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Transcript

Gaming #1194 · From Chad

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  He won the French and Spanish Scrabble World Championship
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  without speaking the language. There's a story behind that.
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  This is your daily message from Chad #1194 to upgrade your
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  mental game today by telling yourself a better story.
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  Because the most important story you hear is the story you tell
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  yourself. This message is dedicated to
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  Nigel Richards. Here's the upgrade.
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  You think the job is to learn the whole shebang.
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  But upgraded thinking knows the job is to learn the game you're
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  playing. Here's the story.
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  Nigel Richards was born in 1967 in Christchurch, New Zealand.
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  He didn't get serious about Scrabble, you know, the board
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  game with the letter tiles, until he was 28, when he joined
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  a club in town In the late 1990s, he wanted to enter the
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  national championship. It was about 220 miles away, so
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  he got on his bike, rode there, won the title and rode home.
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  He has since won the English language world championship five
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  times. That's the record.
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  Then in 2015, he took up a challenge that sounded
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  impossible, winning the French Language World Championship
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  without speaking French. He started studying the official
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  French word list in May 9 weeks later, he sat down in Belgium
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  across from a French speaking player from Gabon, and he won
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  the final two games to none. He didn't learn French.
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  He learned French Scrabble. Which letters make a legal word?
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  Which words fit where on the board?
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  What's left in the bag, where the points are.
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  He never needed to know what a word meant.
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  He needed to know if it was legal, where it fit and what it
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  scored. Everyone else looked at French
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  and saw a language too big to learn.
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  He looked at it and saw a game, and he learned the game.
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  Nine years later, at his first Spanish tournament in Granada,
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  he did it again. 23 wins, one loss, after about a year of
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  study to become the Spanish World Championship.
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  I think there's a lesson you can learn from.
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  Richard's games are simple. There are rules and structure.
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  He saw a game in his own rare public description of a secret.
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  He is disarmingly simple. It's just a matter of learning
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  the words. It starts with keeping things
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  simple. You don't have to understand the
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  whole industry to make the call in front of you.
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  You don't have to master psychology to have tonight's
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  conversation. You have to know the game you're
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  actually in and go deep on that one thing.
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  Legendary Lakers basketball player Kareem Abdul Jabbar once
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  said there's a ball, there's a hoop, you put the ball through
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  the hoop. That's success.
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  He understood greatness starts with simplicity.
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  So stop trying to learn the whole language, find the game
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  and go all in it today. The better story to tell
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  yourself is I don't have to learn everything, I have to
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  learn the game I'm actually playing.
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  Tell me a story of finding the game inside something too big to
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  learn to from chadsmith@gmail.com.
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  Send someone a text right now and ask them what's the game
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  you're actually playing right now?
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  You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in
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  the World, by going to from chad.gumroad.com.
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  The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are
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  always available at www.fromchad.com.