How Life Imitates Chess - by Garry Kasparov
Date read: 2019-04-27How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
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Garry Kasparov, former Russian chess grand master and world chess champion, discusses how principles of chess can apply to life and business. Especially with making decisions. Interesting read if you like chess and some nuggets of wisdom sprinkled throughout.
My Notes
A CEO must combine analysis and research with creative thinking to lead his company effectively.
You must become conscious of your decision-making processes, and with practice they will improve your intuitive-unconscious- performance. This is required because as adults we have already formed our patterns, good and bad. To correct the bad and enhance the good you must take an active role in becoming more self-aware.
It's not enough to be talented. It's not enough to work hard and to study late into the night. You must also become intimately aware of the methods you use to reach your decisions.
"The man who knows how will always have a job.
The man who also knows why will always be his boss." -RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Whereas strategy is abstract and based on long-term goals, tactics are concrete and based on finding the best move right now. Tactics are conditional and opportunistic, all about threat and defense. No matter what pursuit you're engaged in-chess, business, the military, managing a sports team-it takes both good tactics and wise strategy to be successful. As Sun Tzu wrote centuries ago, "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."
If you play without long-term goals your decisions will become purely reactive and you'll be playing your opponent's game, not your own.
The strategist starts with a goal in the distant future and works backward to the present. A Grandmaster makes the best moves because they are based on what he wants the board to look like ten or twenty moves in the future.
"Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do; strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do." -SAVIELLY TARTAKOWER
So for every move always ask "Why?" and continue to ask it every time you come up with an answer or a new idea. It's an essential part of the chess player's discipline that can be applied to just about every pursuit in life.
You must always be aware of your limitations and also of your best qualities. This knowledge allows you to both play your own game and adapt when it is required.
If you are quick to blame faulty strategy and change it all the time, you don't really have any strategy at all. Only when the environment shifts radically should you consider a change in fundamentals.
You must know what questions to ask and ask them frequently. Have conditions changed in a way that necessitates a change in strategy or is a small adjustment all that is required? Have fundamental goals changed for some reason? Why have the conditions changed? Why are my results not as good as they once were? Avoid change for the sake of change.
Don't spend so much time worrying about the other guy that you lose sight of your own goals and your own performance.
Pablo Picasso nailed it when he said that "computers are useless. They can only give you answers." Questions are what matter. Questions, and discovering the right ones, are the key to staying on course.
The moment that confidence weakens, indecisiveness and concrete failures usually follow. If we aren't confident, we begin to postpone decisions and this leads to a destructive cycle of anxiety and time pressure.
Even people in leadership roles are too often content to just get through the day. Most people talk about unwinding after work or school, putting the day behind them so they can relax. How much more effective would they become if, at the end of each day, they asked themselves what lessons they had taken away for tomorrow?
The more you experiment, the more successful your experiments will be. Break your routines, even to the point of changing ones you are happy with to see if you can find new and better methods.
"Opportunity," Edison said, "is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." This was an echo of another great thinker and worker, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote, "I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it."
Most people would welcome having an extra hour in the day, but not the man in a jail cell. The message here is, use time to improve your material, not just acquire more of it.
Unfortunately, this reflects how many of us go about making decisions all the time. We take our best guess and plunge forward, barely considering the options before us. There is a huge difference between just browsing the possible moves and evaluating the situation. Frequently our intuitive leaps prove fruitful, and for at least a short time we get what we want and need. But my years as a chess player have taught me how important it is to do the analysis that will clearly show you which of the options is superior. Instinctive evaluation is better than none at all, but we can't confuse it with understanding even if the results aren't always bad.
It is always valuable to ask ourselves if we will be able to reverse course if our decision turns out poorly. What will our alternatives be if things go wrong? Is there a satisfactory alternative course where we can keep our options open longer?
If there is no benefit to making the decision at the moment and no penalty in delaying it, use that time to improve your evaluation, to gather more information, and to examine other options. As Margaret Thatcher put it, "I've learned one thing in politics. You don't make a decision until you have to."
Question the status quo at all times, especially when things are going well. When something goes wrong, you naturally want to do it better the next time, but you must train yourself to want to do it better even when things go right.
It takes great willpower and self-confidence to surround ourselves with smart, talented people who we know will confront us. No one enjoys being contradicted or "corrected"-there's a constant risk of losing authority or creating an anarchy of mixed messages. But the leader who is willing to risk these things has the potential for extraordinary success.
But as much as you enjoy winning, remember that winning every time is not ideal. Setbacks and losses are both inevitable and essential if you're going to improve and become a good, even great, competitor.
If you can learn to accept criticism and invite your people to present new information-particularly that which may contradict an idea or practice that you hold dear-you will quickly learn to adopt new and potentially powerful methods into your game plan. Learn to see value in other methods and take what you need from them to improve-but not necessarily replace-your own.
The experienced soldier who studies the battlefields in the aftermath of the war returns with both wisdom and renewed courage.
It is dangerous to fool ourselves into believing that something is due to happen when there is no relation between the events of the past and what could occur in the present.
You must rely on your inner observer to look at your results dispassionately, and to push your ego aside long enough to fully and rigorously question your approach.
We can go through our day-to-day lives without changing our habits and nothing terrible will happen to us. The problem is that it is also highly unlikely anything at all will happen to us-including good things. Successfully avoiding challenges is not an accomplishment to be proud of.
You can collect and analyze new information forever without ever making a decision. Something has to tell you when the law of diminishing returns is kicking in. And that something is intuition.
Above all, we must be conscious of every decision we make. Not only in evaluating each future course of action but in looking back to analyze our past choices and the effectiveness of the process by which we made them.