- He's a Russian chess grandmaster
and former chess world champion.
He's considered by many to be
the greatest chess player of all time.
He became the youngest ever
undisputed World Chess Champion at age 22.
He's Garry Kasparov
and here are his top 10 rules for success.
(wind howling) (basketball bouncing)
- It's very important, and I also come back to chess,
to learn how to recognize your own strengths and weaknesses.
This is in fact the vital part of preparation
for a big match and for anything in life.
We always try to study our opponents.
We always try to study the battlefield.
We always try to study all the circumstances
surrounding our venture or endeavor.
But, very often we forget to study ourself,
and this is very important because any choice
of a ground for a battle or a type of strategy
you want to employ depends on our recognition
of our strengths and weaknesses.
And this is a process of constant reevaluation
because life is changing very fast
and our opponents, looking at our success,
studying it, and trying to be smart
and outsmart us eventually.
And we can look at the history and just to find
a number of situations where the inability
to recognize strengths and weaknesses
lead to an eventual disaster.
(taps chess clock)
(taps chess clock) (piece hits table)
It's up to us, what we want to do with our success,
because, you know, eventually if we are successful
we just have to make a conscious decision what's next.
And for me, there was always a next station
because it wasn't enough for me just to win.
I always wanted to make a difference.
It could also remind us of success of Alexander Bell,
the inventor of telephone, who had a stack of notebooks
where he recorded every failed experiment.
So if you work really hard you can find the winning spot
even in the midst of your numerous failures.
I think the ex-speaker of US House of Representatives
Newt Gingrich hit the right points when he said that
perseverance is hard work you do
after you get tired of doing hard work you already did.
I think that, again, from my perspective,
patience is your ability to also accept failures
because very often today, even from kindergarten,
and of course in schools, and of course in colleges,
and of course at the work place in businesses we hear,
oh, failure, failure.
You know, failure's nothing but failure.
Well, failure is inevitable step toward success.
If you don't take a risk, how can you be sure about rewards?
Especially if you're looking for something big.
You want to do something that never happened before.
You're looking for breaks or innovations.
It's like sort of the Moon project.
Something that is for the blue skies.
It means you have to enter uncharted waters,
sort of untested territories.
And again, for me, patience is also
a willingness to accept failure, defeat, and to try again.
I learned that, you know, it's never late to learn.
So that's why even at age 37
you can learn from a younger generation
and that was a very important lesson
not only for the remaining five years of my chess career,
but also for future years, because I just recognized that,
I mean, flexibility is a fundamental quality for success.
We should learn how to trust our gut, intuition.
Because in most of the stories I looked at,
and in most of the quotes I collected
I didn't see people picking up intuition
as the crucial element of the success.
While, in my profession in chess,
intuition is virtually everything.
Because chess, some people don't recognize it,
is a mathematically infinite game.
The number of moves in the game of chess, all the moves
contains 120 zeroes, which is more than number of seconds
since the moment Big Bang created universe.
So, how can you find your way, you know,
in this ocean of possibilities?
And of course, how a man can fight a machine
that could calculate 10s and 10s of millions
of positions per second?
Intuition, because it's all about decision making process
and we never employ calculation as the main tool.
It's one percent of calculation, even less,
and 99% of our understanding of our ability
to find intuitive ways to compare incompatible,
material verses qualitative, time verses material.
So intuition plays a key role and we have to trust
our intuition, our instincts, because in life also
we have many opportunities where
we cannot foresee all the consequences
and there's only one choice, is just to trust your gut.
Because when we win, we forget
that there are a lot of people who are losing
and those who are losing they are analyzing.
They're trying to find out the reasons for their loss,
the mistakes, and if we do nothing,
if we rest on our laurels,
they'll come back after us next time.
And I was on top of the world just for 20 years
because I was very good, even relentless
in challenging my own success.
- [Interviewer] And did you go over all your games?
- Absolutely
- [Interviewer] The ones you succeeded
and the ones you failed? - Absolutely, yeah.
Because even the game we won always contained mistakes,
inaccuracies, it's inevitable.
And I can hardly imagine one Berlin game with no mistakes,
which means that you won--
- [Interviewer] On both sides?
- Yeah, on both sides.
- [Interviewer] But the trick is noticing
when the other guy makes a mistake.
- Absolutely, yeah.
If we won, it's most likely because our opponent
made their last mistake, but he made the last mistake
and he's definitely analyzing the game
and he'll find what we did wrong
in the previous stage of the game,
so what is important is to find it first
and to make sure that next time
when he's trying to actually surprise us with something
we'll be one step ahead.
I made the conscious decision that Linares 2005
will be my last professional
and today I played my last professional game.
- Is there a maximum age, or can you be a chess champion
if you want to be at 65?
- It's a very demanding game,
so you have to spend time at the computer
analyzing, preparing new ideas
and then you just play under this heavy pressure,
so it sucks a lot of energy out of you
and players in their 20s or early 30s, they definitely
have a physical advantage over older competitors.
I probably would be able to play a few more years,
but I made a decision to retire
and it was not just overnight, you know,
at the end of the tournament in Spain
in the city of Linares, but just beforehand I thought
I already made enough difference in the game of chess.
So just making a difference was important,
and I just recognized that maybe it's time just to move on.
Just to start changing my life before it's too late.
You can't stay in chess indefinitely,
because everybody needs challenges
and I thought about other challenges.
Is there any universal recipe for success?
I don't think so.
I think we're all unique and it all depends on us,
what kind of ingredients, and they're similar ingredients,
we'd like to put into our own magic formula.
When we look at the examples from the history,
look at the success stories.
We could find a different definition of success.
For instance, Mikhail Botvinnik,
the sixth world champion known for his notoriety
and called the patriarch of the Soviet chess school.
Probably the greatest scientist in the history of chess.
So, his formula was very solid, and very much the ground.
Talent, good health, strong nerves, fighting spirit,
and good work ethic, it worked.
Thomas Edison was even duller.
He said success is 1% inspiration and 99% of perspiration.
But just look at the different side of equation.
Alexander Pushkin, the greatest Russian poet,
considered to be the father of the modern Russian language.
It's the man who with the lightest touch of genius
could produce the best pieces of Russian literature ever.
He was a man of joy, he was a gambler.
He was even a rake, always lived in the red ink.
So his formula is quite different.
A genius, luck, and experience, it also worked.
- Thank you so much for watching.
I made this video because one of you asked me to,
so if there's a famous entrepreneur
that you want me to profile next,
leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do.
I'd also to love which of Garry Kasparov's top ten rules
meant the most to you, leave it in the comments below
and I'll join in the discussion.
Thank you so much for watching, continue to believe,
and I'll see you soon.
(wind rushing) (basketball bouncing)