On Thinking Ahead (Or Playing the Long Game)

If you’ve watched The Queen’s Gambit, or one of my personal favorites, Searching for Bobby Fisher, it’s easy to see why chess (and the players who are good at it) capture our collective imagination.

The ability to think 3, 4, or 7 steps ahead feels . . . magical, or at least very unlikely for our Muggle lives. So, to compensate, we make lots of Pro/Con lists, and we try to decode our intuition, and we listen to lots of advice, probably a lot more than we should.

We all want the ability to see into the future . . . to know what will happen, and plan accordingly.

But even the best Grandmaster doesn’t have a crystal ball. What he or she does have is the ability to play out parallel scenarios in their brain, determine the path of least risk (or least resistance), and act accordingly. This requires an immense level of strategic, disciplined thinking.

The best chess players also get really good at retrograde analysis. In other word, they identify their desired end goal and work backwards from there. If you can steer your moves (and your opponent) towards the “check mate” moves, your chances of winning the game improve dramatically.

We have to know the desired outcome before we plan out our moves to get there.

My dad used to say, “If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.”

I think what is hard about this level of anticipatory thinking is that our lives are so . . . noisy. And hectic. And crammed full of a lot of things that are good, but don’t leave a lot of time for brain space. It takes a lot of work to create time and space to be quiet.

Playing the long game means sometimes you sacrifice a pawn to capture a bishop. You might go backwards in order to go forwards. Playing the long game means being selective in your “yes’s” and gracious in your “no’s”. Waiting to hire the right person instead of ignoring a nagging feeling in your gut about what you need for a role.

I’ve thought a lot lately about living an intentional life, both personally and professionally. To me, that means not letting life happen to me, but identifying the end goal and working towards it, one decision at a time.

You could almost say, “Do the next right thing.” :) Here’s to playing the long game, one decision at a time.