[00:00] Maurice Ashley: The journey is so much easier when you have trusted advisors in your corner. And I think that a lot of people try to do this stuff on their own. So they’re sitting back thinking I just suck or what am I supposed to do? But if you have somebody or the more, the merrier, frankly, but people you can trust.

[00:21] Maurice Ashley: Who’s who can look at it and say, yeah, I see where you made a mistake there. What you should have done is this where you can change is that, yo, I understand why you’re feeling, you know, we’ll get through this. That’s huge.

[00:33] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Welcome to another episode of success for the athletic minded man. Real talk on harnessing your athletic drive for clarity, consistency, and focus in business and life.

[00:44] Jim Harshaw Jr.: This is your host Jim Harsha Jr. And today I bring you Maurice Ashley. Maurice is the first chess grandmaster I’ve ever had on the show. As a matter of fact, he is the first African American grandmaster in the history of chess. And what exactly does it mean to become a grandmaster at chess? I actually asked him that in today’s conversation.

[01:07] Jim Harshaw Jr.: We also talk about chess as a sport and the training, the mental training, the physical training they actually have to do to endure these long two, three, four, five, six hour. Matches as well as what it’s like to compete in the blitz matches. Like you see, you know, on the streets of New York, when they’re playing these really fast games, they might be five minute games or eight minute games or 10 minute games.

[01:27] Jim Harshaw Jr.: So we talk about both of those, but most importantly, we talk about how you can take these lessons learned in chess and apply those to life. And he wrote a great book called move by move. It published on April 2nd. He has another children’s book that he talked about as well, that you’re going to have access to, we’ll have the links both in the action plan to, to both of those books.

[01:47] Jim Harshaw Jr.: So check those out. But here we go. My interview with chess grandmaster, Maurice Ashley. Maurice, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. What does it take to be a grandmaster? What does that

[02:01] Maurice Ashley: even mean? Grandmaster is the highest title you can have in chess and you have to get it in Actual competition against internationally ranked players, which includes grandmasters, international masters and masters, which are actually a lower level of players, but you have to compete.

[02:21] Maurice Ashley: You have to do it in battle. The international chess federation has specific numerics that say, if you get X number of wins against these players, then you will get what’s known as a norm in one event. And three of those norms qualify you for the title of Grandmaster. And so it’s, it’s got to be done in battle.

[02:40] Maurice Ashley: There, there’s no gift of the Grandmaster title.

[02:43] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Right, right. Okay. So is this something that you plan for? It’s like, okay, there’s a certain event I’m going to, and if I win that event, I’m going to become Grandmaster or a certain series of events. How does that work?

[02:56] Maurice Ashley: There are tournaments happening all over the world where players can qualify.

[03:00] Maurice Ashley: These are tournaments where players are normally playing for money. And trying to win prizes, you enter those tournaments, you either pay to enter, or sometimes you’re invited to participate. And you just have to do well enough to earn the grandmaster norm. As I mentioned, it’s not a question of winning the tournament itself.

[03:17] Maurice Ashley: That’s hard enough. If you’ve got to play against 10 grandmasters, think of it like, uh, having to become an all star. If somebody said, all right, we’re going to line up 10 all stars and you just have to Beat five of them. So you got LeBron, you got Steph Curry, you’ve got Kevin Durant, and they would put 10 of those gangsters in front of you and say, if you beat five of these, you qualify to be an all star.

[03:40] Maurice Ashley: Now with players like that, you qualify to be a legend of the game, obviously. But you get what I mean.

[03:47] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Sure. Yeah, that makes sense. So you were a immigrant and lived in Brooklyn, African American, not a whole lot of grandmasters. Like yourself, you were the first black grandmaster ever, right?

[04:03] Maurice Ashley: There are no grandmas.

[04:04] Maurice Ashley: They were none like myself growing up in BK, uh, Brownsville where Mike Tyson’s from, I always joked that Brownsville was so rough. Mike had to get out of Brownsville. The reality is that there was not a lot of chess going on, but I got obsessed in high school, Brooklyn technical high school, uh, in the 10th grade, I saw a friend playing.

[04:25] Maurice Ashley: I would, I knew the rules of the game, but that was it. And I thought I could beat him because I was a smart kid. That guy crushed me so bad. It wasn’t even funny. I happen to see a book in the library, not even looking for it. I just happen to see a book on the bookshelf as though chess was calling me. And I.

[04:43] Maurice Ashley: Opened up the book, checked it out at the library, said I’m gonna beat my friend, read the whole book, went back and he crushed me again. Turns out he had read that book and many other books, but that started the Love Affair with the game and I have a very competitive side, so, uh, I definitely did not wanna stop before I beat my friend.

[05:04] Jim Harshaw Jr.: So competitiveness runs in your family as well, right? Your siblings are both world-class athletes.

