3 More Strategic Mental Models from Chess

What’s up, all you beautiful people? Welcome back to the podcast. So, one of my favorite YouTube videos and favorite articles that I’ve written in the past five years is all around mental models that I learned from playing chess competitively and how I applied those to my life into my businesses. And what I find so interesting about this article, and this video in particular, is that the video on the YouTube channel, it did abysmally for the first five months or so. It only. It was our worst performing video by a large margin. So, for comparison, our typical view count on videos on the main channel is around 200,000 views. After about four or five months, this video was at like 20,000. So it was like ten x worse than our average.

And I was really bummed about it because it was my favorite video from a, like, I’m just so into chess. Like, I grew up playing. I was a South Dakota state chess champion in 9th grade. Chess was a way for me and my dad to bond as this kid with ADHD. My dad, who was in the military and very rarely home, and he was also very emotionally stunted. It was a way for us to connect and be together. And so it holds a very near and dear place in my heart. And I’ve learned so much from playing chess, and so much of the ways that I think strategically in my business and my life stems from what I learned in that game.

And so when I wrote that article, when I did those videos, I was really bummed that it didn’t do very well because I was like, man, I really. I thought this was the most original thing that I’ve created in a long time. And I thought this could bring people a lot of value well out of nowhere. And I’ve talked about this in previous episodes, is that the video, just around month five or six, it just caught fire and it took off, and it went from doing like 20,000 views at like four or five months in. And then all of a sudden, I think today it’s like 320,000. So now it’s actually a very good performing video for us. And it’s just sometimes, you know, it’s just a matter of how the time length in which you measure an investment is often more important than the quality of investment. So what I mean by that is, like, if.

If you were to measure, was this a good or bad video? The first three months, you’d say, oh, it’s a bad video. Didn’t get, you know, didn’t hit our expectations. Now, if you look at it six months in you say, oh, it’s a great video. It’s exceeded our expectations. So sometimes you just have to give yourself more time. Is the moral of the story there? Anyway, somebody reached out to me the other day and they’re like, hey, you should write a book on this concept around chess and how to apply these strategic concepts to business. And I was like, hey, that’s pretty cool. I hadn’t really thought about expanding it deeper, so if that is something that you guys would be interested in, let me know.

I’m talking to, to some publishers right now about different book concepts that we might explore for future releases. You know, we’re talking about, okay, maybe we do a book on hyper focus and, you know, how we turned adhd into a superpower. Maybe we do them around the five rules of life thing that, you know, they didn’t teach us in school. So how to focus, how to develop self discipline, how to cultivate creativity and curiosity, like those skills that are most important in the modern workflow. I really wanted to write that book as well, but this idea of writing about mental models related from chess and applying it to life and business is also very cool. So if that’s something that you guys would find interesting, shoot me a DM, shoot me a comment, leave a review, and let me know how you’re feeling about that, and we’ll see. We’ll see where this takes us. So, okay, anyways, in this, today’s podcast, what I want to talk about is just a couple more, just concepts that I think about very frequently, and that might bring you some, some value as you’re thinking strategically about your life and about your business.

So the number one thing, the next chess model that I want to share with you. And again, if you want to go see the first five, go to anthonyvasino.com. no, go to YouTube. Go to the YouTube channel Anthony Vacino, and go find the five mental models for thinking like a strategic genius. Now, here’s three more. Number one is this concept of developing your pieces in the opening of chest. In the first couple of moves, there are some rules that you typically want to follow. And one of the most important rules is that you want to develop your pieces.

You want to start getting them out onto the battlefield, into the most advantageous position possible. A lot of the times when you’re playing a new chess player, they will move the same piece over and over. They might bring out their queen and then move it around a bunch of times. But as a good general rule, in the first ten moves of the game, you should never move the same piece twice. That’s a very simplistic rule. But the idea is that you want to focus on getting out all of your pieces, because the sooner you can develop them, the more pressure you can exert on the board. Now, the idea of developing your pieces, I think you can apply this strategically to your own life in the same way with your business. How do I develop my people? How do I bring people into my ecosystem, whether that’s employees or its friends, like whoever it is, how do you bring people into your sphere of influence and help develop them? Help level them up.

And as a consequence, because you’re up leveling the people that you’re spending all your time around, you also get the benefit of up leveling. Right? So how do we develop the people in our ecosystem? Now, if you’re a business owner, this is the most important thing, is to build the people that then build the business. So constantly reinvesting back into developing your people and making them as powerful and positioning them as advantageously as possible, that is going to pay massive dividends. Because at the end of the day, businesses are just people, right? The term company is defined as a group of people with a common purpose. Right? So how do we align the interests of this group? How do we develop them? Because truly, the difference between an A player and a B player is not just double, triple the results. It’s like 1015 20 x. It’s exponential. So any time and energy that you can put into helping improve the people around you is going to pay massive dividends, both in your life, but also in your business.

So that’s, number one, is develop your pieces. Number two, this is a really fun phrase. It’s called Swissenzug. This is a german word, Swissenzug. It means in between moves. And this is a really cool concept. So in chess, as you’re playing, sometimes you will have this, this sequence that plays out on the board. Maybe the opponent takes one of your pieces, and now it’s up to you to take back that piece.

