The Chessboard Mindset — the Power of Patterned Thinking
You go about your day. There must be something that needs to be done to occupy the time, something to cling on to and resort to collapsing to when in need to escape. For a month, my thing was chess. I saw how this changed the way I thought, and this in turn led to another interesting thought process — anything can be internalized if one simply sits with it. In other words, if someone dives deep into a certain concept, then the brain will find ways to connect to it, and in turn, find a way to manifest it. To help visualize this concept, imagine learning to pour coffee into a cup. If you do it enough times, your brain begins to form images of the material — in other words- a step-by-step pattern gets engrained into your head. Next time you hold a mug, for instance, you will most likely be reminded of the action you repeated many times previous, and henceforth has become etched into your memory, and the way you hold the mug will most likely be influenced by the action you have repeatedly performed before. This theme is something I saw repeated occurrences of during the past month of May, 2024.
I could see the opponent dribbling the ball. I immediately calculated the following possibilities for what moves he would make, a skill I had learned while playing chess. I calculated two possibilities — he would back up or he would change direction. From his side, backing up didn’t make much sense, so there was only one option left — to change direction. I anticipated this and quickly blocked the ball. Doing such actions allowed me to reflect on this quite well, and made me think of writing this blog. A similar correlation cam be made between me and the world around me, even though that statement in and of itself makes utterly no sense. This blog is about the development of various different ways of thinking and harnessing the power of the mind. I wish this helps me with my writing, the more I write, the more my mind will find these correlations that I can then improvise upon. The importance of noticing patterns and allowing our minds’ innate ability to expand upon that idea to naturally take over is part of what it takes to think about things differently. This is part of the reason I believe in the importance of an innate and intuitive sense. To be curious and observant, since looking around alone gives us pieces to a much bigger puzzle, which can then be assembled together to form a final result unimaginable otherwise. That is just a passive example. I can think of many more active examples, whereby it genuinely increases one’s ability level. In other words, a cognitive approach to thought greatly helps with such situations.
Over the past few weeks, I have been playing chess quite extensively, and I can’t help but be drawn to patterns. How to make a move and how to think from the opponent’s perspective are all things that I have learned throughout my time playing chess. When I was playing basketball the other day, I noticed that those same skills had surfaced involuntarily: I was actively imagining the ways my opponent would move and moving in that direction to stop him. This was not something I did intentionally — I just played my game as normal and this way of thinking had just naturally become a part of my play. Once I made this observation about myself, I could instantly see a shocking correlation: doing a certain task can give you a certain way of thinking that will impact the way you perform a different task, even if the two tasks have very little in common with one another. This is much like the analogy from earlier — pouring coffee into a cup becomes synchronized enough that your mind will apply a similar manner of handling things when holding something else, like a mug.
Now, what does it all mean?
It is important to perform activities of meaning that enrich a certain skill or perform a certain function rather than purely performing actions that have a direct, short-term benefit. Sometimes, the indirect benefits are much more powerful. This is one (among many) of the reasons I write this blog — it gives me a unique method of thinking that becomes a part of the way I handle situations and act involuntarily. As I discussed above, this may be beneficial in other activities that are seemingly unrelated but require similar thinking, brainstorming, and writing skills. I am not the first to state this — Steve Jobs famously summarized this in his commencement speech, where he discussed how taking classes in calligraphy enabled him to invent fonts, an application that would have appeared non-existent to him back when he decided to learn calligraphy. This is the lesson I learned from this. It is the action that is being done rather than the actual direct effect of it that is of significance.