I know what you’re thinking:

That’s alright. Although Chess is the most amazing game ever created and I could sell it to anyone, that’s not what this piece is about. You don’t need to know any chess to read this. It’s more fun if you do, of course, but this is about my learnings from chess - universally applicable philosophical lessons.

Synopsis

Pawn Sacrifice follows the meteoric rise and slow unraveling of Bobby Fischer - the first (and for a long time, only) beacon of hope against the Soviet Chess machine. The film tracks his obsessive genius, his paranoia, and the crushing weight of becoming a symbol in a global ideological war. As Fischer prepares to face Boris Spassky in the 1972 World Championship, the matches become battlegrounds, the board a Cold War proxy, and Fischer’s greatest enemy increasingly becomes himself.

A tense, intimate portrait of brilliance pushed past its breaking point.

Review

There aren’t any ‘great’ chess films per se, and this one didn’t win any Oscars either. But Tobey Maguire displays his mastery over the art of acting with a brilliant performance alongside Peter Sarsgaard as his friend, philosopher, and guide. Liev Schreiber is his intense self, as always. Add to that - salient undertones of the Cold War, LA in the 60s, and the vast expanses of Iceland, and what you get is a movie that leaves you with something to think, if not much to remember.

7 Lessons From Everest

Most of you reading this already know the story - in May 2019, my father stood on top of the world. Quite literally. He summited Mt. Everest and later wrote a beautiful book about what the climb taught him - about focus, fear, and what happens when the air gets thin but your purpose doesn’t.

You can’t buy that book anymore (the mountain, it seems, doesn’t believe in reprints), but if you’d like to read it, leave a comment and I’ll send you a PDF.

7 Lessons From Chess

I, on the other hand, am much lazier and have chosen slightly less oxygen-deprived pursuits. My battles take place sitting down - across a wooden board with thirty-two pieces and sixty-four squares. But the lessons, surprisingly, aren’t all that different.

Chess began as a model of war - a way for kings and generals to map out conflict before lives were actually lost. And in many ways, it still is. Only now the battlefield is internal: between patience and impulse, calculation and chaos.

Over the past year, I’ve spent an unreasonable number of evenings staring at those sixty-four squares, and somewhere between the blunders and the breakthroughs, I began to see a pattern - not just of moves, but of mind.

These, then, are the seven things I’ve learned - about work, about life, and about trying to make good moves in both.

P.S. I’ve paired each lesson with a famous game that embodies it. If you play chess, enjoy the show. If you don’t - skip the boards and read the words. The lessons stand on their own.

P.P.S. the game embeds will not show on email, but if you know and enjoy chess ; simply click “read online” in the top left corner of the email to see the games as well.

Okay, here goes nothing:

LESSON 1:
“Even a poor plan is better than no plan at all” - Mikhail Chigorin

It’s become an epidemic, hasn’t it? Aimlessness.

Everywhere you look, people are drifting, days are dissolving into each other, one notification at a time. Entire months disappear in the fog of “figuring it out.” I know, because I used to live there too.

No plan ever seemed good enough. Some felt too far-fetched, some too risky, and some simply too boring. So I waited for the perfect one-until I realized that waiting became the plan. And it was a terrible one.

That’s when I stumbled on this line by Mikhail Tal, the Magician of Riga: “A bad plan is better than no plan at all.”

At first, it sounded reckless. Then it started to sound true. Because the purpose of a plan isn’t only to arrive somewhere. It’s to move. It gives the day a backbone-structure, accountability, and, most importantly, momentum. Once you’re in motion, the fog clears. You start improvising. You learn. You even surprise yourself.

As they say, the days are long but the years are short. And idleness - quiet, polite, endlessly forgiving - is the apex predator of them all.

In chess, too, drifting is fatal. You make one vague move, then another, and suddenly your pieces have no purpose and your opponent owns the board. In life, a year of that same drifting leaves you standing in the same place, only older.

