LESSONS FROM THE CHESSBOARD FOR BUSINESS & LIFE

The highest-rated chess player in the world for over 20 years, & widely considered the greatest player that ever lived until his retirement in 2005, Garry Kasparov, shares some valuable tools of chess to help us become more successful in business & in life, in his book, 'How Life Imitates Life: Making the Right Moves from Board to the Boardroom':

1) Losing can persuade you to change what doesn't need to be changed, & winning can convince you that everything is fine even if you are on the brink of disaster. Only when the environment shifts radically should you consider a change in fundamentals.

2) Rote memorisation is far less important than the ability to recognise meaningful patterns.

3) Opposite pairs working in harmony: This is a key theme in the quest to implement decision making. Calculation & evaluation. Patience & opportunism. Intuition & analysis. Style & objectivity. Success comes from balancing these forces & harnessing their inherent power. The only consistent method for achieving such a balance is to studiously avoid your comfort zone.

4) The things we usually think of as advantages - having more time to think & analyse, having more information at our disposal - can short-circuit what matters even more: our intuition.

5) Attacking requires perfect timing as well as nerve. Pushing the action gives us more options & a greater ability to control our fate. That in turn creates positive energy & confidence.

6) Psychological muscles atrophy form disuse just as physical ones do.

7) Every enterprise has an opening, a middle game, & an end game. Knowing where you are lets you hone your strategy - be it attacking, manoeuvring, or negotiating - & enables you to identify & eliminate weakness.