For the last week or so I have been thinking about the term zugzwang. Have you ever heard that word before? Zugzwang is created when you put someone in a situation where they are forced to move even though any movement would weaken their position. Isn’t that a beautiful idea? In our hyper-competitive society it seems foreign to use a strategy like that, whether it is in sports, business, politics, or even our relationships. Instead of praising the silent winners, the people who get the attention are the ones who defeat their opponents as graphically as possible. It is refreshing to think of someone with so much skill that they win by simply forcing their opponent to make a move – any move.

The thing that appeals to me about zugzwang is the idea that you can be in a situation where doing nothing is better than doing something. How un-American is that? Could it be possible that we are in constant self-imposed zugzwang? How long could you sit at your desk in silent contemplation without actually producing something? Deep thought might be what we really need, but instead we surround ourselves with devices that ping us constantly. This puts us in a constant state of motion and it kind of feels like we are doing something meaningful. And we get used to that feeling. Silence makes us uncomfortable. Stopping seems like an unthinkable strategy for success. Are we our own worst enemy, always overfilling our schedules, always promising more than we can deliver, and never saying no? We feel forced to do things that actually hurt us. And don’t get me started about procrastination. That sounds an awful lot like zugzwang to me.

So what is the secret to escaping zugzwang? First you have to do is be aware that it is happening. Life isn’t a chess game where you are required to move your pieces. You rarely if ever are in a situation where you absolutely have to do something. Seriously. You can find the time to isolate yourself from distraction. You can tell your spouse/boss/friends no. You can reduce your work load. You can stop procrastinating. You can be decisive and stop relying on others to make decisions for you. Easier said than done, but it at least is something to think about. I better wrap this up – I have work to do…

Disclaimer: Before I lose 90% of you when you realize that this post is chess related, I urge you to stick with me because I think there are some ideas here that you can actually benefit from even if you have never played a game of chess in your life!

In preparation for an iTunes app that I am developing, I have been studying some of the greatest chess games ever played. I expected these games to pivot on a moment in the game when one player had a spark of insight that led to a crushing defeat. I suppose to a certain extent that is true, but the impression I am left with isn’t how “good” the player’s moves were but exactly the opposite. These players weren’t making extremely “good” moves, they were actually making amazingly “bad” moves – that are only later realized as being correct. This has got me thinking about how our minds work and what we might be able to do to train ourselves to identify the difference between “bad” moves and moves that just look bad but prove to be correct in the end.

To me this is the fascinating thing about studying great chess players. While a computer can plow through massive amounts of data to find the answer, humans have a huge burden of experience tied to their analysis of game situations. In order to make a move that goes against everything you have ever been taught is a rare achievement that takes real courage. Brilliance occurs not by following the established formulas precisely but by knowing when it is appropriate to break the rules. The amazing only happens when canonical knowledge is abandoned in favor of a decision to do something that everyone else in the world would agree is “wrong.”

A computer doesn’t have to worry about breaking from tradition. All it has to do is crunch numbers. Humans can’t possibly process as much data as a computer so we create shortcuts. We boil things down to rules that are easy to remember. We make lists of exceptions to our rules. We look for patterns that match scenarios that are familiar. We survive based heavily on the shortcuts we make. We memorize answers in school because it is easier than solving problems repeatedly. We paraphrase. We summarize. And so we become a population of know-it-alls even though our knowledge is based on generalities and abbreviated summaries. Like walking CliffsNotes we each carry a knowledge base that is very wide, but rarely very deep. We get the “big picture” concepts and let Wikipedia fill in the blanks if we ever need to support our claims. This works really wonderfully except for the times when…

We make mistakes.
Our shortcuts fail us. The stats and research that was once so reassuring ends up being flawed. We are so used to trusting our machines that we stop questioning conventional wisdom. Oops. But that’s just the exception – most of the time we get it right. Right? I am not so sure. While we rarely run into catastrophic mistakes, we also rarely encounter amazing victories. Our days are filled with predictable, mundane, uninspiring, unexciting routine. You know that tomorrow will be pretty much like yesterday. Millions of games of chess are played every day and almost all of them are just like our every day life. They follow the established ideas. Risk is avoided at all cost. At the end of the day there are winners and losers but nobody really cares enough to figure out which is which. And most people are comfortable in this scenario. After all, it seems better to be moderately successful than to be a complete failure.

