Garry Kasparov

You don’t become a world champion without being able to play in different styles when necessary. Sometimes you are forced to fight on unfamiliar terrain; you can’t run away when conditions aren’t to your liking. The ability to adapt is crucial to success.

Our basic recipe, then, is to first steep ourselves in every aspect of the problem and then identify the questions that need to be answered. The most creative minds usually belong to those who know the most about the matter at hand.

Maintaining a suitable attitude, inward and outward, makes a great deal of difference to our success. It’s not as simplistic as convincing ourselves we are geniuses, or that we are invincible. We must aim to give our best effort at all times and acknowledge that doing less is the real failure.

Crises are when we are tested and develop our skills and our senses. ... Chateaubriand wrote that ‘moments of crisis produce a redoubling of life in man.’ We should take such moments as a challenge to carry out our own performance review and to look back at our last crisis and how we handled it. If you cannot recall a recent crisis in your life, even one successfully averted, you are either very lucky, very bored, or both.

Who runs a race wanting to come in second? Who grows up wanting to be the vice-president? Putting limits on our ambition puts limits on our achievement. Having an aggressive philosophy also applies to being aggressive with ourselves. It’s not about being a nice guy or not; it’s about constantly challenging ourselves, our environment, and those around us. It’s the opposite of moral and physical complacency.

How success is measured is different for each of us. The first and most important step is realizing that the secret of success is inside.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, ‘Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.’

The purpose of this book is to inspire fellow explorers. We can all look at our own personal maps and cast off for unknown domains where we will encounter new challenges. We can accept that failure is a necessary part of success. The faith that led Magellan to attempt to circumnavigate the globe in 1519 is why we remember him. But few remember that he was not among the eighteen survivors who completed the journey.

As Thomas Watson, founder of IBM, put it, ‘If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.’ If you aren’t failing at least occasionally you aren’t taking the risks required to be an innovator.

The strategist starts with a goal in the distant future and works backwards to the present.

The strategist starts with a goal in the distant future and works backwards to the present.