5 Lessons From Chess I Used to Build an 8-Figure Business
The Amplified Impact Podcast
October 6th, 2023
I love chess, and I love building businesses. Luckily, for me, the two are very similar. Here are some lessons that I’ve learned from playing chess that have helped me build my 8-figure business.
Lesson 1: Control the Center.
Lesson 2: Understanding Piece Value.
Lesson 3: Proactive Piece Development.
Lesson 4: Assessing Risk vs. Reward.
Lesson 5: Thinking Several Moves Ahead.
There’s so much you can learn from this game that you can then take and apply to other areas of your life. So the next time you’re feeling stuck, break out the ol’ chess board and play a few games. You might find the answer on the board.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“And so the way that we find that move is just by asking ourselves what is the hard move here that I’m not even considering? That’s not even on my radar. Identify that move and then play it.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
Hey, real quick, guys. I don’t know if you know this, but each week I put together an exclusive newsletter for our subscribers that covers things like entrepreneurship, investing, wealth, building, productivity, and personal development. Also, you get some pretty cool behind the scenes content that the rest of the world just will never get to see. So if you’re interested in joining us, get over to beyond theapex.com Newsletter to join the tens of thousands of other subscribers getting their weekly five to Thrive. Alright, let’s get into the show. So I grew up not really seeing my dad a whole lot in the early years, at least when I was like just a very small child, up until maybe I was twelve years old. He was in the army in particular. An army ranger.
Anthony Vicino:
So he was gone a lot. And when he was home, him and I had a hard time, I think, connecting when I was young because he was very emotionally switched off. I think maybe that’s part of his upbringing, but also kind of exacerbated by being in the military and then maybe a relationship with my mom that he wasn’t thrilled about. And then on the other end of that spectrum was myself being just kind of a spastic ADHD kid. So we didn’t really connect on a deep, emotional, intimate level, it felt like as a child. But there was one thing that we had where I felt very connected to my dad. I felt like we were bonding and able to connect, and that was through the game of chess. He taught me how to play chess when I was a very, very young kid, which is like a very brave endeavor for somebody.
Anthony Vicino:
First of all, teaching any kid how to play chess requires a lot of patience. But teaching a kid with ADHD how to play chess, that’s a different type of masochism. And my dad is a very intellectual type and prides him on being the smartest guy in the room. And as a kid, you look up to your dad and you see him as a superhero and you kind of want to emulate him. And they say that the story of the son is embedded in the story of the father. And in a lot of ways, I wanted to live up to this idea of him, of being smart, right? Like it was a value that he obviously held in high esteem and I wanted him to see me as smart. And chess was kind of one of those ways that I felt maybe I could prove myself to him. So I took chess very seriously, and I probably studied chess more than any other activity in my life.
Anthony Vicino:
I’ve taken it very seriously over the entire t of my adult existence or my childhood, and then a lot of my adult existence. And when I think back on chess, there’s actually five lessons I want to share with you guys today that have helped me that I’ve applied in my businesses specifically, that have helped me to scale really strong, robust businesses. And I think you can take these lessons from chess, apply them to your business, but also apply them to your life. These are really interesting concepts to help you think strategically about the decisions and the moves that you’re going to make in life. And so I wanted to share that with you because chess has had such a big, profound impact on my life. And I just want to share these lessons that I’ve been sitting with. So the first lesson is controlling the center. So this is one of the most fundamental rules of high level chess, which is to understand that the middle four squares on a board, so a chessboard is made of 64 squares.
Anthony Vicino:
There are four squares in particular in the very center of the board that really represent the high ground. In a way. What I mean by that is whoever controls those four squares in the center, though, they don’t lead, controlling them doesn’t mean you win the game. But from that position, your pieces have more scope, more capacity. They are used to their maximum and you’re able to see the board and maneuver around it in a way that you wouldn’t if your pieces were all on the side of the board. So more mobility, more range. And the way to think about this is like, think about the chessboard as almost being like a hill. And those four squares at the top of that hill, you have the high ground in it, and that’s a very powerful place to be controlling.
