Being Second Best

We are told it’s a good thing to tell others that they can achieve anything, that there are no limits. Not just to kids, even to adults. The Scottish chess Grand Master, Jonathan Rowson has an interesting take on that point in his book on life lessons from chess, The Moves that Matter.

 

What if you try your best at something and yet can’t be the best at it?

“Being inferior to someone at something you love despite your very best effort can be painful.”

Almost unbelievably, he cites Viswanathan Anand as an example of this! For a few years now, Anand’s still a great player but nowhere as good as the current world champion, Magnus Carlsen (To be fair, nobody is anywhere as good as Carlsen for a few years now).

 

Now you might be thinking that’s just an inevitable decline (didn’t Karpov fade after Kasparov took over? Didn’t Steffi Graf begin to look second-best once Monica Seles’ reign began?). Aha, but Rowson’s point is different. When you read these lines, keep in mind that Rowson knows and likes Anand better than almost any other world champion. But, he says:

“Vishy had for several years been close in strength to Kasparov, but not quite as good… I think he reconciled himself to the same relationship to Carlsen – he was a worthy opponent certainly, but just not quite as strong.”

In other words, Anand was second-best even when he was rising and trying to dethrone Kasparov.

 

It takes a very hard kind of maturity to acknowledge what Anand had done, not once but twice:

“Only by letting go of the frustration of not being world champion could he allow himself to be at ease with merely being world class.”

 

All of which is why Rowson says:

“The idea that there are no limits to our ability is not always true, kind or helpful.”

 

(Anand, of course did become world champion, between the reigns of Kasparov and Carlsen, but that doesn’t moment of glory doesn’t come to everyone. Just think of all those excellent clay court tennis players over the last 2 decades who never won the French Open simply because they played in the era of one Rafael Nadal, the King of Clay).

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