Chess is a game that uses focus and in order to master chess you must develop the skill-set of concentration and directed attention.
Inevitably, in biz and life if you don’t keep relentlessly and almost religiously focused on what you want, you will without question not get there.
In fact, the lack of focus can and probably will cost you more than any business mistake, failure, or detour that you could make. One could even say that all of those failures, errors, and mistakes are results of not being focused.
Chess has been around for thousands of years and has deep rooted symbolism that applies to our modern times.
Chess is a wonderful mental exercise that simulates scenarios where focus is needed for you tap into your “directed” attention skillset and strengthen your ability to focus so you can be more efficient and hit your targets.
I have always had a bipolar relationship with focus so my Mom was smart enough to put me in martial arts as a child to help me work on my patience, discipline, and focus. She also advocated I learn to play chess.
In my experience focus is much like a mental muscle that needs to not atrophy. It needs to be strengthened and exercised. It needs to be managed and fine tuned.
In business and in life, the internet and technology communication mediums are becoming more and more crowded, saturated, and noisy.
I have noticed it has actually helped me to avoid technology until it is absolutely necessary to use. So I spend as much time as I can preparing and being proactive before I engage with technology so I can get really clear on my driving and underlying milestones and goals to execute.
So to relate focus with chess, it has helped me to become very vigilant about being proactive and preparing my strategy, reviewing my goals, contemplating my milestones before deploying action (using technology to direct energy and effort for desired results).
This ensures the directed action is productive and in alignment with that which I want. Most people jump on the computer or their mobile devices first thing. Check email first. Check social media first. Load up their “notification” apps to see what’s new. That is the moment the internet makes you a bitch. You gotta shift and transition and make technology your bitch by being proactive and giving your “focus” muscle some good quality time.
Getting in alignment with the right focus is essential to deploying the correct action. It is very easy to get into the trap of just being busy and wasting energy. This is a management problem. Because its an illusion and trap that one is accomplishing thing. This is just activity in the hamster wheel.
So by becoming a better chess player by achieving growth in business, wider reach, more of an impact, better community involvement focus is the name of the game.
Ambiguity is the killer to lack of clarity and stopping dreams, visions, and potentials from becoming real. This has been my path in experience burnout, failures, etc. These lessons will just keep coming up until there is a shift of paradigm to understanding and realizing this underlying level.
Exercises in chess are directly aligned with simulating how to deploy our focus muscle so we can utilize it better and direct it better. To keep priorities of focus is to write down the goals in a variety of different ways, in different mediums and increase the frequency of writing stuff down. This solidifies the subconscious realm to execute your conscious focus.
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