Opposite elements working in harmony enable perfect decision making: Calculation & evaluation, patience & opportunism, intuition & analysis, style & objectivity, management & vision, strategy & tactics, planning & reaction. Balance these forces and avoid the comfort zone. ~G.Kasparov
Steve Jobs ability to foresee how the iPod could revolutionize the industry was largely driven by his early life experiences with the initial transportable music source that did so, the transistor radio.
By traditional measures, the success of the iPod was one of the most unpredictable in retail product history.”
Three Moves Ahead – Bob Rice
BTW, just happened to come across a similar cartoon illustrating a mass of white men adorating an icon. Shows there’s a choice of who/what to worship.
Last night G stepped into a conversation between R and M. The problem R was expressing to M was exactly the same problem G was experiencing.
It seemed R and G might commiserate to find the one right solution for both because, although M and R were on the same team and G was leading a distinctly different team, any answers found would be to their mutual benefit.
But, G was outside R & M’s coupling and so easy to dismiss.
Use chess tactics to thrive in the face of incalculable complexities and unexpected change. The basic principles of good play – get a big idea, use it to build an advantage, improve it, swap it out for a new one, move quickly, see what happens, make a new plan, and move again – works on a professional level just as they do in corporate warfare.
Three Moves Ahead – Bob Rice
Not only a matter of having time to get things done, it’s also a matter of having the energy.
More closely your schedule of rest & activity corresponds to your natural peaks & valleys throughout the day, the more productive your many efforts will be.
Karl Benjamin (1957)
Cells in embryos make their way across a steep “developmental landscape” to their eventual fate.
Embryonic cells continuously monitor their changing surroundings and make small corrective adjustments, optimizing as development proceeds, locking in on their planned identity relatively late.
Processing positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location. (Some cells unfortunately take the wrong paths and are unable to get back on track.)
All the information is there in the landscape and processing that information effectively may be the phenomenon that makes a bunch of loosely stuck-together atoms behave like the thing we call life.
Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road.”
-Leo Tolstoy
Chess skills are most helpful when you are playing chess. However, when you climb & jump on rocks, your entire brain & body are put to work.
The board & pieces are all the material, but the METAGAME dynamic is certainly a factor in competition. The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig is about losing the battle to a weaker player who uses a novel psychology.
That’s me at the board, on the right, maybe 20 years ago.
Forge your own path, trust in the magic of individuality.
Though the methods vary, the mission is the same: to realize that we are all of us temporary & fragile beings.
Shot here from who knows where, bound for who can tell, we can love ourselves and each other while we’re here.
Elizabeth Berg