Kasparov: Life Lessons

Garry Kasparov's How Life Imitates Chess in a nutshell:

• review
• challenge resources
• confidence, or decisions delayed (then time crunch/stress)
• analysis of decisions & effect
• focus on results
• hard work
• self awareness & consistency: steady effort pays off
• experiment/push boundaries of capacity
• motivate yourself to push though
• small steady increments can lead to large gains (1 hr a day on activity X)
• worse type of mistake from habit - it makes you predictable
• "clock vs. board time" - number of steps to accomplish an objective...
• improve, swap or eliminate "bad pieces"
• spending time only useful if it will improve things
• imbalance: lack of symmetry that can be exploited for advantage
• accurate evaluation key: focus on each choice, prune poor choices, spend time considering good options
• don't over extend, don't ignore imbalances
• power of surprise strong: spend time thinking/learning to find new ideas
• break down your skills/performance - where strong? Weak? Enjoy? Shy away from?
• big branches on decision tree - forks with no way back. Spend careful time on these decisions.
• always valuable to ask - can I reverse course if the decision turns out poorly?
• if no benefit to making the decision now and no penalty in delaying, use time to improve your evaluation, gather information, examine other options
• err on side of intuition and optimism
• be aggressive with self-criticism
• take the initiative - self pressure
• complacency - lack of vigilance -> mistakes & missed opportunities: train yourself to want to improve even when things go right
• essential to have benchmarks to keep yourself alert
• create goals & standards - then keep raising them
• compete like you are an underdog
• find ways to maintain concentration & motivation - key to fighting complacency
• keep track of time - how much time a week doing irrelevant item X? target reducing this.
• lose as much as you can take (push yourself)
• if its been a while since you experienced the nervous thrill of trying something new, perhaps you've been avoiding challenge for too long
• the moment you believe you are entitled to something is the moment you are ripe to lose it to someone who is fighting harder
• pride in achievement mustn't distract from ultimate goals
• results are what matter in the end - concrete objectives and measure
• accept responsibility for results. Every decision made builds character and forms basis of future decisions.
• engaging with your weak points & drilling down so we understand them is best & fastest way to improve.
• good decisions: calculations, creativity, & desire for results.

The book is a pleasant and easy read. Traditional good advice, from a successful person and an interesting perspective. Well worth reading - most of us know this stuff, but it is always worth repeating for the positive reminder and push. The strength of the book is the concise and well presented overview of basic strategies for success, retold with an entertaining metaphor of "life~chess".

Risk

Risk. How best to understand & take on appropriate amounts?

The first thing to do is to discriminate between risk tolerance and risk capacity. Many people who take on risk do so because they can tolerate risk, e.g. they either enjoy it or at least can stomach it, and as they do not realize that they do not have the capacity to sustain losses. Compulsive gamblers are like this - if you are a billionaire you can have a large poker allowance and not endanger or risk anything really. You have capacity. If you are holding down a normal 9-5 job, and are barely making your bills, and you have a family to support, well, you do not have the capacity. You may have a high tolerance for risk, but you cannot afford this. Do not delude yourself that you will win and buy your family a good life. Do not mistake a need to win with an ability to win.

What you want to do is overcome fear and increase your tolerance for risk if you cannot confront it, or if you have a high tolerance you will actually want to reduce this and realize that feeding the feeling of risk may not be worth the entry cost. Either way, you must calibrate in a way that accounts for your (perhaps small) capacity. The key to managing risk is capacity.

One thing we should realize is we often have more capacity than we assume - we live in the richest time in history, so "risking" things to take on a career path you love but may not pay much is not much of a real risk - as long as you are prudent and can accept the relative "poverty". You may be relatively poor to others, but on an absolute level you will most likely be fine in terms of finances.

Another thing we must learn is that there are two ways we can risk, let us say that we feel we can stomach a 80% chance that things will turn out well. We can either do this:

(A) Bet everything on something that we judge to have 80% odds.

Or we can do this:

(B) Bet 80% of our stuff (money, time, etc) on something we judge to have 100% odds, and 20% of our stuff on super long shots.

There are a couple of advantages to (B). First of all, it is more secure. No matter what we have 80% of our wealth protected. Betting everything on a 80% chance is foolish, as you have bet away your capacity so you are screwed if you lose; option B takes capacity into account and makes sure we keep the capacity. Secondly, the long odds pay much more if they work out - and can really engage us either way, win or lose, by having us really live risk and put ourselves to the line or try things that are difficult yet rewarding. It is doubtful you will become a great author and write a book that will change lives. But you can spend a chunk of your day working on your book, and without risking your livelihood you will become a better writer and have a shot at making the tome that changes the world. Perhaps 20% of your time is worth this to you.