[05:10] Maurice Ashley: Yeah, we’re pretty competitive types. My brother’s a three time world champion kickboxer My sister’s a six time world champion boxer, and we’re all in the International Halls of Fame of our various Activities sports it’s pretty rough around the dinner table when it’s it’s time to play board games We stay away from our own specialties when it comes to competing directly against each other But the trash talking is fierce.

[05:34] Maurice Ashley: When we get down to some spades or some dominoes or any kind of activity, nobody wants to lose. So you said sport. A lot of people don’t think of chess as a sport,

[05:44] Jim Harshaw Jr.: but it

[05:44] Maurice Ashley: is. Well, usually people define a sport as something physical, something where you’re running, jumping, hitting a ball, throwing something.

[05:53] Maurice Ashley: That’s usually how people align. Uh, the word sports in their minds. But if you just think of some, a competition. Where you have to sit for hours on end, focus, one false move, you’re dead, uh, you get tired, you get hungry, you have to beat a competitor who is prepared, wily, cunning, looking to take your head off, and if you lose, your ego feels smashed.

[06:21] Maurice Ashley: Okay. If you don’t want to call that a sport, it’s on you. But we know as chess players that it is intense, it is rough and don’t bring money because we plan

[06:32] Jim Harshaw Jr.: to take it. And you train for these, this is something that you physically train for. I mean, that kind of focus for hours and hour, like six hours, like these, some of these matches can take many, many hours.

[06:42] Jim Harshaw Jr.: That’s brutal. And like you said, intense focus. I mean, a lot of folks listening, I mean, you’re sitting there at work and you know, you’re working on your TPS reports or whatever it is, and it’s like focus for a half an hour can, can be exhausting, let alone for a few hours in, in, in a match like that. And how do you prepare for that?

[06:59] Maurice Ashley: Well, I like to tell people so they can understand if you think back to your college days or any tests you had to take, imagine taking a college final that will last two or three hours. That’s nothing come now. Think about it back to back lasting four or five, six hours. Now think of that as only the first day you’ve got to do nine days of that.

[07:25] Maurice Ashley: And you have to prepare because you are going to play against a player whose games you’ve seen, who’s, who’s analyzing all your games, your tendencies. They want to know when you blink. When you lose, why do you lose? They’re deep into your character assessment, so they can throw some weird strategies that will make you uncomfortable in the middle of the game.

[07:46] Maurice Ashley: So they might know you better than you know yourself. So that’s one aspect of it from the strategic side. The other aspect is just a physical side. It seems like sitting there. Thinking shouldn’t necessarily be that arduous. But as I explained, when you’re doing a college final, you know how tiring that is.

[08:04] Maurice Ashley: You walk out of there and you feel like you ran a marathon, let alone two, two back to back, let alone for nine days in a row. We get, we do get a rest day to toss in there so you can recuperate. So you have to be ready from a stamina perspective. You have to have that kind of mental clarity when you’re playing, when you start to get fatigued, you want to be calm, especially the longer the game goes, the more critical the moves become.

[08:29] Maurice Ashley: You start making mistakes and mistakes in that fourth, fifth or sixth hour. And you can’t afford a single mistake because at the professional level, one mistake means death. So. We do train, we do train for stamina. You do train for mental toughness. Meditation is a big part of it, whatever it takes to be able to have that kind of stamina and clarity as the

[08:51] Jim Harshaw Jr.: hours roll on.

[08:53] Jim Harshaw Jr.: How did you move up the ranks? I mean, so you talked about finding chess as a young child in school and you played your friend and you lost. And so I want to go back. How did you go from there? To becoming good to becoming great become thinking like, I want to be one of the best in the world. I want to be a grand master.

[09:13] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I mean, that’s quite a journey from a lot of us have played, played some friends in school, but you made quite a long journey. So talk to us about your progression. The good news

[09:24] Maurice Ashley: is that there. Chess magazines, as you can well imagine, magazines that talk about the greatest players, and I mentioned books before as well, where you read about the epic legends of the game.

[09:36] Maurice Ashley: And so I would read these magazines and I’d see these players who were grand masters, and you could go over their games. You’re not just. Sitting there like in school playing with your friends there You can record the games people have seen or heard in movies people talk about chess like pawn to e4 Usually it’s descriptive notation.

[09:56] Maurice Ashley: So pawn to Kings Bishop for or Knight to King three or four Now it’s algebraic notation, so I won’t bore you with the language, but the point is that you can record games and then review those games afterwards, sort of like instant replay for chess. So I’d go over these grandmaster games, I’d be sitting in Brooklyn, there’d be sirens outside, gunshots every so often, and I would be in at home going over games of the epic players from the past, and I’d be dreaming about one day being like these players being good enough to create the masterpieces that I saw unfolding in my eyes in front of my eyes.