So work towards something. Anything. It doesn’t have to be perfect, or clever, or guaranteed to succeed. Plans evolve, you adapt, and that’s the beauty of it.

The only thing worse than a bad move is never making one at all.

Game: Mikhail Tal vs. Mikhail Botvinnik, World Championship, 1960 (Game 6)

Tal plays the famous 21…Nf4!! — a knight sacrifice launched without a forced win, only a deep feel for chaos and possibility. Not perfect, not even fully sound, but brave. A plan born from intuition, played with conviction, and rewarded over hesitation.

LESSON 2:
“Play the opening like a book, the middlegame like a magician, and the endgame like a machine.” - Rudolf Spielmann

Every chess game, like every life, unfolds in three acts.

The opening is where you follow the book - not out of obedience, but out of respect. The rules exist because someone smarter than you lost enough times to write them down. In these first moves, you build the foundation: you develop your pieces, control your space, protect your king. It’s not the time for creativity; it’s the time for competence.

In the same way, when you’re starting a business, a career, or even a new phase of life, the most rebellious thing you can do is do the basics well. Make a good product. Understand your numbers. Know your customer. Build something solid before you start setting it on fire. The beginning isn’t the time for “visionary shortcuts.” It’s the time to learn how to spell before you write poetry.

Then comes the middlegame - where the rules loosen, and the possibilities explode. This is where the board gets messy, ideas clash, and imagination starts to matter. The magician arrives. You try unorthodox campaigns, take risks, make sacrifices. Some fail, some land beautifully, but all of them keep the game alive.

This is the growth phase - when you can afford to experiment. Launch the new line. Try the insane marketing idea. Say yes to the collaboration that doesn’t make sense on paper. Your early structure gives you the freedom to create without chaos. The only thing worse than playing by the book forever is never having learned the book in the first place.

Finally, the endgame. The queens are gone, the noise dies down, and precision becomes survival. Every pawn matters. Every tempo counts. There’s no room for flair here - only focus.

In business and in life, this is where execution separates the dreamers from the doers. Delivering on promises. Meeting deadlines. Keeping systems sharp. No dramatics, no innovation - just cold, steady, machine-like reliability.

Because the best victories aren’t cinematic; they’re procedural. You don’t stumble across them - you close them.

Game: José Raúl Capablanca vs. Savielly Tartakower, New York, 1924

A quiet symphony of precision. Capablanca builds his position like a scholar, conjures activity like an artist, and finishes with machine-like perfection. The purest demonstration of Spielmann’s wisdom - structure, imagination, execution - all in one seamless performance.

LESSON 3:
“To win, you must be prepared to lose something.” - Wilhelm Steinitz

Every piece on the board is valuable. But not every piece is valuable now. A knight on the rim is a spectator; a pawn two squares from promotion is a tyrant.

That’s chess. Context dictates value.
And that’s life too.

We’ve spent years worshipping the idea of balance, as if life were a neatly weighted scale where work and rest hang in eternal harmony. But that’s not how anyone actually lives. The “daily work-life balance” people keep chasing doesn’t exist. Trying to achieve it usually just means avoiding whatever’s hard that day and calling it self-care.

The truth is far less poetic - and far more liberating. Balance isn’t about symmetry. It’s about timing.

There are seasons when work demands everything: late nights, long calls, caffeine, sacrifice. You do it not because you’re a workaholic, but because that’s what the board requires. Then there are moments when you shut the laptop, skip the meeting, and disappear with the people you love - because that’s what matters then.

It’s not work versus life. It’s knowing which one needs you right now.

In chess, grandmasters sometimes give up a rook - technically “worth” more - for a knight that dominates the center and wins the game. In the same way, you might sacrifice a few nights out for a project that sets you free later. Or you might turn down a lucrative opportunity to protect your health or time. Either way, it’s not about the piece. It’s about the position.

Every move has a cost; the wise just know when it’s worth paying.