By accurately judging your capacity for risk you can proportion how much you want to risk on long shots - if I'm a billionaire I can risk millions and millions of my finances, and all of my time, on super long shots. If I'm working myself out of debt or struggling to feed my kids I can risk little finances, and need to keep my job, but can spend some of my time on long shots. Maybe all you have is 10 or 5% of your time you can do this in, after all you want to play with your kids, put food on the table, etc. But I can likely demarcate 5% of my time to writing that script - at the very least you are engaging life, growing, and showing your kid a great lesson (hard work, growth, risk, the idea of capacity, engaging life, struggle, blah blah blah). Yes, it will be hard to scrape up the time, to sit down and do the work. Or to scrape up the courage of doing your all and (most likely) not measuring up the first few (many, every?) times and failing. But it is likely worth it - you will gain in proportion to the difficulty. And maybe you will sell your script and make a difference in the world and get some coin also, or at least have a story worth telling about how your script was turned down in {insert cruel manner here}, or have the ability to tell more compelling and interesting stories to your friends.

Finally, there is risk and there is uncertainty. I used the term risk, but risk is boring and using the term here is somewhat misleading. Risk is known - if I flip a regular coin I have about 50% chance of getting heads. Uncertainty is what is really rewarding. If I have two doors, "write a book" and "do a normal job" I don't know what is behind them - but I can guess that I am most likely going to do OK doing a normal job and will have food on the table, at the cost of an exciting life perhaps. For many of us, e.g. those without rich parents, we do not really have the capacity to have any other realistic choice. It is dangerous and stupid to operate otherwise - especially if others rely on you. Uncertainty is the super long odds - we can't accurately measure the risk, we simply know the odds are against us - way against us. But taking the uncertain path is when we engage life, grow as people, and can really find and create wealth. Many people like the feeling of risk - they gamble a lot, even though the odds are slightly against them (and therefor they will eventually get fleeced of their money); or perhaps they just want to live an engaged and fulfilling life. For some they go in knowing they are paying for the feeling, for others they think they actually will win. But the important thing to know is this - you can usually go through both doors, you can hold down a normal & secure (and perhaps somewhat unengaged) job, and you can spend some time going through the second door of "write that damn book". It is not either/or like in option A - oh, my parents are rich so I can risk a life that has 50% odds, or oh my family is poor so I must take a 90% career. You can pick a very stable job and take super long shots that allow you to grow, find adventure, and live a real life.

Uncertainty is where life is at. Many of us do not have the capacity to afford exploring uncertainty with all of our time, but almost everyone has the capacity to spend some time exploring life. Figure out how much capacity you have, and start spending what you can on living and exploring.

Finally, whatever you do, do not resent your family for "tying you down". You chose your family with your actions, and you choose your life every day. Blaming them for what you do is a feeble excuse, and one that will limit both your and your families joy. Many people seem to fall into this trap, and waste their lives in an unhappy state with an unfulfilling job. You do not have the binary choice of "fun and fulfilling life" versus "terrible and grueling life", if you are anything like most people you have a small capacity so you must toil but you can also live and explore uncertainty with what capacity you do have. Putting blame on your wife or kids will just undercut your joy and undercut your life, you are simply using your family as an excuse for not confronting life - an easy, yet awful, out. As far as excuses go it is pretty poor - you gain nothing but negative feelings and wasted life from it - and yet it seems surprisingly common. Your family is a gift, don't sabotage yourself and resent one of the most important things you can obtain in life.

Critical Thought

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweet and blood; who strives valiantly ... who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worth cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worse, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have ... known neither victory or defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt

To a high degree our educational system is one founded on criticism and critical thought. There are many positive aspects to this - learning to be a critical thinker prevents one from being a fool and wasting ones precious time (read: life) pursuing ideas that are flawed, being critical allows one to quickly break down a situation to get the feel of it, and criticism is easy and fun. But criticism is also dangerous - the ease, fun, and ego boost that occurs can be a trap preventing one from going further. Critical thought should be used to get you in the game and to improve your game, it is not the game itself. Do you want to be the fat guy on the couch who plays no sports that screams at the TV, yelling that the coach is a moron, that player X is weak, etc. or do you want to be a player? Criticism can be a trap - and one that can capture many intelligent people (many academics are the equivalent of the fat man yelling at the TV - creation of value is the game, not the criticism of others. Criticism without action and creation is simply whining.).

Criticism as an end in itself is pseudo-intellectualism - it is only one tool in your journey and is easy. It is not "stupid action man versus smart thinking man" - it is creating versus consuming. Either you are actively living life, creating wealth and value (friends, memories, joy, artifacts, etc.), or not. The more you engage and create, the better off you are.

Learn how to be critical and critical thought - but learn this to guide your actions, not as an excuse for taking no action. When in doubt you should look to see if something is simple or if it is easy - you want to do simple things, not easy things. Criticism is easy, relative to action (which requires risk, courage, sustained efforts, etc.), which suggests that it is not a sufficient mode to confront life with.