Anthony Vicino:
And so one of the first things that you want to be doing in the beginning of the game, in what we call the opening, is moving your pieces in a way to control the center. And from there you can then start branching off and attacking and doing whatnot, but controlling the center. Whoever does that manages typically to have the highest likelihoods of success in the later portions of the game. What this really means for me is that if a chessboard is 64 squares and the four in the center are the most important, then it shows that there’s a very few number of inputs that account for the majority of our outputs. We know this from Peretto’s principle. And so we ask ourselves, what are those very few number of squares? What is that center of the board, both internally within your business, but then also externally, and some ideas of this internally, I always look at what are the fewest number of squares that I need to control that would maximize my probability of success, and that is marketing. How do I get customers operations? Like what is the product and how do I fulfill it? And then the finance, how are we managing cash flows? So if I can control those three squares from a very high level, then it’s going to set me up for success. The external might be things like in the instance of escape climbing.
Anthony Vicino:
It was Google SEO. We wanted to rank very high when somebody searches for rock climbing gear. It could be an Amazon storefront so that we can sell directly on Amazon, which is third largest search engine in the world. But then it also makes it very easy for us to rank highly on Google. It also handles a lot of the fulfillment and then the supply chain. How are we handling the flow of raw goods through the manufacturing process until they become inventory and then getting them to customers? If we can control those three things, like user acquisition, that’s Google SEO storefront, which is a lot of again, that’s kind of marketing, but it’s a little bit of fulfillment as well. And then supply chain, which is the operations and cash flows. So identify what is the center of your business and then control that at all costs.
Anthony Vicino:
Number two is understanding the true value of a piece. One of the first lessons you’re taught when you first learn the game of chess is that each of the pieces has kind of a different value, and you can count them and get to a number that then tells you who’s winning or losing. For instance, a pawn is typically worth one point. A knight is worth about three points. A bishop is somewhere between three and three and a half points. A rook is five. A queen is nine. Then the king is priceless.
Anthony Vicino:
And so the way that you can quickly tabulate what’s the equivalents of a piece is that a bishop in a knight, a knight is two and a half, or three points, and a bishop is three to three and a half points. So that means combined, that’s six and a half points. And so you could trade a bishop and a knight for, say, a rook, which is five points, and a pawn, which is one point. That’s six. So that would be a roughly equivalent trade. Or you could trade a queen and one pawn, which is nine plus one, to get ten for two rooks, which is five and five equals ten. So this is just a really easy way to look at the board, count the pieces. But the problem with this is that this is just a starting point.
Anthony Vicino:
And what really matters is that you understand that the value of a piece is fluid, and it depends on the context of the board. The board dynamics dictates the value of your pieces. If you have a piece strategically positioned in the optimal way, then you can easily have what we saw in the World Championship between Kasparov and Karpov, where Kasparov placed this knight on the most beautiful, gorgeous square that you’ve ever seen. And he was defended. It was hard to dislodge the knight from that place and from that square, that one knight, which is typically only worth three points was able to dominate the other Karpov’s queen, which is worth nine, and then two rooks, which were combined ten. So almost 20 points worth of army were just neutralized by one knight in the right spot. And they dubbed this knight the Octopus Knight. He lives in.
Anthony Vicino:
Infamy is a great thing. So this is just understanding what is the true value of my piece or my people in particular, and Jim Collins talked about this in the book good to Great is like, get people on the bus and then get them into the right seats. If you can get people into the right seats where they’re able to express their unique genius, then you have a situation like the octopus night, where just like, one person can do so much. The leverage that you get from that is insane. So be asking yourselves, what is the true value of my pieces here? Number three is owning the initiative. Now, there’s a couple of different ways that you can determine who’s winning a game of chess. We already talked about counting the armies. That’s one way.
Anthony Vicino:
Typically, the bigger army is doing better. You could look at it from a positional perspective and say who’s controlling the center, even if they have a smaller army. We saw the 300 Spartans holding off the Persians at Thermopoly. So a smaller army can definitely do some damage if they have the right position. But there’s another way of determining who’s winning or losing a game. And it’s a hard one to see. And most people aren’t even aware that it is a thing, much less maybe the most important thing. It’s called the initiative.
