Jan

11

Try to start each morning thinking of something and someone you're grateful to in your personal and professional lives, and think specifically what you are grateful about. You will discover that you can't be earnestly and sincerely grateful in a heartfelt way and at the same moment in time feel that anything is wrong or missing in your life. It is from that position that one can often make the best decisions that will stand the test of time.

Every time you make decisions from scarcity, fear, jealousy, etc. they are often as flawed as those mindsets are poisonous to your mind.

By the way, try to find the people involved in what you are grateful about and express it to them. It will not only make their day, it will make you a little bit more deserving of success and happiness because you were temporarily able to leave your self-absorption that can very easily become a black hole.

Nigel Davies comments: 

In chess, to coin a phrase, it depends on the position. Sometimes there's a second chance, sometimes there isn't. Schlechter and Bronstein came very close to winning the World Championship and the point at which they missed their opportunities has been traced to single moves. In Schlechter's case the outcome was particularly tragic as he subsequently died of starvation. A Bronstein win probably would have improved his situation also, no matter what he said in retrospect.

Of course most of the moves we make in life are not usually so critical. If we miss one, we go on living even if it was some kind of key moment, and things then take a different course. They may be better or worse depending on which variation we find ourselves in. And probably we should not dwell on 'what might have been' for it distracts the attention from the game we're actually playing.

But the thought that haunts me is that our choices may be more limited than we think; it is difficult to be anything other than ourselves and most of the outcomes will be an extension of this. Perhaps we can learn to make better decisions and I believe that my struggle with the chessboard (and now markets) has been largely about this. As I like to tell my students, a genius is a man who only makes the same mistake five or six times, most of us do it for our entire lives. 


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