Stop Comparing Life to Chess
Why life strategy works better with fifty two cards than a checked board.
Due to the success of The Queen’s Gambit, a Netflix original I highly recommend to anyone, the game of chess is cool and popular to talk about and play right now. This moment of success however, has fed into a mistake we already made when it was a game left for those who had the patience to look boring: Viewing life like a game of chess.
It’s a popular misconception, viewing life strategy like a large extended and protracted game of chess. You carefully moving your pieces on the board of life, planning each step to achieve resolution in the form of checkmate. It is mistakenly assumed, as was the motivation forcing many children to learn the game who didn’t care about it, that learning how to be good at chess somehow carried over into thinking more strategically about life. This is not only an incorrect viewpoint, but a damaging one.
The Difference in Domains
Chess is a game which operates within defined rules and constraints, unlike the life you and I get to enjoy when our coffee is too hot, too late, and tastes terrible anyway. In his book Range: Why Generalists Succeed in a Specialized World, David Epstein defines the differences between Kind learning domains and Wicked learning…
