Marginal disaster example
The first thing to know about go is that you will always be terrible at it. Professionals take decades of constant play to be good at it. And nobody is ever good-good. We are only stronger or weaker in one given moment, constantly practicing, and then we die, I guess.
There is no way you, reading this, are good at go. There is no way you will become good at go. The first thing that go teaches you is that is no such thing as being “good” at anything.
You mostly mess up your first few games, but you have a good enough time, and so you decide to read a book about how to play go. This is your first mistake, and you will pay for it dearly by not being good at go for quite a long time. Something will happen that you never expected: you will, in response to reading a book about how to play go, get markedly worse at it. Your opponent will capture two-thirds of your stones that you thought were unassailable. You will look like you have over half the board, and then you will lose by 50. You will hear a muffled scoff as someone reams you. This is the practice.
Playing a game isn’t all about winning. If you have a competitive streak, it will be mortally threatened by playing go. Oh, you lost? No, you went on a journey. You will still have fun or you will never do this again.
You do this again. You realize that instinct is telling you something. Intuition is a muscle you can flex. You let it atrophy for too long. A style develops. You are held by those who love you as you proceed to fail marginally less at something. It’s up and down. You have a bad day, play go that evening, mess it all up. You’re feeling good, slept well, mop the floor with your opponent. The game rewards clarity, focus, mindfulness. You start to figure out better sleep habits the night before you play games, and then you expand that to include every night forever.
You start with a 9-stone handicap, then 7, then 4, then 5, then 4 again, then 3, then 2, then 1, then nothing. You mark the first time you play when they have a handicap. You’re less bad. You’re better than something. You don’t know how this happened because you stopped reading any books about it.