You must always be aware of your limitations and also of your best qualities. This knowledge allows you to both play your own game and adapt when it is required.

Change can be essential, but it should only be made with careful consideration and just cause. Losing can persuade you to change what doesn’t need to be changed, and winning can convince you everything is fine even if you are on the brink of disaster. If you are quick to blame faulty strategy and change it all the time, you don’t really have any

Physics also tells us that “ordered systems lose less energy than chaotic systems.” In chess terms, when our pieces work together, they can turn one advantage into another without losing quality. A position or a company or a military unit that is disorganized can be torn apart by attempting a transformation. Trying to achieve the objective can

I saw the final winning position, an incredible fifteen moves away. It was a feat of calculation, but there is no way your mind can go that far without help from your imagination.

A manager might say they built an effective team from a group of individuals with disparate skill sets. An army commander would recognize that a well-coordinated force will almost always triumph over a numerically superior enemy who lacks organization. A company with an efficient management structure, or assembly line, will often have better

So before I played Petrosian again, less than a year after the defeats described above, I spoke with Spassky, who was playing in the same tournament in Yugoslavia. He counseled me that the key was to apply pressure, but just a little, steadily. “Squeeze his balls,” he told me in an unforgettable turn of phrase. “But just squeeze one, not both!”

Finally we come to the hardest part of developing and employing strategic thinking: the confidence to use it and the ability to stick to it consistently. Once you have your strategy down on paper, the real work begins. How do you stay on track, and how do you know when you have slipped away from thinking strategically? We stay on track with

You can—and must—look for ways to experiment and to push the boundaries of your capacity in different areas.

Experience allows us to instantly apply the patterns we have successfully used in the past. Tactics involve calculations that can tax the human brain, but when you boil them down, they are actually the simplest part of chess and are almost trivial compared to strategy. Think of tactics as forced, planned responses, basically a series of “if—then”