## Metadata - Author: [[Jonathan Rowson]] - Full Title: The Moves That Matter - Category: #books ## Highlights - I was beginning to understand that the best kinds of freedom involve choosing your constraints wisely and claiming them as your own. ([Location 237](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QLN47CX&location=237)) - Maturing into a viable adulthood is partly about discipline, but it is also about luck. Aldous Huxley famously wrote that ‘experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you’. ([Location 244](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QLN47CX&location=244)) - the intimacy we feel through shared attention may be an unconscious emotional driver that keeps us coming back to the game. ([Location 373](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QLN47CX&location=373)) - To see the chess pieces set up therefore looks to me like a gateway to a particular kind of freedom – the freedom to concentrate. ([Location 550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QLN47CX&location=550)) - Positive freedom depends upon the capacity to concentrate because it involves preferring goal-directed attention to stimulus-directed attention; activities where we feel some agency, rather than those where we are merely entertained. ([Location 593](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QLN47CX&location=593)) - Clock time is to chess like sets are to tennis or overs are to cricket; they create the temporal form that sets the tempo of the contest. I think you have to have experienced taking a series of decisions under time pressure to even countenance the idea that chess might be a sport. The experience of the game is not contemplative or reflective in the way it can appear in cultural references; in practice it is a perpetual competitive injunction to resolve complexity as quickly as possible. ([Location 709](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QLN47CX&location=709)) - I have learned to respect people who know how and when to draw their lines. Concentration depends on saying no, and so does any freedom worth having. ([Location 825](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QLN47CX&location=825)) - Chess taught me that the real purpose of planning in life is not so much to get to where you want to be, but to strengthen the willpower that you will need to get to a good place of any kind. Clarifying purpose through plans is about knowing how you want relationships to change. When you begin to feel the relationships moving in the right way because of how you set your intent in motion, purpose grows at compound interest, just like the grains of rice on the chessboard squares. ([Location 1073](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QLN47CX&location=1073)) - At those moments where we succeed in clarifying our purpose and acting on it with vigour, it is as if our will looks up and sees itself through us, smiling as it goes. Not without reason did St Francis of Assisi say: ‘Start by doing what is necessary, and then do what is possible. Soon you find you are achieving the impossible.’ ([Location 1076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QLN47CX&location=1076)) - As long as we resolve to care about something, we remain vulnerable, a fact that social researcher and bestselling author Brené Brown develops beautifully in her work on human emotions, calling vulnerability ‘the magic sauce’ that holds relationships together. It might even be the shared experience of vulnerability that bonds chess players together as a global community – we know how easy it is to go wrong, and how much it hurts when it does. ([Location 1330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QLN47CX&location=1330)) - As the writer Sally Kempton once put it: ‘It’s hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.’ ([Location 1457](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QLN47CX&location=1457)) - Brian Wall, an American amateur, is not known for great games, but I will remember him for a great quote: ‘Chess is basically a fight between the pain of losing and the pain of thinking.’ ([Location 1543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QLN47CX&location=1543)) - While as players we can agree to a draw from any position, as performers we are obliged to keep playing each other at progressively faster time controls until someone wins. If the game is drawn after the normal time control, we play a faster rapid game. If that game is drawn, we play an even faster blitz game. As the games grow faster and blunders more likely, a conclusive result will eventually occur. Chess is civilised, yes, but it is only worth watching when it is a game for civilised gladiators rather than mere civilians. There is no place for physical violence, but for the game to be a worthy spectacle there needs to be a ritual sacrifice. The crowd has to feel that blood will be spilt. Someone has to kill to live, which means someone has to die. ([Location 1617](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QLN47CX&location=1617)) - etymologically, competition means ‘to seek together’. ([Location 1627](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07QLN47CX&location=1627))