Champions

I arrived early at St Pancras for the train to Leicester, and wondered whether I should get a book from the bookstore to read on the train. As I visually browsed the shelves, I saw Garry Kasparov's How Life Imitates Chess. Interestingly, I recalled Deepak Chopra's Golf For Enlightenment: The Seven Lessons for the Game of Life, when I saw Kasparov's book.

Chess was one of the two games I played when I was younger. The other is Monopoly. I picked up chess by observing how my other classmates played in class to kill time (so to speak) when teachers were busy marking exam papers during my primary school days. I felt a great sense of achievement when I played my first game, and occasionally won games played in class. Now my two sons too play chess, and they too learnt it from observing how their classmates played.

Grandmaster and World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov's pieces on strategy and winning tactics in Chess had appeared in Harvard Business Review (no less) which are useful and relevant for business. He beat his opponent, fellow Soviet Anatoly Karpov in 1985 to become world champion and went to hold the title for 15 years. Despite the win, he acknowledged Karpov as the adversary who shaped his life.

Kasparov woke up to find the best present he ever had for his 6th birthday. It was an enormous globe - he had always been fascinated by maps and geography, and his favorite stories were those of voyages of Marco Polo, Columbus and Magellan. These stories fired his own sense of pioneer spirit. He wanted to blaze new trails, even if at that point that meant little more than taking a new route on the walk home.

Every Grandmaster left behind legacies and Kasparov was no exception.

Mikhail Botvinnik who was titled "the patriarch of Soviet chess", left professional chess in 1970 to concentrate on coaching. He invited the top junior chess talents from all over the country two or three times a year to join the Botvinnik School. It went on to produce several generations of champions. In the first "graduating" cohort in the early 60s was the young Anatoly Karpov. In 1973 one of its students was the ten-year-old Gary Kasparov. By 1987 when another (future) world champion Vladimir Kramnik arrived in 1987 it had become the joint Botvinnik-Kasparov School - quite impressive record of champions.

What makes someone a better manager, a better writer, a better chess player - a champion?

For there can be no doubt that not everyone performs at the same level or has the capacity to do so. What is critical is to find our own paths to reach our peaks, to develop our talents, improve our skills, and to seek out and conquer the challenges we need to push us to the highest level.

I am not a devout chess player.

But Kasparov's lessons about mastering the strategic and emotional skills to navigate life's toughest challenges are worth more than the 8.99 Pounds Sterling price marked on the book.

And even the cashier told me that he will be reading this book on his train ride to Yorkshire, this weekend.