The Moves That Matter Quotes

“It is a glorious challenge and and the experience is intensely meaningful and rewarding, but happy? Not as such. The deeper point is that children make your life heavier in a way that is experienced by most people as good. Children give your life depth and definition and responsibility.”
― Jonathan Rowson, The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life

“Most of the studies on chess thinking are related to expertise and really they are about perception. they deal with our visual take on positions rather than the thinking as a productive process. Chess ability stems from noticing patterns over time and recognising in related contexts. Patterns are the raw material of the trunking process, they are constellations of pieces that we gradually become to understand as competitively meaningful.”
― Jonathan Rowson, The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life

“The educational value of chess is that it makes asking questions a reflex and the experience of getting better at chess is finding that your questions get richer and more pertinent. A great deal of chess improvement is about cultivating the inclination to move one deeper than you typically would, but that effort is about being concentrated enough to care. The chess lesson for life is often framed as the importance as being one step ahead of your opponent but I think that aim is to challenge ourselves to push beyond our cognitive comfort zone, to enquire of a place where we naturally want to stop thinking, is this it? Is there not perhaps more to be discovered here?”
― Jonathan Rowson, The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life

“To ask a question is to invest in attentiveness, to declare a stake in the answer and that is one of the many gifts of chess; you cease to be a passive recipient of information and become an active learner, an intrinsically rewarding experience. Playing chess is about posing questions to the opponent, and answering the questions they pose you. The little questions are always nested inside bigger ones. As you get better at the game you zoom into the most important questions quickly and you can sense that they are the most important questions because they speak to the conceptual ambiguity that holds your attention. Your overall question is, how can I check mate the opponents king? But the recurring questions that help you answer that include; What am I trying to achieve here? What happens if I go there? What do I do now? How will he respond to that? What does that knight want? The anti-philosopher Frederick Nietzsche saw more deeply into questions than most. We only hear those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.”
― Jonathan Rowson, The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life

“Chess can therefore give us valuable forms of meaning in ways that information, explanations and rational analysis cannot. A chess game is rarely meaningful as a given, it is not data. The story only comes to life when we make meaning out of it and then it becomes what some scholars call capta. Chess has shown me that we need the unconventional language of capta every bit of much as we need the present exponential expansion of data. The philosopher of education Matthew Litman puts it as follows, in the context of how children learn to think but the point applies more broadly: “meaning's cannot be dispensed, they cannot be given or handed out to children, meanings must be acquired. They are capta not data. We have to learn how to establish the conditions and opportunities that will enable children with their natural curiosity and appetite for meaning to seize upon the appropriate clues and make sense of things for themselves. Some thing must be done to enable children to acquire meaning for themselves. They will not acquire such meaning merely by learning the contents of adult knowledge - they must be taught to think and in particular to think for themselves”. The point of the capta-data distinction is that the power of chess lies not so much in the moves created by the games but in our relationship to the stories we create through them. A chess game is rarely meaningful as a simple matter of fact, as data. The story only comes to life when we make meaning out of it and then it becomes capta. In the language of perhaps the greatest scholar of narrative thinking, Jerome Bruner, chess subjuntivises reality. It creates a world not only for what is, but for what might be or might have been. That world is not a particularly comfortable place but it is highly stimulating, it is a place says Bruner, that keeps the familiar and the possible cheek by jowl. In light of the power of metaphor, chess’s role as a meta-metaphor and the capacity of chess to illustrate that education is ultimately self education the question of what chess might teach us about life is worthy of some answers.”
― Jonathan Rowson, The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life

“In chess one realises that all education is ultimately self education. This idea is a timely consideration in our data driven world. Chess lends itself to structural information and quantitive analysis in a range of ways. For instance the numerical value of the pieces, databases of millions of games, computerised evaluation functions and the international rating system. However, the value of the experience of playing the game is more qualitative than quantitive. Like any competitive pursuit or sport, chess is an elaborate pretext for the production of stories. The benign conceit of rules and points and tournaments generates a narrative experience in which you are at once co-director, actor and spectator. Chess is education in the literal sense of bringing forth, and it is self education because our stories about a game emerge as we play it, as we try to achieve our goals, just as they do in real life. Chess stories are of our own making and they are often about challenges we overcame or failed to overcome. Every chess player knows the experience of encountering a vexed colleague whose desperate to share their tragic tale in which they were “completely winning!” until they screwed up and lost. And yet we also know tougher characters who recognise that taking resolute responsibility for your mistakes, no matter how painful, is the way to grow as a person and a player. As the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim says: "we grow, we find meaning in life and security in ourselves by having understood and solved personal problems on our own, not by having them explained to us by others”.”
― Jonathan Rowson, The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life

“What could me more human than a state of permanent doubt when facing the thoughts and actions of our fellow beings? How we make decisions in that state of permanent doubt matters to everybody of course and most situations in our lives feature one hundred and one small decisions that we are barely conscious of making. Decisions are often framed in the context of strategy and leadership as singular moments in matters of destiny, but they are more like repeated challenges and matters of character. Mostly we are not global leaders with a clear personal narrative featuring decisive moments and clear take home messages. Mostly we are strangers to ourselves and each other, hungry for insight, meaning and refuge to get us through the day. I believe chess can and should speak to that more familiar experience of life.”
― Jonathan Rowson, The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life

“Chess is about the experience of passion, intimacy and caring but not in the way we typically use these terms. The game reveals implicit meanings in the idea of love by offering a shift in perspective and context. The point is that metaphors don’t function merely as comparisons but more as translations, recreations or re-presentations.”
― Jonathan Rowson, The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life

“Chess simulates a truth that we tend to suppress, namely that life is hazardous and we are always at risk. The game is fun but is not entirely innocent fun which is why we tend to reach for chess metaphors in tense situations with high stakes. Love for instance, is a tense situation with high stakes. Or at least it can be. Historically various works of art and literature associate chess with courtly love and by extension with love in general. However chess is a metaphor for love not because the players long for each another or want to knock down the pieces and make out on the board - though there is of course a time and place for that. The link between chess and love is much more oblique. The spirit of eros permeates the game in the forms of suffering and passion that characterise unrequited and unconsummated romantic love ... And shared attention of any process of co creation is a rare and profoundly intimate process. In fact the intimacy we feel through shared attention may be an unconscious emotional driver that keeps us coming back to the game. Moreover, chess thinking in some ways entails compassion because it is about cultivating order through chaos through caring about the felt significance of particular pieces and squares and ideas and outcomes … Caring is a fundamental feature of being in the world … Controlling for all other variables, those given a potted plant to look after consistently lived longer than those who were not.”
― Jonathan Rowson, The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life

“Maturing into a viable adulthood is partly about discipline, but it is also about luck. Aldous Huxley famously wrote that experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you. That is profoundly correct. Our life experience is not one event after the other but a series of opportunities to grow by making sense of what is meaningful and what isn't. Some do that better than others.”
― Jonathan Rowson, The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life

“I was beginning to understand that the best kinds of freedom involved choosing your constraints wisely, and claiming them as your own.”
― Jonathan Rowson, The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life

“Metaphors matter because they give conceptual shape to life, and we live within the dimensions of those shapes as if they were real. The cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest: ‘Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.’ Life really is ‘a journey’, ‘big’ things really are significant, sophisticated ideas really are ‘deep’. Such conceptual shapes are real because we make them so. It helps to wake up to the fact that we are to some extent free to create new conceptual shapes, indeed that this may offer our only hope for a genuinely new world.”
― Jonathan Rowson, The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life