What’s Your Daily Chess Move?
Do you feel like you have control over your life? Do you feel like your circumstances dictate your life or do your reactions to your circumstances control the outcome?
“Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.”
Of course it’s an extremely privileged way of thinking but I believe it’s true for most situations. You have control over the actions you take on a daily basis and the changes you make moving forward.
Photo by Vlada Karpovich from Pexels
Inspiration:
Experiment Without Limits - Chris Sparks
Atomic Habits - James Clear
Chris thinks of habits like a flowing river, with strong currents moving downstream. If you wanted to go against the current, you’d need so much more energy than moving downstream. Eventually going against the current will feel normal and in some cases like Ox Bow Lakes, you’d have created a completely new stream symbolising a new habit.
James Clear has a simplistic view of habits, seeing as his book was very well written for beginners jumping into habit building. James just explains the power of daily tiny habits as casting votes. In an election, one party will start as the majority party and James compares this to your old, undesirable habit. And to overthrow the majority, you’d have to cast multiple votes to your new habit constantly to turn the tables.
My Daily Chess Move
I have a little theory I like to call the Daily Chess Move that came from a few inspirations. To gamify your life, you can see it as a daily game chess and you get to choose the moves you make everyday.
The Daily Chess Move motivates me to get things done, however small they are, every single day. It combines the concept from Atomic Habits of incremental improvements and ideologies of gamifying life.
This concept even brings in the argument of being dealt a bad hand in life. If you felt that you were already a step behind, you could think of it as having a bad start to a chess game, making trades upwards to a better position.
How do I use my Daily Chess Move?
I use my Daily Chess Move to remind me to make a positive move every single day. When I end the day with journaling, I reflect on it. Have I exercised self-discipline or did something outside of my comfort zone? Did I really not want to do the dishes today or go for a walk but I still did?
My Daily Chess Move is a reminder to be constantly pushing myself despite my inner resistance. Ultimately, after journaling and noting down my chess moves, I have a long list of my previous triumphs and days I’ve pushed myself to do more than I normally would.
How You can use the Daily Chess Move?
A Daily Chess Move is a way of motivating myself and I hope it does for you too! Make use of the Daily Chess Move to give you the burst of energy you need to take another step in your day or to make even the tiniest amount of progress towards your goals!