The shape of getting good.

One last thing before you go, because you will need it the first time the game humbles you, and it will. Getting good at this is not a smooth climb. It comes in steps, with long flat stretches between them where nothing seems to improve and you begin to suspect you have found your ceiling. Then something quietly clicks — you start catching a leak you were blind to last month, or you stop falling for one that used to take you every time — and you rise a step, and the flat stretch begins again at the new height. Do not despair on the flats. The plateaus are not the absence of progress. They are where the last lesson is sinking down below the level of thought, becoming something your eyes simply do now without being told. Trust them. They are the sound of a skill being buried deep enough to use.

And remember the cruelest, best feature of this whole game, the one we spent the first half of this book uncovering: the staircase has no top, and every opponent worth playing climbs it alongside you, which means you never arrive. There is no final rank, no day on which you have solved the thing and may sit down and rest. To some people that is unbearable, and they drift back to games that can be finished and shelved. To the right sort of person, it is the entire appeal — a game that will be exactly as deep 20 years from now as your grown skill can make it, a mirror that keeps pace with you for as long as you live.

So do not measure yourself against mastery. There is no such thing here, and chasing it will only make you bitter. Measure yourself against the player you were last month — the one who flinched off the losing shape, who never once thought to watch, who called the whole thing luck. Beat that player. Then beat him again the month after. That is the only ladder there is in this game, and if you stay on it, it is more than enough. It will take you further than you can presently imagine, in this and in a good many things that are not this at all.