[10:37] Maurice Ashley: And in the meantime. I got to beat my friend in high school, which I finally did. I got to somehow make the chess club in high school, which I never did. I mean, the chess team, which I never did. I wasn’t good enough to make my own high school chess team. If you can imagine. And also I was playing in the parks in Brooklyn.

[10:53] Maurice Ashley: So you had hustlers in the park. Good thing New York has a very robust chess scene in the parks. So I’d go to prospect park in Brooklyn and start playing these players and. They would whip me, take my money. I was a high school kid. They didn’t care if it was 50, 50 cents, just give us the money. Like that’s, they wanted to play and I wanted to play against them.

[11:14] Maurice Ashley: So I had to again, study to defeat those guys. And then on top of it, I met a group of African American, largely African American players who call themselves the black bear school of chess. And they copied it off the idea of the Soviet school of chess. Obviously the Soviets knew a thing or two about the game, but they were extremely serious about studying, reading books, playing against each other, especially trying to crush each other.

[11:45] Maurice Ashley: And they welcomed me into that group. And these were older men. As, as much as six years older, as much as 20 years older, but they were welcoming in the group. They saw that I had some talent and their thing was. If you’re ready to get your ass kicked, come on in. Like we’re not here to coddle you. We’re here to whoop you and see how tough you are.

[12:06] Maurice Ashley: And so that really prepared me for a much more competitive space in chess. When I finally had to go to the austere chess clubs, the Manhattan chess club, the Marshall chess clubs, where a lot of people, frankly, didn’t look like, you know, And you started to see the, the international masters, the grandmasters, and those are the guys I really want to get better against.

[12:26] Maurice Ashley: And so I started participating in a lot of those tournaments. By then I knew the track. It was just a question of working hard to try to get there.

[12:37] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Quick interruption. Hey, if you like what you’re hearing, be sure to get the notes, quotes, and links in the action plan from this episode. Just go to Jim Herschel, jr.

[12:45] Jim Harshaw Jr.: com slash action. That’s Jim Herschel, jr. com slash action to get your free copy of the action plan. Now back to the show. So is there a difference between the type of chess you played with the black bears versus some of these other more traditional chess clubs, same style of chess and the chess scene in New York, you said a strong chess scene.

[13:09] Jim Harshaw Jr.: The, you see guys playing when you go through New York, is there a difference between that kind of chess or that style of chess and what you might play and say a competition?

[13:16] Maurice Ashley: There is absolutely a difference between the styles in Brooklyn, a black bear school players were playing a lot of blitz. We didn’t have time to sit and play games for four or five hours.

[13:27] Maurice Ashley: We’d play blitz game that take four or five minutes. And those games are fast paced. The hands are moving as, as quickly as a Edward scissorhands. If you remember that old movie and. You just have to be very quick on your feet. The game was far more tactical, which means that people were looking for your mistakes.

[13:46] Maurice Ashley: They were trying to exploit any kind of off move you made and try to steal a piece or even checkmate your King. Quick traps were just as effective as slow strategic grinds, but those didn’t work when you went to the clubs. Because now you’re playing long games. You weren’t going to catch anybody in some stupid trap that they might fall for.

[14:08] Maurice Ashley: You had to be much deeper, much more strategic in your approach. And so the slow grind was the way. And man, that was a true test. That’s, that’s where you, you really separate. The top players from the also rans, because when you have to sit there and suffer, you make a small mistake, a positional mistake, we call it.

[14:32] Maurice Ashley: And your opponent starts to squeeze you and really start to put the pressure on. That’s going to take two or three hours for you to suffer through as you try to survive. Right. And then maybe they’ll slip and you say, Oh, I’m back in the game, but it took two or three hours just to get to that point.

[14:48] Maurice Ashley: Right. Of course, when you’re playing Blitz, the game’s over in five, seven, 10 minutes, and you’d start another game. So the level was absolutely different. The intensity level was off the scale.

[15:03] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And there’s a great video, YouTube video. And for the listener, we’ll put that in the action plan. Go to Jim Harshaw, jr.

[15:09] Jim Harshaw Jr.: com slash action to get that. There’s a great video. And Tim Ferriss is looking on as you’re playing Blitz and. I think the guy was unsuspecting. I don’t, it didn’t seem like he didn’t know you were a grandmaster, right? Everybody’s watching. And then, and there’s trash talking going on. It was so, it’s so intense, so much fun to watch.

[15:28] Jim Harshaw Jr.: So this trash talking that’s happening, like this, this is part of the blitz game, certainly not part of the classical game, is that right? I mean, if you’re determined, it’s like, you know, you’re playing like a three, four, five hour. Game. There’s no trash talking. Right. But it’s like a different, just different types of mental warfare going on.

