Member-only story
How Playing Chess (And Other Strategy Games) Prepared Me to Run A Business
When he was a young man, my father won his university’s chess tournament. After he graduated, he moved to America, married my mother, and had children. He instilled within each of us a love for the game. An entrepreneur himself, he would come home from work after running his pharmacy in New York and play a game with us. However, even though I was a child, he never went easy on me. He played with the same level of intensity as he always did and never bent the rules. I lost game after game after game. Instead of taking pity on me and letting me win, he simply encouraged me to keep trying and would give me feedback every time I lost as to why I lost. In fact, it took me 30 years to finally beat my father in a game of chess and it was when he had retired and I had a family of my own. Every single game of chess I played with my father taught me a lesson.
My parents valued hard work, winning by the rules, and self-reliance. They strongly valued education and as a reward for getting good grades, they would take me to Toys R Us at the end of each marking period and let me pick out a console or game. We started off with a Nintendo, then upgraded to a gameboy, then an N64. However, by the time I was in high school, I ended up switching over from console gaming to PC gaming. My circle of friends all got into real time strategy…
