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by helloplanets·5y ago·view on hn ↗
Don’t agree with this writeup at all. It seems like writeups comparing life and chess are heavily biased towards the strategic concepts, when in reality playing the game well is heavily based on grasping tactical concepts, recognizing a certain amount patterns and being able to apply them under pressure. Strategy starts mattering only way later, and is still completely dependent on you not letting the other player catch you with your pants down because of a pattern that slipped your mind.

I’d go as far as to say that applying the opposite of what the writer is implying is more beneficial in most circumstances. Instead of viewing running a business as a contest between businesses for Scarce Resource X and Y, it’s probably better to view running a business as a contest of managing the scarce resources within the company itself: Capital, time, amount of great people working with you, etc. Although, even that sells the challenges of running a good business short.

The better you get at chess, the more it can feel like you’re trying to grind water out of stone, but persisting until you notice you’ve progressed after a year. I think that comes closer to the day-to-day experience of running a business.

P.S. This is the best article I've read about chess and life: https://aeon.co/essays/playing-chess-is-an-essential-life-le...

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> Instead of viewing running a business as a contest between businesses for Scarce Resource X and Y, it’s probably better to view running a business as a contest of managing the scarce resources within the company itself: Capital, time, amount of great people working with you, etc.

Advocates of Go (the game, not necessarily the language) see the first view as problematic as well. In Go, attacking is much harder than it is in chess. The game is more like a negotiation, where every "take" is necessarily accompanied by a "give". As in negotiation, the more skilled player can subtly shift things their way, but from the Go mindset, each defeat is a lesson. You may have lost the immediate "negotiation", but what you were given in return was a lesson in how to improve for the next time.

Applied to business, competitors can be negotiated with and perhaps at times even cooperated with when it's in both party's interest (in software, you see this in things like conferences where people swap best practices and "war stories"), and competitors who have an advantage over you can be learned from.