Some Life Lessons from Chess
The Scottish chess Grand Master, Jonathan Rowson, hovered around the Top 100 chess rankings, at his peak. So yes, you’re not likely to have heard of him. But he does have many interesting points on what chess can teach us about life in his book, The Moves that Matter . He knocks off the obvious one first: “The connection between chess and life is usually assumed to be almost exclusively about the application of strategic thinking.” After all, we hear a remark like this in so many contexts, don’t we? “Sporting commentators often announce disconcertingly that the tennis or cricket match you thought you were watching is now ‘a chess game’.” Another obvious thing in chess is that you need to concentrate. Very hard: “The experience of how concentration ebbs and flows, how we replenish intellectual bandwidth so that we can keep examining the same set of things while also accommodating new things without the whole wave of thought collapsing on itself. To concentrate, we need...