people, so I always assumed I would easily acquire financial freedom because how hard could it be competing with average people? "If these fools can do it, so can I!" I had all these ideas about how all I had to do was learn how to build websites, digital products, learn SEO, online marketing, and it's off to the races. I thought that I'd out-maneuver or out-SEO everyone because I would find the leverage they'd miss and I'd put in more work than them. I was happy and complacent in the loop of collecting knowledge and theory without testing it, because I thought I was stockpiling leverage. I had knowledge and ideas, but no true operational knowledge. No matter how many articles I read, it was all too vague. I didn't know what advice was right because I wasn't testing any of it. It was only about 10 years later when I actually made a website and tried to compete in the real-world that I found out all my ideas about how easy it was going to be was all bullshit. If you had 24/7 exclusive access to the best business mind on the planet for a whole year, he couldn't guide you to financial freedom because the bottleneck is not access to intelligence, wisdom, or advice - it's access to feedback. Only seek leverage for your near-term problems - don't stockpile. This one principle takes people with very little development from rags to riches all the time. When it comes to making money, intelligence doesn't compound the way we all think it does.

What would you say to someone who insists they need to study hydrodynamics before they learn to swim? You'd tell them: get in, fail, adjust, repeat. That's also the loop for money. You need a functional foundation, which is: an offer, an audience, and a feedback loop. Pick a simple service, try to sell it, fail, adjust, repeat. This is the only theory that adds money to your bank account.

Sustained enjoyment isn't a mindset - it's a consequence of efficacy and agency. Enjoyment comes from experiencing that your effort works (efficacy) and agency (felt control + efficacy + predictable results) is what makes that enjoyment persist. You can't "enjoy the work" until you have enough efficacy to experience agency in it. This is why people grow to enjoy things they initially disliked once they become competent. Nobody starts out loving Excel spreadsheets. It's only when they can bend it to their will they start to enjoy it. Before efficacy, there is no enjoyment. There can be willingness to try and curiosity, but enjoyment only comes after efficacy and agency. A med student reading a textbook can enjoy it if they're understanding it and everything is clicking. But if they're reading the same page five times and nothing clicks, they can't enjoy it no mater how committed they are. Also, a med student might not feel "I'm becoming a doctor," but they can feel "I understand this chapter." Small efficacy and agency wins like this sustain them more than the vision of becoming a doctor.

Structure creates early leverage Leverage produces agency Agency generates motivation Motivation makes discipline tolerable Discipline stabilizes long-term effort Structure creates leverage by turning effort into visible progress. Once progress is visible, motivation and discipline activate without force. That's the loop you want to engage. @blankisomeone You can get financial freedom with little skill acquisition. People do it all the time. I acquired technical skills and I make money with them, but I see so many people way less competent than me who put in way less work than me, making way more money than me. Check out the Youtube channel "Upflip". This channel has tons of examples of how people with little skill are making insane money with low-barrier businesses. The biggest advantage of starting at the bottom is you have tons of options. Check out this kid making bank. He's not some skilled, extraordinary grinder. You could have this business off the ground in no time.

@Leo Gura How can OP tolerate long horizons where effort doesn't quickly restore agency?

That "urgency" is fear. Fear of staying locked into what you perceive as hell, and you see no clear way out. This creates a very heavy load. This desire to escape is so strong that it dominates your experience. It nags at you all the time and pressure accumulates. "Patience" is not the antidote. You only need patience if you continue feeding the problem. The antidote is to forget about the outcome and submerse yourself in work, and trust that reality will see you through while you get your ducks in a row. The good news is you're still young. You have plenty of time but you have to get going because it goes by fast. Breaking free from your loop will take some time, but the mind is malleable. If you distract it with work for long enough, it will drop the fear that currently dominates. Doom thoughts keep your fear alive. Starve it out by replacing the doom thoughts with productive action, such that the slate of consciousness is preoccupied with processes other than fear generation. This is the mechanism behind all psychological change.

100%. If "grieving widow" dominates your Erika Kirk frame, it's the same thing as thinking "Trump is a great man who pours his heart into doing everything he can to make America great". Structurally, there's no difference. Structurally, you're being a conformist and skewing reality due to blindspots in the domain of reading people.

How to uproot the baser drives and act like a robot? The simplest strategy that comes to mind is that of David Goggins: just quit being a bitch and do it. lol. But it doesn't work like that for most people - Goggins has a unique motivational structure. Some of the things involved are energy management, habit removal and formation, inertia, entropy, motivation, interpretation. Each of these play a role in why you can't just behave like a robot. People get this idea that they can override all that and just be like Goggins if they only had the right perspective, but it's not that simple. Maybe the real question is something like: How can you want to work 10 hours a day? I think energy, habits, and interpretation are the levers, but it's very complicated and each person would need a tailored strategy. Another strategy would be instead of trying to force behavior, design systems that turn you into the person you want to become over time. That's probably best for most people. Self-help often fails because loads spike all at once and makes people crash and burn, which opens the floodgates and everything they've been trying to keep out comes rushing back in. So maybe implement change very slowly, such that you barely perceive any agitation from the changes. Also, when you do change, be careful not to associate it with your identity, like "I'm someone who works 10 hours a day". This increases load. Now if you miss a day, it's not just a missed day, it's an identity threat. This is subtle but I think it's a big reason for failure. No matter your strategy, I think you need ample, clean energy. If you're running on fumes, stressed, or depressed, the whole pursuit will be a neurotic nightmare.

Exactly. And accepting that lot takes courage and sacrifice.

For leverage in all problem spaces, the best you can do is to always be vigilant about what is true or false. Everytime you get something wrong, get to the bottom of how it happened. Over time, clarity compounds.

PLEASE GOD!!! LET THIS BE THE ONE THAT SAYS I'M NOT OUT OF MY FUCKING MIND!!! 😂

Yeah, conversing with you here has prompted me to dive deep into motivation. I've learned a ton about motivation in the past few days. It's such an interesting and fruitful domain of inquiry. Some ideas: Motivation: Energy released to restore or expand control at the currently engaged layer. We unconsciously shift between the layers, thus making motivation inconsistent. Your nervous system is made of stacked control loops, running at different layers of reality. A control loop is the opposite of being at the mercy of things. Motivation is the fuel released when a control loop is active and solvable. We are not driven by one goal, one value set, or one motive. We are driven by multiple feedback systems, layered on top of each other, each trying to regulate something different. Motivation depends on which loop is active. We don't "lose" motivation - we shift loops. So much to explore here.

"Pussy-getter" or "lover of pussy" or "Don Juan / Casanova" seeped into identity. Common among youngsters and sometimes can take a while to outgrow. Some never outgrow it. When I was 25 or so, I went to hang out with a bunch of dudes in their 40s after the bar closed. We were playing cards, drinking, and snorting around a kitchen table, and the host had porn playing on the big screen in the background. That was some odd shit. Like bro, you don't watch this stuff with your buddies. lol. It reminded me of my 14-yr-old horniness when a picture of a girl's coochie was worth taking care of. lol. Poor souls. Don't be too hard on them.