But maybe you don’t want to be mediocre. Maybe you aren’t satisfied with the status quo. Maybe you want to do something big and memorable. If you are serious about setting yourself apart you might want to seriously consider making more “wrong” decisions. It would be counterproductive to try to debate what exactly a “wrong” decision would look like, so let me just wrap this up by giving you three thoughts that may or may not prove to be helpful to you…

Three Rules For Breaking the Rules:

1. Deep Trumps Wide
With wikipedia only a click away it is much easier to understand a little bit about everything than it is to be the world’s authority on a single subject. That is why there are so many “jack-of-all-trades” and so few true masters in any given field. Strive to be a master. Know even the tiniest detail inside and out. Know exactly what you know as well as what you don’t know. Don’t ever “fake” knowledge on a subject that you are fuzzy about. Dig deeper, work harder, and never stop learning about your area of expertise. If you can truly attain mastership of something then making the “wrong” decision is no longer a risk. While everyone else is blinded by their incomplete knowledge you will be able to see the solution they are dismissing.

2. iPhone Defeats iClone
It would seem that patterning your project after someone else’s success would be a foolproof way of avoiding failure. Contrary to poplular belief, Apple doesn’t have the market cornered on innovation. Anyone can create the next revolutionary product. And yet the biggest competition of the iPhone isn’t from competing ideas. The only competition is from phones that function and look remarkably similar to the iPhone. This happens in almost every market. As soon as one company innovates there is a competitor waiting to copy their success. Don’t be the copycat. Embrace concepts that don’t look like something your competitor would make. Champion ideas that don’t fit nicely in the marketplace as it exists today. Look at how different the phone market is compared to pre-iPhone. This might feel like a mistake since it puts you all alone and separate from your competition. You won’t be alone for long.

3. Conviction or Death
If you are going to boldly break the rules there is one thing that you can’t do without: conviction. If you aren’t willing to defend your idea to the death then you might as well not even try. Lack of conviction leads to compromise. Compromise results in watered-down versions of your vision. Mediocrity is sure to follow and you will be left with nothing. But if you have conviction, the hard decisions will come easily because you know what needs to be done. This is the only way to achieve the impossible.

Since the difference between insanity and genius is measured by success, you should understand that fully embracing these ideas means that people will probably question your sanity. But what really do you have to lose? Go crazy.

P.S. Oh, I didn’t want to leave you hanging without a great chess game for your enjoyment. Here is a classic Bobby Fischer victory:

My love of chess and WordPress has collided over the last couple weeks and the result has been a breakthrough in geeky output. Apologies in advance! Anyway, I was surprised that there are only a few chess plugins for WordPress and one thing led to another and you know how it goes…

The first product I am proud to announce is a WordPress plugin called “Daily Chess Puzzle Widget.” The plugin is a simple way to add chess puzzles to the sidebar of any WordPress powered website. The only prerequisite is that the theme you are using needs to be “widgetized.” The official home of my plugin will reside at adrian3.com/projects/wordpress-plugins/daily-chess-puzzle-widget/

The Daily Chess Puzzle widget pulls its puzzles from shredderchess.com, a website that offers the puzzles for free. Each day they deliver an easy, medium, and hard puzzle. My plugin gives you a dropdown menu where you can choose the size of puzzle you want shown.

While this chess plugin is a relatively simple project it did teach me some valuable lessons that I am planning to build on in future releases. For example, this is the first “widget” I have created and that will be a valuable tool to have in my arsenal going forward.

The next chess plugin I am working on involves a chess game viewer that allows you to post a games into your blog post for people to replay. It will allow you to customize the style, color, size, and features of the chessboard. I am pretty happy with it so far and plan on releasing it in the next week or two so stay tuned.

Not sure how long I will stay in the chess plugin phase, but it has been fun so far!

Friday was my 31st birthday and I am recovering from a long weekend of celebration. My friends at work took me out to lunch at my favorite barbecue restaurant Friday afternoon. That evening I had a quiet evening at home with Betsy and Rian. We ordered pizza and opened some gifts. Saturday was the “official” party and I had a bunch of people over for a ping pong tournament. Sunday we drove to Denver to celebrate an early Thanksgiving/birthday meal with extended family. It was great fun and I can’t help but feel blessed to have such loving family and friends.

