There are two approaches to life – either life teaches you lessons or we act proactively, sense things, think a couple of steps in advance and learn from things that could happen. This is called interpretation and it plays a crucial role in shaping our intellect and traits. While an egoistic mind shuns every possible opportunity to learn, a wise mind creates opportunities to evolve from within.
And for that evolution to happen, our minds need to be trained the right way to see things from a different perspective. Metaphorically speaking, if you intend to stay fit physically, just the thought of hitting the gym isn’t enough, is it? No man has ever achieved things by just staying indoors. Physical fitness requires you to hit the gym, work out, sweat it out and repeat every single day to actually see results. If the gym trains your body and helps it evolve, chess is something that trains your mind and trains it to make it better with every game.
Chess is like a gym for your mind that teaches you diverse things. From making you see things from a different perspective and teaching the importance of losing to helping you formulate strategies and interpret things, chess plays a crucial role in your everyday life. A mind that is trained by chess tends to be more alert, accurate, clear and composed than the otherwise chaotic mind that is just noises from within.
Apart from just being just a game for passing time, chess when taken seriously can take you where you deserve to be. Especially, a proper exposure to chess at an early age can inculcate skills that no school or college will teach. Chess trains your mind to learn from your failures, which is perhaps the biggest life skill today’s generation needs. From petty issues like not getting responses from your crush to not landing a job, this generation has its own set of problems and consequences it has benchmarked as failures and this game will train your mind to learn that failure is good.
Secondly, chess will also allow you to think. When was the last time you sat down to think about things around you? Let’s put it differently. When was the last time you thought about things other than your smartphone or social media or your charger? Today, it’s pretty alarming to see ourselves stuck to our smartphones, digging through memes and newsfeed content hours after hours. We are more exposed to content we don’t need than crucial pieces of information we need. From the few minutes of break you get from work to situations when there’s no power, our mind today just resorts to smartphones for everything. This isn’t healthy for the body and for the mind. We have all lost our abilities to think, visualize and imagination to nonsensical stuff. To come out of this, you need to engage on things that will train your mind to think outside nonsense. Chess will put things into perspective again and help you connect with life.
It will make you spend time with yourself and your mind when you’re free and give you more time to think about things that matter.
Frequently playing chess will also help you become better at communication and time management. Most importantly, it will foster discipline from psychological levels, which is crucial today for us and our next generation. From binge watching television series to improper eating and sleeping habits, we have a long way to go. Chess brings in the much needed discipline back into our lives, making us enthusiastic, fresh and clear with life in general.
If you think a lifestyle like this is luxury, it’s time you start training your mind with chess. It’s not a game designed for summer camps or weekends. It’s a game that will hold your hand and take you through every aspect of life with confidence and train you to approach it with clarity. Get started!