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 that kind of resilience.”

As if that wasn’t hard enough, you have to consider a move, then your opponent’s move… and you realize how it easy it is to get lost (or tired). It doesn’t stop at 2^nd order thinking, the best chess players go many orders deeper:

“There are times when what matters is knowing what others know, and further, knowing what others know about what other others know. This experience of holding multiple perspectives in mind and then thinking productively without dropping anything is (very hard but useful to be able to do).”

That resilience, to not drown even when there are a dozen alternatives, is something that would serve us well in life. And it’s also a reminder that whoever said that man is a rational animal didn’t know squat about human nature!

“Rational is one of the many things we can do, not something we are.”

 

He quotes these lines by David Bohm, the physicist, on the topic of information:

“(We tend to believe that) ‘you’ are inside there, deciding what to do with the information. But I want to say that you don’t decided what to do with the information. The information takes over. It runs you.”

That’s so true. In chess, you should consider multiple aspects (kingside, queenside, the center, short term v/s long term), and then decide the right move, without falling in love with only one aspect. Rowson says we need to do that same multi-aspect analysis for the decisions we make in life, and not let one axis (physics, biology, chemistry, economics, psychology, politics, sociology, philosophy, theology) dominate our thought process.

 

That’s quite a lot of food for thought… and all that’s just from the first quarter of the book.