> To win at chess, blunder less.
How to win: don't lose.
C'mon it's not like people actively choose to make mistakes.
Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy
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Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy
#22> To win at chess, blunder less. How to win: don't lose. C'mon it's not like people actively choose to make mistakes.
Sure, but you can choose your play style. I find I’m way more likely to win a chess game if I play a few moves of a really safe, boring opening, and then just focus on keeping everything protected and never extend myself too much until the opponent hangs their queen (I’m about 400, so that’s actually very likely).
If I get creative and come out all aggressive, I hang my queen. But the former is boring as hell, which is why I don’t play chess.
Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy
#23It seems to me that the main difference between chess and startups is that in chess you only have one opponent. The more opponents you have, the more likelihood that not blundering on its own is not sufficient.
Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy
#24Also luck is probably a much larger factor than most people realize. It's not just bad luck leading to failure, but luck leading to customers/revenue. As an example, if no one is competing with you, it doesn't matter too much how good you are.
if no one is competing with you, it doesn't matter too much how good you are.
Temporarily. Once people see you're doing well with no competition the competition will spring forth, no matter how good you are. If you're also doing things badly those competitors will eat your lunch.
That isn't a reason not to launch when your product is very basic and scrappy. You don't need to make it good, and definitely not perfect. You just need to go fast.
Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy
#25Avoid blundering?
To do that, you need to learn opening strategy, endgame strategy, tactics, etc.
This isn't helpful
Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy
#26Also luck is probably a much larger factor than most people realize. It's not just bad luck leading to failure, but luck leading to customers/revenue. As an example, if no one is competing with you, it doesn't matter too much how good you are.
if no one is competing with you, it doesn't matter too much how good you are. Temporarily. Once people see you're doing well with no competition the competition will spring forth, no matter how good you are. If you're also doing things badly those competitors will eat your lunch. That isn't a reason not to launch when your product is very basic and scrappy. You don't need to make it good, and definitely not perfect.…
Unless your first mover advantage lets you just stay there for decades. See: PayPal
they have only now been dethroned as the default credit card processor despite being awful to work with when I tried to integrate their API circa 2010
Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy
#27> To win at chess, blunder less. How to win: don't lose. C'mon it's not like people actively choose to make mistakes.
Sure, but you can choose your play style. I find I’m way more likely to win a chess game if I play a few moves of a really safe, boring opening, and then just focus on keeping everything protected and never extend myself too much until the opponent hangs their queen (I’m about 400, so that’s actually very likely). If I get creative and come out all aggressive, I hang my queen. But the former is boring as hell, which…
That's you, when I play aggressive chess the OTHER side makes blunders. It will show up as "the other player made a mistake so you won" and as an unforced error
of course it's unforced, if we all played perfectly there would be no game to play, but the aggression is what showed their bad tactical play
Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy
#28The problem is you don't know if it's a blunder until after.
Blunders are things you _could_ or _should_ have avoided, had you only taken a moment to pause and think.
That's not applicable to chess. Some blunders are deep and neither player sees mate in 10.
The computer immediately sees mate in 10 and calls the last move a blunder. The opponent misses the mate in 10 and moves elsewhere, the computer puts it as a blunder.
Both players blundered without even seeing a clear win, and it would take them an hour of analysis to see the exact sequence and prove there's no way to escape it even though there are a hundred variations
Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy
#29I think this is very true, I've found the same thing in e.g:
- Simracing: getting faster doesn't make you win races. Getting more consistent does.
- Squash: getting stronger and faster doesn't make you win games, getting less exhausted does, because you make less mistakes.
These are surely not true when you're at a high level, but for most people it's the right focus.
The corresponding insight for building software is this: "Brilliant" ideas for your engineering are probably not the right place to invest energy. Instead you are likely to create more success by ensuring you have excellent testing, qualification, user feedback, monitoring, rollouts, stuff like that.
This also just comes back to investment+return again. If _you_ think you gave great ideas then that's fine. But if you can keep your race/game/project/startup alive and stable then you start to unlock extra "passive income" from your teammates having good ideas (and the latitude to execute them) and your competitors fumbling their opportunities.
So take your ego out of the equation and do the humble stuff first. Don't reward your "rockstar programmers", reward the person who set up the dashboards and the e2e tests and threw up together that spreadsheet of 'most common user complaints'.
Re: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy
#30Also luck is probably a much larger factor than most people realize. It's not just bad luck leading to failure, but luck leading to customers/revenue. As an example, if no one is competing with you, it doesn't matter too much how good you are.
It's possible to make no blunders and still lose. That is not a weakness, that's life.