Millions of Ideas

I often ponder vexing questions of life like "What is the meaning of life?" "What am I going to do with myself?" "Is there a career for me" or simply "What is the next step?" All sorts of questions like this are no doubt familiar to your average college graduate wondering truly what his purpose is... or maybe its just your philosophy major. In any event, I have discovered that it takes is one good idea.

This notion is perhaps harder to achieve than it sounds though. Most people are no doubt familiar with the age old adage: It takes a million ideas before you get one good one.

But perhaps this far-fetched cliche is not as hard to achieve as it seems. When I sit at the chessboard for a game, I often go through about a million silly ideas over the course of 6 hours. Perhaps none of them are any good but they still occur to me! Can I sac this knight what about a pawn sac, maybe I should go for the endgame now with these slight advantages. If you look at the game of chess as a chance to live a mini world several times over. You will see what ideas work and what won't. More or less what you can get away with in a given position. Each time though you will become stronger as your experience in positions grows. This mini-universe as we shall now refer to it reflects nicely on life. You don't need to find that multimillion dollar idea right off the bat out of college or find your true calling in life. It is enough to have a lot of bad ideas and understand why they are bad. Eventually it should all culminate in the big calling in your life down the road. With that I hope some of the anxiety is relieved from other people in similar positions to my own. No need to be in a rush to head to grad school or whatever you've decided must be the ONLY next step. Relax and think awhile... it will come to you like saccing the exchange on f6 (oblivious remark to having listen to GM Jonathan Rowson commenting on Magnus Carlsen's victory over Linares 2009 tournament leader Alexander Grischuk): http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1536452

I believe the fitting proverb here is that you must always have a plan in chess an idea. Preferrably your moves should be flexible enough to have multiple ideas or plans behind them. Why not the same desire for your life? Keep your options open!