[15:48] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Absolutely.

[15:49] Maurice Ashley: You’re not allowed to talk like that in a chess room. And you’re not even allowed to talk. Gaysmanship is an issue. Somebody will call the tournament director over. You could do some slight things. If you look at your opponent too long, then they can call the tournament director and said, this guy’s staring at me, you know, get him to, to behave like little stuff.

[16:07] Maurice Ashley: We’ll throw people off. You really have to be on your best behavior. There’s no such thing when you’re playing chess in the parks. There’s too much stuff going on. There’s, there’s, like I said, sirens, there are people watching. There are people talking. You can’t just tell them to shut up because they’re talking.

[16:26] Maurice Ashley: They’re just spectators. And then the reality is if you actually tell somebody to not talk, that’ll be. The open door policy to talk even more because it means that you’re being distracted. So absolutely We have a lot of fun playing. It’s a lot different atmosphere It’s a different kind of warfare, but it’s the stuff that I grew up with in brooklyn So I was quite used to it that video is pretty funny because my opponent did not know that I was a grandmaster He found out only later.

[16:55] Maurice Ashley: He actually knew my name, but didn’t know my face And so he was told afterwards and he was in quite a bit of shock. It’s a pretty funny video, especially for what he tried to pull in the middle of the game.

[17:06] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you got to watch the video there. He does definitely tries to pull some stuff. That was pretty funny.

[17:11] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Like I’m just fascinated in, listen, I don’t, I don’t play much chess. I’ve interviewed Jeff Bellington, who you and I talked about before we hit record here, fascinated with the game. It’s not something I’ve, I’ve spent much time doing in learning, reading your book and learning more about you. I’m fascinated with the mental.

[17:29] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Toughness that goes into being successful. It is such, it certainly, you know, the learning and the research and the planning and the prep and the training, all of that like goes without saying. The mental toughness is so. So important in chess to a level that I don’t think most people understand

[17:51] Maurice Ashley: it really is and You can find a lot of chess players who are extremely talented when they were kids.

[17:59] Maurice Ashley: I’ve seen extraordinarily talented players as young people Incredible they look at the chessboard and they see the moves just that fast Like how did this kid see that and we know that kid is a talent But then when they start losing against other kids who are extremely talented, they’re used to winning all the time and it’s sort of like when you’re good in high school as a basketball player, and then you go to college and you go, Oh, wait a second.

[18:26] Maurice Ashley: I’m not as good as I thought I was. Those kids. Start to shy away from getting hit from the pain of losing and the difference of the kids who say, you know what, I don’t care. I lost, but I’m coming back. I’m going to hone my game and I’m going to lose again. And I’m coming back again. And that really starts to separate the talented ones from the future grandmasters.

[18:50] Maurice Ashley: And that kind of mental toughness. Sometimes it’s just innate. Sometimes it’s their background. Sometimes it’s the right coach who taught them the right way because a coach can be the deal breaker in that situation. Really can see a kid who’s talented, but they say the right words and the kid loses and the kid might be in pain and crying, but the coach says just the right words about learning from losing, learning from loss or using your mistakes as a way to grow, you give just the right advice.

[19:23] Maurice Ashley: And the kid gets it. And when the kid gets it, that’s when they catapult to a next level. And they’re willing now to go through the pain of the journey in order to get to the other side.

[19:37] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Let’s make everything you’re talking about here. Can we make this relevant to the listener who’s sitting there? Maybe not a chess player.

[19:44] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Maybe they are, maybe they’re not a chess player, but they’re sort of, they’re navigating the chess game of life. Maybe they’re married with kids and high stress job, trying to grow their business or get that next promotion. You talked about that failure leading to these leaps. How does that person who’s listening, who said, yeah, Maurice, you know, I tried to get that promotion.

[20:05] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I tried to start that business. I tried to lose that 20 pounds. And. I failed last time and just deep inside they’ve, they’ve kind of given up or they’ve settled for less. I mean, what do you tell them? Failure

[20:20] Maurice Ashley: is a funny word because the path to success is often littered with failures. And it’s really your attitude that dictates whether or not you’re going to call an individual.

[20:36] Maurice Ashley: action, an individual loss, a failure, or you’re going to call it a stepping stone because nobody wins right away. And all the time, nobody, I mean, if Michael Jordan did not make his high school basketball team, you’re allowed. It’s okay. It is a stepping stone. It is a learning tool. Every single loss, every single so called failure, every single mistake is a potential learning tool, and the real failure is not learning from the loss is not.

[21:14] Maurice Ashley: Extracting all the lessons possible that you can get from a loss. Because in fact, humans look, humans learn best through failure. I mean, when we were trying to learn how to walk as babies, you got up and you fell down. And what did you do? You got up again, and then you fell down again, and it kept happening over and over until finally you walked.

