Yes, getting skilled is hard, but reading this site helped me immensely. Yet, my experience is that my peers don't believe me when I say that studying fields like philosophy and rationality help people think, and my (Catholic) English teacher doesn't even want to hear anything about these topics. Getting over social politics is pretty difficult for me.

Would you be willing to try to explain your ideas about why chess is important (for people like me who don't particularly like chess) and maybe talk about the "cognitive tricks and verbal patterns"?