The Patience of Chess

I've been stuck at 1100 on Chess.com for three months. Every time I push close to 1150, I fall back. Not because I don't know the theory — I've studied openings, I understand basic tactics, I can spot a fork or a pin. I fall back because I'm impatient.

Chess has a way of exposing your worst instincts. Mine is the urge to act. I see a move that looks aggressive, a piece that's momentarily undefended, and I pounce. No calculation, no consideration of what happens two moves later. Just the dopamine hit of capturing something.

This is, it turns out, exactly how you lose at chess.

The Lesson Behind the Board

The strongest chess players at my level aren't the ones who see the most. They're the ones who wait the most. They develop their pieces methodically. They don't grab pawns when there's no advantage in it. They build pressure slowly, almost imperceptibly, until their opponent cracks.

I recognize this pattern from other parts of my life. In business, I've made my worst decisions when I acted from urgency rather than from strategy. The deal that seemed like it needed to close this week. The hire that seemed like they needed to start immediately. The product feature that seemed like it couldn't wait another sprint.

In almost every case, the rush was self-imposed. The deadline was imaginary. The urgency was a feeling, not a fact.

Sitting With Discomfort

What chess is teaching me — painfully, one lost game at a time — is how to sit with discomfort. The discomfort of not acting. The discomfort of watching your opponent build up their position while you quietly build up yours. The discomfort of knowing that the best move right now might be the boring one.

There's a concept in chess called "prophylaxis" — making a move not to improve your position, but to prevent your opponent from improving theirs. It's the least satisfying type of move. It looks like nothing happened. But the best players do it constantly, because they understand that preventing a threat is often more valuable than creating one.

I think about this in the context of running a company during difficult times. When tariffs hit and your US operations start unwinding, the instinct is to do something dramatic. Pivot. Restructure. Launch something new. And sometimes that's right. But sometimes the best move is prophylactic — shore up what you have, prevent the damage from spreading, and wait for the position to clarify.

The Rating Isn't the Point

My goal is 1200 by my next birthday. But I've started to suspect that reaching 1200 isn't actually the point. The point is becoming the kind of person who can reach 1200 — someone who can resist the urge to act impulsively, who can think two or three moves ahead, who can lose a game and study it instead of starting another one immediately.

That person would be better at chess. But they'd also be better at everything else.

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