[21:38] Maurice Ashley: You’ve got to get back to that baby’s attitude that said, it doesn’t matter if I fall down, I want to walk. That’s what I want to do. And the more you do it, the better you get at it. And so for me, it’s really important that people understand the idea of incremental improvement. You’ve got to do everything step by step slowly, one little bit at a time.

[22:03] Maurice Ashley: And many times you’ve got to go backwards so that you can go forward. If you’re learning a new skill, you’re trying to master something that’s different from the way you’ve always done it. It means that you have to revamp, rejigger everything that you know sometimes in order to get to that new place.

[22:22] Maurice Ashley: It’s like Tiger Woods back in the day when he was on top of his game and decided to reinvent his swing. You’re the best in the world. How are you reinventing your swing, losing tournaments now? So that you can do what? Be the better, best in the world? And that’s exactly what he did. So that idea of continuous improvement, the idea of being willing to learn from loss, some of the toughest losses that have happened to me have been some of the greatest in my life.

[22:53] Maurice Ashley: They show me so much about the game, but it also showed me so much about myself. And that is a willingness and openness. So learning, but it’s very much on openness to losing and learning from those losses.

[23:10] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And for the listener, I want to highlight something that Marty’s just said. He said, he said, it’s the attitude, right?

[23:15] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And you have to choose your words. He said, you could choose to call it either a failure or a stepping stone. Like. Listen, it’s going to feel like failure. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, like losing hurts, losing socks. It doesn’t feel good. We’re not going, Hey, that was great. I’m just going to call that a step.

[23:30] Jim Harshaw Jr.: You’re not smiling your way through it. Pain there. There’s internal, maybe even self doubt creeps in all of that stuff. Yes. We’re acknowledging that all of that is true. All of that is real. All of that is there. Even for some. The best in the world. Like Maurice, what we’re saying is choose the right words.

[23:47] Jim Harshaw Jr.: If you choose the right words, that is, that’s what changes your attitude. Okay. That was a failure. It sucks. It hurt. I didn’t like that. I don’t want to do it again. I’m going, I’m now here’s where you got to put in. I’m going to learn from that. I’m going to get better from that. This is a stepping stone.

[24:02] Jim Harshaw Jr.: You have to choose those words because listen, the default words in your head, they’re not going to be good enough. Those default words in your head are the negative bias that we have, that Maurice has, that I have, that every best in the world have, you hear these best in the world athletes talking about.

[24:16] Jim Harshaw Jr.: What they do to override that negative thinking about failure, setback, or even just potential, like what potential you have, you have to actively do that. It doesn’t just happen by default. You have to take action in much of what Maurice is talking about is taking action, like saying the right words, changing your attitude.

[24:37] Jim Harshaw Jr.: You said that

[24:37] Maurice Ashley: perfectly right. And I will say it is extremely difficult to do it on your own. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t pretend that I went on a journey by myself and I was so smart and so tough that I figured it all out. I had coaches, I had role models with the black bear school, whether we’re seeing my family members who were excelling at what they did, whether it was hiring a coach, a grandmaster coach to come and talk about.

[25:07] Maurice Ashley: These difficult games that I had, the journey is so much easier when you have trusted advisors in your corner. And I think that a lot of people try to do this stuff on their own. So they’re sitting back thinking I just suck or what am I supposed to do? But if you have somebody. Or the more the merrier, frankly, but people you can trust who can look at it and say, yeah, I see where you made a mistake there.

[25:33] Maurice Ashley: What you should have done is this, where you can change is this. Yo, I understand how you’re feeling. You know, we’ll get through this. Those that’s huge. And I just think on so many of the journeys I’ve seen, people have made it an individual thing and isolated path to greatness. And

[25:53] Jim Harshaw Jr.: virtually no one does that.

[25:55] Jim Harshaw Jr.: You talked about Tiger Woods. I mean, Tiger Woods didn’t do it all alone. He had coaches, he had people working with him. When he reinvented his swing, he didn’t say, you know, I’m going to go lock myself in a room and reinvent my swing all by myself. Didn’t happen. And it doesn’t

[26:06] Maurice Ashley: matter what it is in your life, by the way.

[26:08] Maurice Ashley: It’s not even about improvement. Just, you know, you talk about your skillset in a sport. It’s not just your job, even your personal life. A lot of us men don’t want to go to therapists, right? When they’re challenges, well, that therapy stuff is not for me. Right. But maybe just having somebody listening alone, just you getting your voice out there and somebody asking good questions so that you can provide a sort of they can provide a reflection for what you’re saying.