Whenever you make a birthday post on your blog you feel like you have to say something profound about getting older. Since 31 is such an uneventful age, forgive me for not having the secret to life in this post. However, I am going to use my birthday as an excuse to do a little naval gazing. Apologies in advance.

If I had to comment on a characteristic of my personality that I have noticed lately it would be how competitive I am. I have always been competitive but lately it seems especially hard to not want to win at everything I do. It doesn’t matter if it is ping pong, chess, basketball, graphic design, or a weight loss competition. I will put everything I have into trying to beat you at it. I am even competitive when the only person to compete with is myself. For example, when I run I am disappointed if my time isn’t a personal best every time. I am so competitive, that I don’t want you to just think of me as being a competitive person, I want you to think I am the most competitive person you have ever met. And I am not sure why.

As I try to consider what makes me the way I am, I think it has something to do with how I handle failure. My mom tells stories about how stubborn I was as a child. Being strong willed is a trait that hasn’t left me over the years. I like to think of this as a positive attribute, and it has served me well. Perhaps a better word to describe me would be “determined,” When I don’t win I will try again, and again, until I achieve my goal.

If I have achieved any degree of skill, it has been earned from failure. I have always been a mediocre basketball player. Today I can hold my own because years of blocked shots and turnovers have taught me what not to do. I have lost more games of chess than I care to admit – probably in the thousands. Playing ping pong with me is like playing against a wall – because I have logged so many hours of racket sports.

Unfortunately, being extremely competitive often goes hand-in-hand with being a jerk. And that’s where things get tough. Allow me to end this post with an apology to anyone I have annoyed with my constant determination. As I said at the beginning of this post, I am blessed with family and friends. Thank you for putting up with me! Oh, and if you think it is annoying now, wait until I turn 40 and really have something to prove.

Cuba wasn’t always the place we imagine today. It may surprise you to learn that in the early 1900′s Havana was known as the “Paris of the Caribbean.” It was in 1910 in Havana that the world was introduced to one of greatest chess players who ever lived. His name was José Raúl Capablanca.

Capablanca learned the game of chess from watching his father play. He claims to have never read a book about chess. I don’t tend to believe in talent, but Capablanca seriously challenges that belief. His incredible mind seems to have been born with an amazing natural ability for chess. At age 12 he defeated the Cuban champion. Here is a video showing on of those incredible games:

When Capablanca became world champion in 1921, he was in the middle of a winning streak that lasted 8 years. Yes, you read that correctly. Capablanca, playing against the greatest players in the world, including Alexander Alekhine, Emanuel Lasker, and Akiba Rubinstein he never lost a single game.

To give you an idea of the amazing mind of Capablanca, consider this. He would give exhibitions where he played multiple games at the same time. At one point he played 102 games simultaneously. He didn’t lose a single game. His opponents marveled at his speed and praised his ability to instantly see deeply into the position of a game. Here is another game of Capablanca’s that has been described as one of the most instructive games of chess ever played:

A world champion of chess may seem like an unrewarding title, but don’t be fooled. When a world champion was defending his title in 1915 the stakes were about $700,000 in today’s terms. Don’t ask me where this money came from, but needless to say, world champion chess games are big money.

An interesting footnote to Capablanca’s amazing life is his invention of a variation of chess that added two new pieces to the game. The first new piece is called an archbichop which has the combined power of a bishop and a knight. The second piece is a chancellor which has the combined powers of the rook and a knight. The game is played on a 10×8 board and is referred to as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capablanca_chess. If you are interested in chess variations the wikipedia page about fairy pieces is fascinating.

Twitter makes it too easy to ignore this blog, so I wanted to check in with a post about all the miscellaneous activities that have been sucking my time lately. Here goes…

I invented a boardgame.
One of the things taking a big chunk of my time has been a board game I designed that is tentatively called Blockade. I will talk about it more in future posts, but it is basically a two player strategy game where you roll a cube on a 4×4 board trying to pin your opponent. Stay tuned for more information in future posts.

