Once up-pawn a time♟️

The first step of a Chess addiction is to admit it...

Yes, obviously I am one of those people that went all-in on chess after watching The Queen’s Gambit. I’m so scared of getting any more addicted that I added a screen time constraint to the Chess.com app and have refused to buy the premium subscription. Jeez.

Anyway, when Adam Robinson and Shane Parrish jammed on chess and positioning last week, I was naturally all ears:

“Chess is an amazing game that I love. One thing is to be aware of positions that you excel in. I’ll steer the game as much as I can from the very opening to positions that are of my liking. So, it’s important that each one of us has an awareness of the positions that they excel in and steer the game — or their life — to those situtations.”

What I love about this idea is that it applies to just about everything: from running basketball plays (pass it to Steph Curry) to finding a dream job to executing a go-to-market strategy. Having unique strengths as a founder, investor, or leader is useless unless you’re able to deploy them at the right time and in the right place.

Founders only have a handful of shots on goals; before committing to writing a line of code, make sure your position is strong. As James Cham likes to say, “Be a heat-seeking missile”.

Happy weekend,

Raman at Rhetoric

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📚 What’s made me a better storyteller this week

My badass fiancé graduated from her MBA program on Monday. I’m a sucker for commencement speeches and this one by Gina Fong, who won Professor of the Year, is a must-listen. Storytelling at it’s finest.

If you read Born to Run and enjoyed it, this is a great read. The psychology of endurance is truly fascinating and this essay goes deep on the latest research in the field. Highly recommend as a Sunday morning read.

I’ve spent so much time in the past year thinking about human/machine interaction. ChatGPT and Bard have given us a look into one possible UX, but are chatbots the right experience for all workflows? Here’s a fun read by Watten Berger.