Arjun Erigaisi and the story of breaching the Plateau of Latent Potential

A few months back, Arjun Erigaisi emerged as India’s top-ranked chess player, surpassing the iconic Viswanathan Anand to reach the World Number 4 rank. Although well-known within the chess community, his name resonates less beyond it compared to figures like Praggnanandha or Gukesh. While each player has their journey to mastery, Arjun’s narrative stands out, offering valuable life lessons.

Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous efforts that build up a potential to unleash a significant change. Picture yourself striking a rock with a hammer. Initially, despite repeated attempts, there may be no visible result, but eventually, a single blow will break it in two. All the preceding efforts converge towards reaching a threshold better known as the plateau of latent potential. Your exertions accumulate, requiring this threshold to be crossed before results become evident.

At 14, Arjun didnt even have an IM(International Master) or GM (Grand Master) title. To put this into context, Praggnanandha achieved the same at 10 and 12 years, respectively, and four years is a significant gap to catch up in the chess world. So, the narrative about Arjun tended toward a talented kid unlikely to reach world-class status. Despite this, his coaches always used to say how underrated he was, and his ratings were never a true reflection of his actual strength. There was a big gap in how Arjun was evaluated subjectively and through metrics. He could have stopped trying at this point, believing he would never catch up using Fide rating as a metric. Instead, he relied on his own assessment of progress and continued pushing, and once he reached the plateau of latent potential, there was no stopping him. He achieved the IM and later the GM title in the same year.

Arjun’s journey underscores the importance of viewing results not as immediate outcomes but as products of sustained effort and improvement. Now, there is an obvious question of how to know if you are making progress if results are not the primary metric. I want to answer this question by extending the notion of vanity metrics outlined in the book “The Lean Startup.” Vanity metrics, by definition, are those numbers that look impressive on the surface but don’t contribute much to your bottom line or help you make informed decisions. Primarily used in the context of business, these are numbers that fail to tell you the correct story and often put you under false assumptions. A quick example from the tech world would be judging an app solely based on the number of downloads or Play Store ratings.

To me, the vanity metric, in this case, is the Fide rating. While I agree that this is a well-respected system that has existed for hundreds of years, it can often be misleading, especially for young players. Why is that the case is a very complex question. A simplified answer is that when you are young, some parts of your game are still being developed, and no matter how good you are at other aspects – the weak link remains your bottleneck towards progress. Once you overcome that bottleneck, your metrics will improve significantly. A cricketing example I like to quote is that even if you are the greatest legside player, you are easily exploited if you struggle to play on the offside. The numbers will never show the proper justice to your abilities until you overcome your weakness.

Arjun’s big judgmental call to rely on more subjective methods to assess his progress over metrics proved pivotal here and gave India its top-rated chess player. His story is a great lesson that teaches us to look beyond vanity metrics and focus on continuous improvements even when immediate results are not visible. Now, is the story over here? Do you think his struggles stopped after becoming world number 4 – then you’re mistaken here. But I would leave that now for the readers to explore more.