Position Over Submission

Position Over Submission

In chess, there’s a few different ways to determine who’s winning at any given moment. The most obvious way is you count the pieces. Generally, whoever has the more powerful army has the advantage. But not always, because, a smaller army occupying better terrain can hold off a vastly superior force. We’ve seen this multiple times throughout history. A really classic example is the story of the 300 Spartans holding back the Persian Empire at the Battle of Thermopoloe - granted, they did eventually lose. So maybe, that is not the best example. But regardless.

This is called having The Positional Advantage. Regardless of how big the army is, you should always be thinking - How can I control the position. Because if you do that, winning just gets that much easier.

I re-learned this lesson a couple of years ago when I started traning Brazilian Jujitsu - which is really just a bunch of grown men wrestling around on the mats trying to submit one another. One of the biggest differences I noticed almost immediately is that, when you wrestle with lower belts, like a white belt or a blue belt, they’re constantly looking for the submission. You see the same tendency when people first learn boxing or Mui Thai. They’re constantly looking for that one punch kill shot that’s going to end the match instantly. It doesn’t matter where these people are in the position, they’re just throwing hay makers, praying something lands. If you compare this to the more skilled fighters, the black belts for example, it is a very very different strategy. The upper belts pretty much only ever go for submissions after they’ve thoroughly dominated the position. They get to a dominant position, sitting on your chest, they got your arms spread over your head all willy-nilly, and then they finally reach down and choke you out with practically no effort.

The same thing happens in chess, in business and in life. New players fixate on attacking the opponent’s king at all costs. And in the process of hunting that checkmate, they compromise their position. Advanced players understand that if you control the position first, the submissions will naturally appear. It is human nature to want the easy solution, that one shot kill, which is why trillions of dollars are poured into miracle fat loss pills, get rich quick schemes on YouTube, in the lottery. Somehow, we think that if we can just find that one little hack, everything in our life will fall into place. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there is no hack. Not only that, but spending all your time looking for one is what’s keeping you from doing the laborious work of controlling the position that would, if you give it enough time, lead to success. So the question to ask in all domains of your life and business is, what does it mean to control the position?

I like to think a lot about the concept of environment design, which is all about setting up your life in such a way that it creates a slippery slope towards your goals.