Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, with your host Joe Bautista. In this podcast, my goal is to give you quick lessons that you can reflect on in your journal so you can grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually and have a better career, better relationships, and better personal finances while you enjoy your morning cup of coffee.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones. I’m also the founder of Grow With Joe, where I combine self-development coaching and financial planning for Latino Professionals.
In today’s episode, we are going to talk about how chess is a great metaphor for life. I like playing chess, especially five-minute blitz because you have to make fast decisions, and you need to think five moves ahead while also preparing for what the other side will do.
I used to play a lot more chess in the past but school and this business are taking away time from chess.com for me. But I feel that chess helps me out in a couple of ways.
The first way is that with five-minute blitz chess, I only have five minutes to either win the game or if I run out of time first, then I lose the match. In life, we don’t have all day to make decisions and if we take too much time, then we can lose out on opportunities or be rushed into making a decision that is not the best for us and make a blunder.
This is why before the game, you want to study concepts and know the different strategies so that when the real game is played, you can make more informed decisions. This is why I love to listen to podcasts and read books so that I can prepare myself for future events. I read a book on negotiating and when I go into a negotiation, I’m going to be more prepared.
My first couple of negotiations wasn’t the best, but after reviewing the scenario, I can see where I can improve and what is working. The same thing with chess. It’s important to review your matches so that you know where you made a mistake or blunder, and why you made a certain decision in a game. This feedback can allow you to become better at pattern recognization so that the next game you play, you’ll be able to better read the scenario and increase your chances of winning.
Also, in chess, sometimes you have to sacrifice a piece so that you can win in the end. With my business, there are somethings that I sacrifice in terms of my leisure so that I can have more flexibility and control over my situation in the future. It’s about placing myself in the right position in the game of life. I don’t want to fall behind because I focused on the wrong things.
Another important concept about life is the pin. This is where a piece can’t move because it’s in front of the king and moving that piece would put that player in check, and the other player can’t put themselves in check. So if you’re out in the world and trying to win the game, think of ways where you can put yourself in a position where people need your help. They are pinned to your needs. This is what I do with financial planning because I’ve been doing for a long time and I can show people how to make money and without me, they not going to be as successful. So think of ways that people are pinned to your services.
Chess is a great game but it requires training and playing a lot of games. So if you have trouble with making decisions, try playing some blitz games and see how you can apply chess lessons to your own life.
And that’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, play life like chess, not checkers as Denzel Washington would have wanted you to in the movie Training Day. And if you haven’t seen those movies, it’s a great movie and there is a reason why Denzel won the Oscar for his performance in it. But there is a lot of lessons from chess that you can apply to your life. After the first there moves in chess, there are 121 million different outcomes. But if you know the general strategies, it can increase the likelihood that you win your game and cause a draw where you still don’t lose. And this is what this podcast episode is about, not losing your game. But to do this, you need to know how to win, and the first step is winning is to studying the rules of the game. Do this and life will be a lot easier.
If you would like to get the journal questions for today’s episode, you can sign-up for my monthly journaling subscription newsletter, where you get daily journal questions Monday through Friday, and as a bonus, you will also get my time management course and my personal development cheat sheet. You can get all this for $13/mo, which is less than the cost of an audible subscription and it’s less work to gain more wisdom. You can get this offer at growwithjoe.me/journal
Thanks for listening today! To get a free copy of my Audiobook “More You Know, More You Grow: How to get better every day” just go to my website growwithjoe.me/book and you can download it right there.
I have a quiz on my website that grades your inner circle, so if you want to find out if your inner circle is an A, B, C, D, or F, you can take that quiz at growwithjoe.me/quiz
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Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.
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