The lesson I learned most effectively from Go was to acknowledge mistakes; when I was a weak player one of my worst faults was being unwilling to admit to my opponent that they had outplayed me. This is particularly clear when compared to chess.
In chess, if you fall behind in material or tempo the correct thing (in my experience; I am a weak chess player) is almost always to see what you gained in exchange and try to exploit that. If you gained nothing in exchange and the loss was significant, your play is typically irrelevant because you lost. This encourages you to search for justifications for your moves: I lost that piece as part of this attack, or that sacrifice improved my position in this way, or so forth.
In contrast, if you are outplayed in Go the correct thing (in my experience; I am about 10k, which is slightly better than I am at chess but still quite weak) is almost always to recognize that you have been outplayed. My original problem was to reason, “If I cannot beat my opponent in this fight, then he is better than me” and then continue a lost fight, or perhaps to assume that the stones would eventually serve some other function (which they typically would not). Eventually I realized that a game of Go consists of many fights, and that you are severely handicapping yourself if you lose the game whenever one of them goes badly. Sometimes, even in deterministic games of perfect information, you will win most but not all fights. The only way I can now win games is by frequently recognizing that my previous moves were errors and abandoning whatever rationalization for those moves I may be tempted to construct.
The difficulty of internalizing this lesson leads me to suspect that I make the same mistake in my life. I am constantly tempted to justify my decisions; the temptation is even greater when I am forced to justify myself to people around me, and the only alternative is to explicitly admit that I made a mistake.
Losing fights sooner is an important go lesson, related to the OPs point about invasions.
The sooner you realize that you’ve lost a fight, the less you typically lose (early detection means lots of aji).
My favorite breakthrough when I was learning go, was the game that I crushed an opponent a stone stronger than me (or rather a stone stronger than I was before the breakthrough) by giving way at every fight, and then at the end of the middle game, destroying a formation he thought was safe with the aji created along the way. It was all about paying attention to what I could gain while giving up original aims, and how that would affect situations elsewhere on the board. For a while that became my style: winning by losing: lose every fight but win the game. That was my jump from 6k to 3k overnight.
The lesson I learned most effectively from Go was to acknowledge mistakes; when I was a weak player one of my worst faults was being unwilling to admit to my opponent that they had outplayed me. This is particularly clear when compared to chess.
In chess, if you fall behind in material or tempo the correct thing (in my experience; I am a weak chess player) is almost always to see what you gained in exchange and try to exploit that. If you gained nothing in exchange and the loss was significant, your play is typically irrelevant because you lost. This encourages you to search for justifications for your moves: I lost that piece as part of this attack, or that sacrifice improved my position in this way, or so forth.
In contrast, if you are outplayed in Go the correct thing (in my experience; I am about 10k, which is slightly better than I am at chess but still quite weak) is almost always to recognize that you have been outplayed. My original problem was to reason, “If I cannot beat my opponent in this fight, then he is better than me” and then continue a lost fight, or perhaps to assume that the stones would eventually serve some other function (which they typically would not). Eventually I realized that a game of Go consists of many fights, and that you are severely handicapping yourself if you lose the game whenever one of them goes badly. Sometimes, even in deterministic games of perfect information, you will win most but not all fights. The only way I can now win games is by frequently recognizing that my previous moves were errors and abandoning whatever rationalization for those moves I may be tempted to construct.
The difficulty of internalizing this lesson leads me to suspect that I make the same mistake in my life. I am constantly tempted to justify my decisions; the temptation is even greater when I am forced to justify myself to people around me, and the only alternative is to explicitly admit that I made a mistake.
Losing fights sooner is an important go lesson, related to the OPs point about invasions.
The sooner you realize that you’ve lost a fight, the less you typically lose (early detection means lots of aji).
My favorite breakthrough when I was learning go, was the game that I crushed an opponent a stone stronger than me (or rather a stone stronger than I was before the breakthrough) by giving way at every fight, and then at the end of the middle game, destroying a formation he thought was safe with the aji created along the way. It was all about paying attention to what I could gain while giving up original aims, and how that would affect situations elsewhere on the board. For a while that became my style: winning by losing: lose every fight but win the game. That was my jump from 6k to 3k overnight.