So forget the myth of perfect equilibrium. Aim instead for intelligent imbalance - shifting focus with intention.

Because the game isn’t won by saving every piece. It’s won by knowing what to give up, and when.

Game: Kasparov vs. Shirov, Credit Suisse Masters 1994 - “Take My Book, Take My Rook”

Kasparov sacrifices a rook to cement a knight on e6 - turning a modest piece into a stranglehold of pure dominance. A lesson in timing, context, and the art of giving up something valuable to control everything else.

LESSON 4:
“When you see a good move, look for a better one.” - Emanuel Lasker

Most of us stop at “good enough.”

If something works - a process, a campaign, a design, a decision - we pat ourselves on the back and move on. After all, why fix what isn’t broken? But the truth is, “not broken” is often just another word for unfinished.

In chess, the moment you see a move that looks good, you’re supposed to pause - not play it. Because the first idea that comes to mind is almost always the one your opponent saw too. So you dig deeper. You ask, what am I missing? And somewhere beneath that first layer of logic, a better move often hides.

That pause - that refusal to settle - is where mastery begins.

My father has a way of forcing this lesson into every conversation. Whenever I present him with an idea - something tidy, workable, “good” - he listens, nods, and says, “Okay, now tell me why it doesn’t work.” The first few times, I thought he was just being difficult. Then I realized he was training me to do what Lasker demanded - to keep looking.

You might still end up with your original idea, but now it’s been tested, sanded, strengthened. And sometimes, by the end of that mental excavation, you stumble on something far better.

This isn’t about perfectionism; it’s about honesty. The honesty to ask yourself whether you’re truly giving the problem your full attention, or just the first five minutes of it.

Because in chess and in life, competence ends where curiosity does.
The player who moves first is impulsive. The one who looks again - and again - eventually wins.

Game: Donald Byrne vs Bobby Fischer, New York 1956 — “The Game of the Century”

Fischer bypasses safe, sensible moves and uncorks the stunning 11…Na4!! and later the legendary queen sacrifice 17…Be6!!. A masterclass in refusing the merely good and choosing brilliance instead, ending the game long before the obvious win would have arrived.

LESSON 5:
“Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do; strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.” - Savielly Tartakower

Most people become their best selves only when they’re under pressure. Give anyone a crisis, a deadline, or something obviously urgent and they suddenly find clarity. They act quickly, solve problems, and pull off small miracles because the situation leaves them no choice. That part is easy. That’s tactics.

Strategy is harder because it happens when nothing is forcing your hand.
And this is where most of us quietly fall short.

When life is calm and the inbox is empty, it’s tempting to assume that nothing needs attention. A peaceful moment can feel like permission to drift. In reality, these stretches are where long-term progress is actually built. Chess teaches this brutally well. In a quiet position, weaker players wait for something to happen. Strong players improve a piece, reinforce a structure, or plant an idea that will bloom twenty moves later. Nothing obvious is going on, yet everything is being shaped.

Real life mirrors this. Anyone can be productive when the deadline is in twelve hours. Anyone can be thoughtful after a fight. But the work that compounds is the work you choose to do when you could get away with doing nothing: the book you read slowly, the project you refine without being asked, the relationship you strengthen even when everything seems fine.

Tactics get you through emergencies. Strategy builds your future.

And the quiet moments, the ones most people waste, are the moments that decide where you’re going.

Game: Antonio Medina García vs. Svetozar Gligorić, “The Bughouse Immortal,” Palma de Mallorca, 1968

29 moves, 0 trades and Medina resigns. Both players maneuver endlessly, waiting for the other to blink - but Gligorić is doing more. A perfect embodiment of Tartakower’s wisdom - when there’s nothing to do, think, improve, prepare. Because when the storm finally breaks, only one side will be ready.