[26:39] Maurice Ashley: And that alone, just talking to somebody solid can be a difference maker. So you’ve got to look for that in any areas you have difficulty. I always highly recommend stress. Make sure you have trusted advisors in the areas where you’re trying to improve.

[26:56] Jim Harshaw Jr.: That is it. I mean, when you look at world class performers, we think they do it on their own.

[27:00] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And again, whether it’s in sport, whether it’s in business, whether it’s in, in, in marriage, I mean, like relationships that you mentioned therapy, like, These are the people we need around us. We see that in sport. We see, okay, Tom Brady had a fitness, a strength and conditioning coach. Like I’m pretty sure Tom Brady knew his way around the weight room.

[27:19] Jim Harshaw Jr.: You know, Tom Brady had a nutrition coach. I’m pretty sure he knew what to eat, but he had still had these people in his life. And, and that’s how you go from whatever level you’re at to your next level, right? Good to great, whatever that is for you. And not everybody’s starting from the same level, whatever, wherever you’re at right now.

[27:36] Jim Harshaw Jr.: You want to go to yet another level. You’ve got to have the team. You’ve got to have the right people around you. And what’s at stake now for, for the former athlete listening, you’re a high school athlete or a college athlete, or maybe a weekend warrior, like what’s at stake now is not winning a game or winning a match.

[27:54] Jim Harshaw Jr.: It’s your life. It’s your livelihood. It’s your legacy. It’s so much more important now than it ever was in competition. And.

[28:04] Maurice Ashley: Say the team can change as well. We can’t get locked into the fact that you just have one person who stays all your life. I had multiple coaches, my coaches, when they taught me all they had to teach me, pass me onto another coach, somebody who can give you a different look, a different aspect.

[28:22] Maurice Ashley: It’s not that you don’t trust that person anymore. It’s just that. You stop hearing what they have to say because you’ve already digested most of it. And it’s sort of like your parents, you know, you know, we get our parents get smarter, the older we get. I mean, at some point when you’re a teenager, your parent and not as smart really is because you’re getting dumber, but, but then when, when you become adults, you’re like, wow, they knew some stuff from life experiences.

[28:46] Maurice Ashley: But the trusted advisor, sometimes they’re too close. When your mom says, Oh, it’ll be okay, honey. You don’t hear that because you figure his mom, she’s going to try to tell me the thing that makes me feel better. And what I need is somebody I can trust who doesn’t mind saying the negative stuff or giving the criticism that you really need in order to grow.

[29:08] Maurice Ashley: So that can change. I remember one of my greatest advisors was A sensei how he was a sensei of Aikido, which is a martial art that I practiced for years and I practiced it because it showed me something about chess. That I did not understand or appreciate very well. I was out of the Brooklyn school, attack, attack, attack, seek, kill, destroy.

[29:39] Maurice Ashley: Like that’s what my mindset was, but at the highest levels I was losing. And I came to realize that my attacks were not working. They were, they were. Actually the fuel for my opponents to create counterattacks, but my mindset was I need to become a better attacker what I didn’t realize was that I actually had to become better at defending and Using my opponent’s intentions against them and that’s exactly what Aikido is about, unlike something like karate and a more direct kind of kick, punch, uh, maim.

[30:12] Maurice Ashley: Aikido was about receiving the energy and then guiding it in a direction that threw your opponent off balance and then putting them on the floor. But As much as I was learning from the physical training in Aikido, for me, I was translating that physical training into mental training and then mental attitude that transformed my game.

[30:34] Maurice Ashley: It was also important that my sensei was so cool. I was this old Jewish guy who just spoke very practically. He didn’t, as much as Aikido had this sort of ethereal kind of mystical quality. He just kept things simple. And he’s saying, you know, you don’t, you don’t have to, you know, act as though you’re connecting with your chi in some space beyond the universe.

[30:58] Maurice Ashley: Right? Like it’s, it was just, just go with the flow, just go with the flow. And he was such a practical guy and I trusted him a hundred percent. No, there was not a malicious bone in his body. And anything he said was all about you improving. And it’s having people like that. Who just got you grounded that made it so much easier for me when I was in the middle of battle to just say, just go with the flow.

[31:24] Jim Harshaw Jr.: So for the listener, I think we covered that pretty thoroughly, get the right people in your life. And if you don’t have them in your life now, go find them. You know, my background and my coaching firm is we do executive and life coaching. And it’s like personal performance coaching for the real world.

[31:39] Jim Harshaw Jr.: You get these people in your life, right? And in whatever area of your life, you might need them. And the other thing I wanted to talk to you about Maurice is this idea of balancing sacrifices and risks. And you talk about that in your book. Can you talk about how you learn that through chess and how that applies to.