Font Burner Plugin Updates
I released a major upgrade to my Font Burner WordPress plugin. Feedback has been great and downloads passed the 3000 mark recently.

Fever
I recently purchased Fever, a $30 personal rss feed aggregator. I don’t recommend it for anyone who isn’t savvy enough to install apps on your website, but for me it is really great. Once I loaded it up with the hundreds of feeds I try to follow (keyword: try) it filters through the “hot” feeds kind of like a personalized Digg.

I am quoted in Web Designer Magazine
A Twitter connection gave me the opportunity to be quoted in the upcoming issue of Web Designer magazine, a publication out of the UK. Now all I have to do is track down where I can buy a copy of the issue which I think will come out next month.

Music
My favorite album right now is an album called Fantasies
by Metric. The new Eels album
is great, too.

Movies
Netflix has been hit and miss lately. I enjoyed the Wrestler more than I was expecting. Finally saw The Village and Unbreakable and I thought they were great. I enjoyed The Omega Man as much as the remake, Legend.

Red Rocket
Life at work has been busy but good. I have a couple of posts up on the Red Rocket blog. One is about how good design adds credibility to a website and the other is about this YouTube video:

We are in Arizona for a few days to celebrate my sister’s wedding. Rian pretty much summed up my plans for the vacation when he said, “Daddy, I got a good idea. After our nap we can go swimming again, okay?” I don’t miss winter in Colorado in the slightest…

I got an email this week from a person who was interested in comparing graphic design and chess. Her idea was to write a chess rule book based on the principles of design. I don’t know if that is possible, but if she can do it, I would love to read it. The whole thing has got me thinking again about how the mental activity of chess and design are similar.

The connection for me is that Chess is a game of creativity. Within the rules and structure there is an infinite amount of possibilities. You sort out the potential winning ideas from the sure losers. You avoid traps and stick clear of easily predictable moves. You narrow down your options until you are left with a few “rough drafts” that might work. No guarantees, just your best effort and the hope that it will work out the way you plan.

You also have to predict the actions and tendencies of your opponent. When you play well you are actually controlling their actions and reactions just like a well designed object will. Things fall in place and you are successful. When you play poorly, the best intentions – the seemingly fool-proof strategy- falls apart and you lose.

Design also is more of a problem solving activity than just the “make it look pretty” mentality that defines our profession to the uneducated. A creative mind can overcome a deficit of “pieces” by understanding how to use limited assets in powerful combinations. With a firm understanding of “the game” we can see possibilities that are hidden from the average person.

If you are interested in exploring the chess/design metaphor further, you can browse the Be A Design Group archive where I have talked about the connections in the past.

Beating people at chess is one of my favorite things to do. I have played thousands of games online, and winning never gets old. Losing rarely comes with pleasure. Although I haven’t been playing as much as I used to, it isn’t for lack of desire. The other day an old friend invited me to a game by email, and for some reason I hesitated to accept. My hesitation has puzzled me, and I have had to analyze my response to figure out what my problem was.

There have only been a few rare occassions when I have felt bad about winning a game of chess. The example that stands out in my mind is playing my dad. My dad taught me how to play and I have fond memories of the games we played as I have grown up. When I was at the top of my game a couple years ago, I don’t think my dad could have beat me. I was playing several games a night, and he probably hadn’t played in years. When I saw that he left me an opening, I felt disappointed. I didn’t want to win that easily. It is strange because all my life I wanted to beat him, and when I finally could do it, I realized it wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. Beating someone you respect and love can be agonizing.

Back to the invitation from my friend. I think I hesitated for reasons similar to why I didn’t enjoy defeating my father. I am not saying I have a father/son relationship with him by any means, and I am not even confident that I would win. The thing is he is someone I really respect and admire. I would hate to think less of him if I win, and the thought of losing is equally unappealing.

So did I accept his invitation? Of course I did. Everything I have written so far is really irrational when you think about it. Basing my opinion of someone on how they play chess is ridiculous. Fearing that someone will think less of me if I lose is silly. If I let my irrational feelings get in the way of enjoying a game that I love, then I have lost sight of the fact that chess is just a game and a very small part of who I am. I expect that learning to not take the game so seriously will help me enjoy the game even more. Who knows, I might even enjoy beating my dad again.