CHESS AND THE GAME OF LIFE.

Recently, I became addicted to the game of chess.

This all really began was when I realized just how often I was on my phone.

Instead of mindlessly scrolling through social media, which only short-circuited my attention span and gave me brain fog, I decided that if I was bound to spend significant time on my phone that I might as well use it more productively.

Specifically, chess became the perfect substitute for mindless media consumption. It was active, rather than passive. Rather than reducing my attention span, it improved my patience, and afterwards, rather than feeling disoriented, I felt sharper and more focused.

It also reoriented my frame of mind in life. Life, like chess, is a game of strategy, calculation, setups, adapting to circumstances, and making sacrifices. It requires an understanding of sequencing, leverage, and options.

In life, as in chess, you can only make one move at a time. However, you must make these moves with intent, knowing how they serve a greater goal in the future.

Balancing presence and foresight, you then must operate on a knife’s edge to gain every advantage to maximize your chance of winning, because any mistake or poor decision you make may be exploited, and all it ever takes to win is to be one step ahead.

You must learn to adapt to the responses of your environment, and have options at hand for different situations.

You must move in silence, understanding your plan and your goal, knowing that others will not, and not allowing them to thwart your efforts.

You must learn how to make sacrifices, weighing them either on the basis of their immediate value exchange, point for point, or in terms of the long-term—the position you gain, and how it sets up for the end game: checkmate.

In life, as in chess, there is winning and there is losing. It is important to understand that this is the case, to know what you want to win and how to win it, and to take action on these impulses.

In the book The Hustler, the protagonist is a pool gambler. In a scene, he has a revelation that the game is all about winning—not about playing. He realizes that until you play the game to win, you do not deserve to play the game for its own sake.

This is the greatest lesson I have learned from the game of chess. I do not play chess for its own sake, but to win, in the same way that I do not live life just to exist, but to achieve my goals. Enjoying the game is simply an added benefit, one that motivates me to continue to win.

Because in the end, no matter the cost, all that matters is winning.