LESSON 6:
“What is important is to keep pushing, to keep improving.” - Magnus Carlsen

Chess has this humbling way of reminding you that no matter how much you know, there’s always a blind spot waiting to embarrass you. You study a new endgame and discover ten more you’ve never heard of. You learn an opening and immediately find out it has seventeen sub-lines, each one more irritating than the last. And just when you think you finally “understand” something, a twelve-year-old on the internet crushes you with an idea that looks like it was invented by someone who skipped every classical rule ever written.

The message is simple: learning never stops.

Not in chess. Not anywhere.

This isn’t the motivational-poster version of lifelong learning. This is the slightly painful truth that you are never quite as good as you think. Every time you improve one part of your game, another part quietly shows cracks. You become sharper tactically but suddenly realize your endgames need work. You become positionally sound but realize you can’t calculate your way out of a paper bag. There is always a next thing.

And life is somehow even more complicated than chess.

You might be a great communicator but a terrible planner. You might excel at empathy but be hopeless at boundaries. You might be brilliant at your job but mediocre at taking care of yourself. There’s always another endgame. Always another opening you haven’t played. Always another version of yourself waiting to be understood better.

Perfection isn’t a destination. It isn’t even a milestone. It’s more like the horizon - it moves every time you take a step.

That is strangely comforting. Because it means you don’t have to chase the illusion of being a finished product. You just have to stay curious. Keep reading, keep practicing, keep asking uncomfortable questions, keep trying to become a little less foolish than yesterday. Whatever “your next improvement” is - in work, in love, in your own head - it’s already tapping impatiently on the board.

Learning never ends. The good news is: neither does the possibility of becoming better.

Game: Magnus Carlsen vs. Ian Nepomniachtchi, World Championship 2021, Game 6

Carlsen wins the longest game in World Championship history, a 136-move grind where he turns a nearly equal position into a full point by pure persistence. No shortcuts, no miracles — just relentless improvement, tiny gains stacked patiently until the position finally breaks. A perfect example of squeezing water from stone.

LESSON 7:
“A good player is always lucky.” - José Raúl Capablanca

Capablanca said this with a straight face, which is hilarious because he was one of the least “lucky” players in history. He didn’t wait for fortune. He created positions where fortune had no choice but to agree with him. That’s really what this line means.

Luck isn’t magic. It’s the byproduct of preparation meeting a moment.

In chess, you don’t control whether your opponent blunders. You don’t control whether the tactic exists. What you control is the quality of your moves. You control whether you’ve studied the structure well enough to recognize the opportunity when it appears.

That’s the real definition of “luck”:

being ready when the world finally gives you something.

It’s the same everywhere. People obsess over results, as if outcomes are some cosmic referendum on their worth. They treat success as justice and failure as indictment. But the truth is far colder and far kinder: results fluctuate. Circumstances interfere. Timing doesn’t always cooperate.

The only thing you genuinely own is your effort.

If you prepare deeply, act honestly, and perform at your highest level, then the result - good or bad - becomes just information. Something to study, not something to fear. You don’t become emotionless. You just become less enslaved to the scoreboard.
And strangely, the moment you become results-agnostic - the moment your focus shifts from “What will I get?” to “How well can I play?” - things start going your way more often than not.

Because now you’re improving every day, not just celebrating or mourning outcomes.
Because now you’re consistent, not reactive.
Because now your so-called “luck” is simply the natural reward of showing up properly.

A good player is always lucky because a good player is always prepared.

Game: Ding Liren vs Gukesh Dommaraju, World Championship 2024, Game 14

In a quiet rook-endgame where most expected a draw, Ding blunders 55 Rf2?? and opens the door. Gukesh seizes the moment with precision and grit, turning preparation into victory. A vivid reminder: do your work, stay ready, and when luck knocks, you’ll be there to open the door.

I have learnt countless things from chess but these are the most universally applicable and easily executable of them. I hope this piece motivates you to explore the game - it really does change your life.

In conclusion, I just want to say: watch Pawn Sacrifice, it’s a good movie.

Until next time!