[31:58] Jim Harshaw Jr.: The listener, right? Whether it’s in, you’re trying to get that promotion, build that business, make that career change, what have you. Magnus

[32:03] Maurice Ashley: Carlsen, the world chess champion, and maybe the greatest player of all time. Maybe he is indeed the goat. Uh, if, if not, he’s one of the top three, no question about it.

[32:14] Maurice Ashley: He had a quote where he said that to not take risks is in and of itself, a risky strategy. In chess, we have a bunch of pieces on the board. Sometimes you’ve got to give one up, like literally give it up, not exchange it. I get a pawn, you get a pawn, you know, I, I give you my knight. For your knight.

[32:37] Maurice Ashley: Literally I give you a pawn, a knight, a bishop, a rook, or maybe even the queen. And I don’t see exactly how it will all play out. So there’s a difference between a sham sacrifice in chess. And a real sacrifice. A sham sacrifice is one of those. I give you my night. Yeah, but guess what? I knew that not only was I going to win back the night, I’m going to also win back a pawn or maybe even checkmate your king.

[33:03] Maurice Ashley: I can see that clearly just by looking and analyzing. I see five, six, seven moves ahead. Oh yeah. I’m getting it all back by force. That’s a sham sacrifice. A real sacrifice is one of those, I give you my knife, and it looks like I’ll have a great position, I’ll have a lot of space, your pieces will be restricted in their movement, I might have a nice little attack against your king, but I gave away a piece, and if my attack doesn’t work, then your superior forces will come back to haunt me.

[33:31] Maurice Ashley: Those sacrifices require a certain level of equanimity. A certain level of bravado, a certain level of confidence that it’s going to be okay. It’s going to work out if I just stay focused and. It’s hard for people to make those sacrifices in real life, right? You sometimes you’re talking about money. How do I balance giving up X number of dollars for what may be a risky proposition in business that may not work out your investments in life, where, where you do that.

[34:08] Maurice Ashley: It’s challenging. And I recognize that, but with no risk, there’s no reward or with little risk, there’s little reward. So you have to figure out that balance and to each his own, trust me, even as chess players, it’s not just a monolithic strategy or profile in chess, where all chess players sacrifice all the time.

[34:26] Maurice Ashley: There’s those chess players who play close to the vest. They’re like IRS accountants itemizing every single last chess pawn or piece. I’m not just giving this up. I need everybody, but even they know when it’s time to take a chance, know when there is some payoff with some risk. And you have the other players on the other side of the spectrum who they will sacrifice at a moment’s notice.

[34:53] Maurice Ashley: The fear of loss left them when they were little kids, and they’re ready to fight to the finish. So you really have to know your own risk profile in everything that you do, and you have to be really attuned to it. But you also have to know your risk limitations, where you are afraid to do things. That others you can see that they’re doing it and you’re thinking why, why are they so successful, but you can see that they’re willing to take that chance, and you have to really really know yourself.

[35:24] Maurice Ashley: And again, that often means. Having discussions with others, with coaches like yourself, Jim, who can say, no, I think this is where you really stand, even though you think you’re otherwise, but I just want to make one more point about that. I used to think that I was the wildest attacking player ever in my own mind.

[35:43] Maurice Ashley: I was a gladiator running onto the field in front of a thousand competitors. But when I analyzed my games, I realized that it wasn’t the case. I was shocked. Wait, why am I so much more conservative than it feels when I’m sitting at the board. Again, you, it’s very hard to know yourself. You think you know yourself, but it’s extremely difficult for you to know yourself.

[36:04] Maurice Ashley: We see the mirror image when we look in the mirror, not the true image. And that often requires again, trusted advisors to help you on that journey.

[36:13] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I have a business partner, Dr. Tom Perrin, who I had on the podcast several months ago, and he does an assessment. We do this with a lot of our clients and it is absolutely incredible.

[36:24] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And one of the things that I learned about myself doing this 12 or 15 years ago was that I have a, I have a relatively low risk tolerance to the point where it can hold me back. When you have this trusted advisor, when you have somebody from the outside looking in saying, here’s what I’m seeing, Jim, here’s a little bit about your wiring, you can now take action to hedge against that.

[36:44] Jim Harshaw Jr.: You can say, okay, this is one of those scenarios, right? In business and chess and whatever other area of your life. This is one of those scenarios where probably being overcautious. Let me be aware of that. And let me put on a new set of eyes and look at this from a little bit different perspective. So just another example of, of getting the right people in your life.

[37:02] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And I’ll

[37:02] Maurice Ashley: tell you, there was a big game. One of the biggest games in my life. It was against Michael Betzel, Grandmaster Michael Betzel of Germany. It was in Bermuda. This was 1998 and I’m playing this game and I have two options. One. Is to capture his rook with my Bishop. It’s called winning an exchange.

