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what matters most in making good decisions is knowing what really matters most.
It’s not enough to be talented. It’s not enough to work hard and to study late into the night. You must also become intimately aware of the methods you use to reach your decisions.
If you play without long-term goals your decisions will become purely reactive and you’ll be playing your opponent’s game, not your own.
Sticking with a plan when you are winning sounds simple, but it’s easy to become over-confident and to get caught up in events. Long-term success is impossible if you let reactions trump planning.
Nokia CEO Jorma Ollila turned the Finnish company into the mobile phone leader with an unorthodox, even chaotic style that turned convention on its head at every turn. Top managers were asked to swap jobs, research and development staff met directly with customers, and the company’s chief phone designer once compared its management to the way a jazz band improvises as it plays together.
Everyone would benefit greatly from stopping before each move, each decision, and asking, ‘Why this move? What am I trying to achieve and how does this move help me achieve it?’
There’s a business saying that goes: ‘Planning without action is futile, action without planning is fatal.’ This echoes Sun Tzu, who centuries ago wrote, ‘Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.’
‘Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do; strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.’ – Savielly Grigoryevich Tartakower
Here was a strategist who knew that not having anything to do didn’t mean doing nothing.
‘Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.’ Questions are what matter. Questions, and discovering the right ones, are the key to staying on course.
‘I see only one move ahead, but it is always the correct one.’ – José Raúl Capablanca, third world chess champion
‘Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.’
‘If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.’ If you aren’t failing at least occasionally you aren’t taking the risks required to be an innovator.
In 1977 Ken Olsen, President of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), told the audience at the World Future Society convention that ‘There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.’ This was said in the same year that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak released the Apple II personal computer that began the PC revolution.
If faced with a repetitive job it can be difficult to stay alert to opportunities to solve problems creatively. Your instincts slowly go numb when every analysis returns the same answers over and over. What should be a search for excellence and the best solution eventually turns into a ‘good enough’ mentality. We must strive to keep things fresh so we can rely on and enhance our instincts instead of falling into mental ruts.
General Electric’s Jack Welch once sent the senior manager of an under-performing GE sector on a month’s vacation so he could come back and ‘act as though you hadn’t been running it for four years’.
‘Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist, but in the ability to start over.’ If we err and must begin again, we must. This vitality isn’t only about quality of life; staying motivated and involved in the decision-making process is one key to improving it. One of the best ways to do this is to take the initiative, which puts positive pressure on you while challenging your competition. I like to say that the attacker always has the advantage.
‘the threat is stronger than the execution’. An attack doesn’t have to come to fruition to have a devastating effect on the enemy’s position. If our opponent has to lose time rushing to defend one area it may lead to an opportunity to win elsewhere.
‘What you can do or think you can do, begin it. For boldness has magic, power, and genius in it.’ – Goethe
Attacking requires perfect timing as well as nerve. Knowing the right time to attack is as much an art as a science, and even for the best it’s often guesswork.
Vigilance is the next essential instrument in the attacker’s toolbox.
Detecting opportunities requires letting go of assumptions of all kinds. The patterns and automatic assumptions we rely on to save time can also prevent us from identifying the best opportunities.
Mikhail Tal once said that perhaps the worst move of his life was one he didn’t make, a speculative sacrifice he pondered for forty minutes before uncharacteristically declining. Attackers may sometimes regret bad moves but it is much worse to forever regret an opportunity you let pass by.
‘The first essential for an attack is the will to attack.’ All our planning and evaluation skills are academic if they aren’t combined with the nerve to employ them and to strike when the opportunity arises. There are concrete practical benefits to having an aggressive approach. If you’re already in a fight you want the first blow to be the last, and you had better be the one to throw it.
Similar sins accumulate in our daily tasks. The old saying ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ should be left for plumbing and kept well away from how we lead our lives at home and at work. We must question the status quo at all times, especially when things are going well.
do it better even when things go right. Failing to do this leads to stagnation and eventual breakdown.
Ignoring what the competition is up to can leave us looking like George III, whose diary for 4 July 1776 read, ironically, ‘Nothing of importance happened today.’
Anticipating Nike’s ad agency by two centuries, Goethe wrote, ‘Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.’
Inner strength is required to question success, to face failure, and to accept that changes are needed. Further strength is necessary to enact those changes. Churchill said ‘Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.’ This courage can be inspired by competition or any number of external factors, but in the end it has to come from within.
In his own words: ‘You must have good health, a strong nervous system, and you must hate losing a game. Only then you may have a chance to become world champion.’
South American liberator Simón Bolívar said that ‘only an inexperienced soldier believes that all is lost after being defeated for the first time’.
As much as some players try to downplay it, the importance of psychology cannot be over-estimated in chess or in any endeavour. Every skill and talent we have requires the fortitude to develop it and the courage to employ it. Even a game like chess, which has the appearance of a mathematical puzzle, benefits greatly from the proper mindset at every step, not just at the board.
Nervous energy is the ammunition we take into any mental battle. If we don’t have enough of it our concentration will fade. If we have a surplus the results can be explosive, either for us or our opponent.
There is more to such premonitions and results than the power of positive thinking. Creative and competitive energy is a tangible thing, and if we can feel it, so can our opponents. Our confidence level is reflected in how we move and talk, not just by what we say, but how we say it.
If everything seems easy, we aren’t pushing ourselves hard enough or being challenged enough.
Psychological muscles atrophy from disuse just like physical and mental ones.
Friends and associates will seek out people with similar outlooks, and it’s the rare boss who doesn’t surround himself with people who think the way he does. It’s that rare leader, however, the boss who instead brings in people who think differently and who will challenge him, who has the potential for greater success. Such people are exceptional because no one enjoys being contradicted or corrected. It takes great willpower and self-confidence to willingly surround ourselves with people we know will confront us. If not handled correctly it can lead to loss of authority, or to an anarchy of
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Successfully avoiding challenges is not an accomplishment to be proud of.
It sounds strange to say that being a better artist might make me a stronger chess player or that listening to classical music can make you a more effective manager. And yet this is exactly the sort of thing that Feynman had in mind when he said that being a drummer made him a better physicist. When we regularly challenge ourselves with something new we build cognitive and emotional ‘muscles’ that make us more effective in every way. If we can overcome our fear of speaking in public, or of submitting a poem to a magazine, or of learning a new language, that confidence will flow into every area
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Polish writer Stanislav Ezhi Letz observed that to reach the source we must swim against the current. With courage and experience we can come to accept each crisis and even seek them out in order to tackle them on our own terms. Instead of fearing these moments of maximum pressure and risk, we must accept them as inevitable and focus on improving our ability to predict them and to cope with their consequences.
‘If not you, who else?’
The first and most important step is realizing that the secret of success is inside.