Anthony Vicino:
And the initiative is just another way of thinking about who is determining the pace of play, who’s dictating the action, who’s acting, who’s reacting. Typically, the person who is dictating the action is the one that’s in charge. They’re winning in a lot of, like, we saw this with Napoleon. Napoleon never went into a battle where he didn’t have the initiative, where he maybe had the smaller army, but he had the high ground, he had the position, he had the speed of attack, of action, and he was able to use that to win over and over and over again. All right, the fourth lesson is position over submission. So, like two years ago, I started training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and it was really interesting. Very quickly. I’d been training martial arts and fighting.
Anthony Vicino:
I’d fought professionally for a while. So I come from a world of wrestling with other people and fighting in martial environments. So very familiar with it. So I was able to go into that as a white belt and maybe just have a different level of experience and perspective than maybe the other white belts did. And so going into it, one of the things I noticed very, very quickly from the difference between the upper belts and the lower belts is that when you were grappling against, say, a white belt or a blue belt. They would look for submissions everywhere, even in positions where they had no mechanical advantage. Maybe you’re sitting on their chest and they just reach up and try and choke you. You’ll never be able to do that.
Anthony Vicino:
But they’re constantly looking for that knockout blow. And the difference with the higher belts is that they control the position before they go for the submission. Because they understand that if they can neutralize your counterattacks, if they can neutralize your arms and your legs and make them not part of the equation anymore, then the submission is very easy to find. And so they focus on position over submission. And I think about this a lot when it comes to sales and marketing in particular. Sometimes sales and marketing is harder than it needs to be because we focus on getting the sale and getting the close. And as a result, we maybe haven’t done the preparation of getting the positional advantage, which, I mean, it comes from maybe branding or nurturing relationships and all these other things that take a little bit longer, but then ultimately make the submission or the sale much easier to get. And so I think about this a lot.
Anthony Vicino:
Are we trying to get that knockout punch or are we actually laying the foundation upon which we’ll just make the knockout punch naturally appear? And the last lesson is the hardest move to find. So one of the greatest chess players to never win the world championship is a guy named Vassal Ivanchuk. And he said something that’s really stuck with me all these years. He said the hardest move to find in chess is the retreating knight. And the reason it’s so hard to see the retreating knight move is because it’s so counterintuitive. First, the way the knight moves is already weird, but then to move it backwards is taking us away from our goals. And so it can be very, very hard to even consider that move. But sometimes it’s necessary to take a step back before we can take two steps forward.
Anthony Vicino:
So that means sometimes we have to fire our really high maintenance customers that are taking up all our time and taking away our attention from our really good customers. We need to rethink our entire business plan. It might mean we need to take down our best selling products so that we can revamp it or relaunch it with a new initiative, whatever these things that on the surface look like it’s going to take you away from your goal. But ultimately, by taking that step back and resetting, it will now allow you on this new path forward to make much quicker progress than you would have before. And so that can be one of the hardest moves to find. And so the way that we find that move is just by asking ourselves what is the hard move here that I’m not even considering? That’s not even on my radar. Identify that move and then play it. And if you do that, along with these other ideas that we talked about, these five lessons that I’ve learned from chess and you apply them to your business, but you also apply them to your life, I think you’re going to just go through this game with a higher level, strategic approach that ultimately, I hope sets you up for more success.
Anthony Vicino:
That’s the goal, at least. So I hope you take these lessons, apply them. If any of these stuck out and were useful, interesting to you, or you want me to go deeper, reach out, let me know. I’d love to hear from you guys, but I’m done here. I’m over. I got to go. So, as always, thanks for being here. I’ll catch you around these parts tomorrow.
Anthony Vicino:
Stay hyper focused, guys. Hey, real quick, guys. You already know I don’t run any ads on this because I want to keep it, like, a really awesome listening experience for you. But I do have an ask. I’d love it if you could just help me spread the word so we can help more entrepreneurs, creatives, and high performers just make more money with less stress and more fulfillment. So the best way that you can help me do that is by reading, reviewing, and sharing this podcast. The single thing I ask of you is please just take 10 seconds to drop a review. Seriously, it would mean the world to me, and more importantly, it may just help change somebody’s life.
Anthony Vicino:
So thank you.
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