[37:24] Maurice Ashley: The bit rook is a better piece than a Bishop in most circumstances, or I can take a pawn and it’s a cheap, it’s a little pawn, right? So obviously a pawn is not a rook. So I’m sitting at the board and taking the rook just seems so juicy, but taking the pawn kept all the dynamic advantages and I sat a long time.

[37:45] Maurice Ashley: And here’s the thing. If I won that game, I get the grandmaster title. So. Long story short, I take the rook and throw away my entire advantage. What I thought was going to be my rooks being more active turned out to be his Bishop being far more active, the Bishop that he had left. And soon I got blown off the board.

[38:05] Maurice Ashley: I was so frustrated. It was the title on the line. And right after the game, I’m sort of moping, uh, figuring out what, what am I going to do now? I got to go play in another tournament to try to get the title. And Grandmaster Alexander Shabalov. Was watching the game and he said to me, you should have taken the pawn.

[38:24] Maurice Ashley: Right. I was like, yeah, I guess so. And he said, listen, you’re going to have many other opportunities, but I want to tell you this in order to become a grandmaster, you have to first be a grandmaster. And that was some kind of Yoda stuff. You know, when I heard that and I was like, what? And it dawned on me, you know, I got it with clarity when he said it, that I was busy trying to penny pinch my way to the title, you know, like be safe or take the rook.

[38:52] Maurice Ashley: Right. If I’m already in a, in a mental space that says I’m confident things work out, just be bold. Don’t rush things. Don’t worry about the title. If I’m already trained mentally with all my support system with the studying that I’ve done with the physical fitness stuff that I’ve done, then when the time comes.

[39:16] Maurice Ashley: I’ll get the title.

[39:17] Jim Harshaw Jr.: If you’re already a grandmaster, you will be,

[39:19] Maurice Ashley: I’m already a grandmaster. I’ll just be, they’ll just ordain it. They’ll say, okay, dude, you did it. I mean, you, you’ve been that, and that meant so much. And the next time I had an opportunity to get the title, I was playing into an international master, Adrian Negulescu from Romania.

[39:35] Maurice Ashley: And I had a situation where, again, if I win the game, I get the title. And I had a situation where I have to give up. A pawn, a very important pawn that I, I’d actually gained a pawn in the game before, already, but now I had to give it back just to make sure my pieces danced. And usually in a situation like that, you think, well, I’ll keep the pawn and you know, pawn’s important because a pawn can become a queen eventually.

[39:58] Maurice Ashley: So you want to keep as many of them as you can. But in this moment, my spirit said, you know what? You can have the pawn. I’m just going to start dancing with my pieces. And I did that. I started putting pressure on him from multiple directions. And it was so much so that he collapsed under the pressure and the winning move was what I call a beginner’s move.

[40:21] Maurice Ashley: It’s the kind of move that you would see if you, when I started playing chess back in the day in Brooklyn Tech, and I couldn’t believe it. I sat there thinking I’m about to get the Grandmaster title from playing some bogus beginner’s move. And I mean, bogus, but it’s just so simple. Like that’s the move that gives me the Grandmaster title, but it wasn’t that move.

[40:40] Maurice Ashley: It was all the games before that, that got me to that point, the decisions that I had to make the journey that I went on. And yes, when it came time, it was a simple move. As all that, just like, just drop the move on the board. There’s the grandmaster title. So in order to become, you have to be, and that requires preparing yourself in such a way that when the challenge is in front of you, you just know exactly what to do

[41:07] Jim Harshaw Jr.: for the listener.

[41:08] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Look in the mirror. What is it that you want to become? What is the title? What is that? Whatever level, whatever you’re thinking, whatever that is in your life. Be that person first. Maurice, incredible. Just so much value here. So much more in your books. You have two books that were published in the same day.

[41:26] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Can you talk a little bit about those books and where we can find those? On April 2nd,

[41:31] Maurice Ashley: two books being published at the same time, which is kind of a funny thing. I don’t know how many authors got that to happen. It’s two different publishers. They happen to choose the day, April 2nd, which I guess now it’s a very special day for me.

[41:43] Maurice Ashley: It was a normal day, day after April fools, but now it’s a special day. Move by move. Is the adult book life lessons on and off the chess board, much as of what we’re, we’ve been talking about now and more of those stories. And the children’s book is called the life changing magic of chess is for early readers who may want to get into the game five to eight year old so you can get it for your young kid who may want to become a chess champ one day or a life champ.

[42:17] Maurice Ashley: And so both books are out there already for pre order on Amazon. And. If this date you’re listening is past April 2nd, well, they’re out. Go get it on Amazon.

[42:27] Jim Harshaw Jr.: They’re out. Excellent. Maurice, thank you so much for making time to come on the show. Very much. Appreciate it. I had a lot of fun.

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