Intention. Plan. Purpose. Tempo. When playing chess these are the words that float around in my mind. Chess is a controlled game of tactics, strategy and preparation. A good chess player will have a plan as to what they want to do in a game. A good player will also use every move to further this plan in some way. As even a middling chess player I recognize these things. I try and apply these facts to the games I play. When I follow these truths good things happen on the board. When I ignore these truths, a lot of bad things happen quickly. I see these things when I sit at the chess board, yet when away from the board these truths get me in more trouble.
Chess teaches lessons that I find useful in life. The lessons of having a plan and making sure every move matters and has intention behind it are two such lessons. The first lesson is obvious to many people. It is indeed good to have a plan when doing anything. Even when you go to a restaurant, your plan is to eat food, you have a plan for this simple action. The intensity of plans can vary, and they should. The plan for a business presentation should involve more intensity than the plan you have for your Friday night out with friends. Having a plan is great, but without the right moves a plan doesn’t mean much.
Once you have determined a plan for your chess game you need to make the right moves to execute this plan. You would say this is obvious, but many players don’t make the right moves to execute their plan. Often they will make random moves that accomplish nothing towards their goals in the game. Once you quit completely wasting moves at the board, you need to start thinking about move quality. There are good moves that accomplish things. There are also winning moves that win the game for you. Some moves are also all about potential. Sometimes you drop a chess piece on a good square and you just wait for the opportune time for it to do damage later. A good player will always have a strong reason for why they made a move. A good player knows that wasting moves is how you lose games, even if you are actually a more formidable player than your opponent. Once you start making decent moves every single move in chess you become a far more formidable player.
We all make moves daily in our regular lives, and often we are wasting a lot of those moves. Often during the course of my day, I just do things. I look at these wasted moves and see so much potential for improvement. Our moves should align with our goals and plans, my moves don’t always align.
I’ve been thinking about my interactions with my friends and family lately. I have been wasting a lot of moves here. When it comes to those close to me, I want to have positive relationships with them. We should be lifting each other up. We all know this too. I don’t know that my actions always reflect this. I waste moves when I sit there and never talk about anything meaningful with these people. To be honest I am not always nice to my friends and family. This might be normal for people to get comfortable with each other become grouchy, confrontational, rude, and negative towards each other. This may be normal but I have no interest in being normal. Better moves with my friends and family would simply be making sure my interactions are positive and meaningful. These are simple, but meaningful moves, moving with intention is so important.
Intention can come into play even with things like walking. I go for long walks for exercise. It is the simplest form of exercise, but could I be messing even this up? In a way I am messing up walking. When I go for walks, I tend to just wander around at whatever pace I feel like moving. This is still a good move, but it is less than optimal. If I walked a little faster, I would be in better shape. Many days walking faster would be the better move. Finding better moves when you are already making good moves is a path to victory on the chess board, and can’t hurt away from the board either.
One area where I make a lot of good moves, but don’t follow it up with enough of the right moves is while networking. I have gone to countless networking events the past several years. This is a good move for my career. I will go to events and make all the decisions I have to make to get there. I will often drive an hour to get to one of these events. These are all good moves. Then I will get there and end up just talking to my friends at the event. At many events I don’t really end up networking, and I don’t meet anyone new. This is not the optimal move in this situation. This one less than optimal move means all the good moves that came before it became much more wasted. What is the point of getting dressed, driving an hour, and then only talking to someone you already talk to five? I set up the plan and moved forward with it, I just missed the winning move.
There are all sorts of ways to waste moves and I find a lot of them, I also find some winning moves. I just talked about screwing up my moves with networking. There are also some very good moves I have made with it. Primarily I have planted myself in the right rooms and waited for good things to happen. I have had some good things happen to me because I was simply showing up to the opportune rooms with the right people. Sometimes the winning move is just putting your pieces in the right place and waiting for good things to happen. I ended up getting a pretty good job out of just talking to a guy 10 minutes at an event. 2 months later he calls me up, we have an interview and I was hired the next day. All because I planted myself in the right room. My moves are sometimes bad, but this time my moves were good.
I can’t help but wonder about the difference between my good and bad moves. This isn’t thinking about things in moral terms. This is entirely about tactics, strategies and preparation. Knowing the reasons for bad moves does seem to be a good step in making better moves.
The first reason I think of for my bad moves is that I don’t know what the hell I’m doing a lot of the times. In the beginning of anything we are bound to stumble around because we don’t know any better. I am just as guilty of that as anyone else. At some point this is not acceptable any more. I remember when I played tournament chess as a middle schooler. I would run into an opening called the Sicilian Defense and I would melt before my opponent. I kept making bad moves against this opening and I would quickly be decimated at the board and lose. I had to learn this opening otherwise my moves would remain bad. I got better at playing against his opening, I lost less, and the bad moves got a lot better. Not knowing any better is a reason for wasted moves, but at some point a smart person needs to start knowing better.
Laziness is another reason for my wasted and bad moves. I get tired and lazy. Then I do stupid things. There is nothing much to say about that other than it happens. I can prevent it from happening. I must however acknowledge that I get tired and take the easiest path. To deny this is a strong reason for my wasted moves would only be fooling myself. This kind of reason for bad moves is all about being honest with myself and looking at what I’m really doing and thinking.
Another area that requires honesty is looking at default behavior. We have many moves during our days that are done completely on auto-pilot. This is normal and not a bad thing. Our minds would probably melt if we had to think about every single thing we do all day. Our default moves are still moves though and can be optimal, good, or completely wasted. Sometimes rewiring default behaviors can lead to much better moves. Knowing some moves are just defaults programmed into our brain is a good first step in making real changes.
Changing our move quality in our lives is a many faceted problem. It involves learning about what good moves are. It involves putting ourselves in a state to make good moves, being tired rarely puts us in position to make a good move. It involves recognizing our less than optimal moves, and that is often a function of experience. Thinking about the moves we’re making is the first step, and that is what I have been thinking about so much lately thanks to the game of chess.
The more we look for quality moves the more quality results we are bound to get. How are you wasting moves? How are you looking for the optimal moves? What things are you treating as moves that could lead to winning? These are important questions. The answers vary according to your strategy and plan. On the chess board every single move impacts how the game unfolds, and when we view our “life moves” the same way, cool things are bound to happen.