It’s just a logical exchange of pieces, right? Like two forces come together. I take yours, and now you take mine back. Right? Now, the Zwissenzug, zwish and zoo. It’s a very hard word to say, is this really basic concept, but it’s actually quite advanced to apply in real time, which is sometimes instead of just directly taking back the opponent’s piece, you should pause and ask yourself, is there an in between move that I could insert right now that helps me advance my position and I still retain the option of taking back their piece in a second. Right. And it doesn’t always pertain to taking back pieces, but the in between move is this interesting idea that sometimes as you’re moving towards a goal, it’s not always about just immediately taking the logical step that’s right in front of you. Sometimes you have enough time to introduce the side quest, the side maneuver, while in pursuit of the bigger move. And so the way that you can think about this is in your business.

Let’s say you’re working with a vendor, you’re working with a customer. When you go for the sale, instead of just, you’re sitting there in the sales pitch and you get them signed on, instead of just immediately going for signing the contract and saying, cool, I got you to agree to this product, this service. Here’s the thing. The in between move would actually be, oh, cool, we got, I got. This is gonna be a great fit, this program that you agree, by the way, before, before we go down and we, like, sign all this contract and lock this in, you might also be thinking about this, this other thing, this upsell, this Downsell, this other, you know, add on tertiary offer. And that in between move is often a powerful way of increasing the lifetime value of a customer. You’ve already got them to say yes to this thing that’s on the table. It’s a logical move, and some people just sprint so hard towards that, they just get blinders on.

They don’t even think about, okay, what else might I be able to add into here? What are the in betweeners that I could add in? That would add some value. But by doing that, by pausing at that critical moment, you can often convert 20% to 30% of people through just that one additional ask. That’s like this one simple example. But always ask yourself, like, in life and business, as you’re moving forward, is this the next move? Is it forced? Do I have to do this, or can I afford to introduce something in between real quickly? It’s a really interesting concept called the zwift and zug. Okay, number three, king safety. One of the most important concepts in chess. And again, we go back to the opening. The first ten moves of the game is to get your king to safety.

Right now, in the beginning of the game, he starts it in the middle of the board. That’s not very good, right? And generally, because we want to advance our pieces and develop towards the center, that’s the most important piece of terrain on the board. Think of it like the high ground by moving the pawns in front of the king. By moving our pieces beside the king, we’re actually exposing him to more, more danger in the opening. And so we want a castle, we want to tuck him away in the corner, and we want to put a wall of pawns in front of him. This idea of get your king to safety before you start attacking is very important. It’s one of the reason a lot of beginner chess players struggle is because they start attacking without first defending their king, and now their king is vulnerable. And so the way that we apply this same concept to our business is to ask ourselves, what is the king? What is the most important thing that I must not lose sight of? Right.

You have pieces on the board that are all worth different values, but the king ultimately is priceless, because if you lose him, the game’s over. So you have to ask yourself in business and life, what is that king that you cannot afford to lose? Maybe that’s your relationship with your significant other. Maybe it’s your relationship with your kids. In the context of your business, maybe that’s just not running out of money. Right? What is that thing that you have to shore up first? And for me, the thing that really helps think about King safety in the context of business is cash reserves. Like, how do we put enough money in the bank to make sure that we have enough to meet our obligations in six months, nine months, twelve months? And then how do we maintain strong cash flows? How do we keep our expenses low so that we, if times get rocky, like, we have safe, we have a safe king. And one of the things that I talk about with our employees a lot is how it’s so important that we fail our way to success, right? Failure and success, they’re really just two sides of the same coin. We need to be okay making mistakes and failing forward.

However, one of the things I noticed with our employees when we would talk about this years ago is they would still feel this fear of screwing up. And one day I was talking to my shipping manager, she’s like, I’m just so afraid of making a mistake that’s going to cost us too much, cost us tens of thousands of dollars to put us out of business, or something like that. I was like, listen, here’s the most important thing as the founder entrepreneur that you need to communicate to your team is that it’s okay for them to fail, because the things that you’re handing them to fail at are not going to put the business at risk. You retain decision making powers over all of the potential things that could bankrupt your company. So you don’t hand the gun to your employees, that could kill the business. You retain those. So you, by saying, hey, anything that I hand you, by definition, cannot bankrupt the company. Therefore, it is okay for you to fail.

I found that that did wonders for alleviating the stress that my shipping manager felt. And she’s like, oh, I never thought about it that way. I was like, yeah, I’m never going to give you the ability to bankrupt the company. Those are failures that me and my partner, we retain those decisions. You don’t have to worry about that. And what I found then is that she approached her work in a much more free and fluid way, approached it with more creativity. Because when you’re afraid of screwing up and killing the company, of course you’re going to play the game a little bit differently. So the very first thing that you need to do is just secure the king.

Let your team know that don’t worry, you’re not going to do anything that’s going to risk the king’s safety. That’s for me to worry about. And those are three concepts that I found really, really interesting from chess that you can apply to your life. Hopefully, you got a little bit of value out of this. I know it’s a little bit different than what you’re probably used to hearing in terms of business advice. Develop your pieces, think about the in between. Move the Zwishanzug, and then get your king to safety. So hope this brings you guys some value.

If you like episodes like this, let me know, shoot me a comment, leave me a review, shoot me a dm, let me know, and we’ll do more like this. Otherwise, we’ll catch you in the next episode. Stay happy, folks. My friends.