Success Is the Enemy of Future Success
On November 9, 1985, I achieved the great goal of my young life: I became the world champion of chess. During the celebration afterward I was taken aside by Rona Petrosian, the wife of the former world champion. “I feel sorry for you,” she said. “The greatest day of your life is over.” What a thing to say at a victory party!
But those words resonated in my head in the many years that followed, and now, after a lifetime as a competitor, I know firsthand that one of the most dangerous enemies you can face is complacency. I’ve seen—both in myself and my competitors—how satisfaction can lead to a lack of vigilance, then to mistakes and missed opportunities. Success and satisfaction may be our goals, but they can also lead to bad habits that will impede greater success and satisfaction.
After that huge early victory I spent the next fifteen years in a constant battle to augment my strengths and eliminate my weaknesses. I became convinced that if I worked unrelentingly and diligently and played to the best of my ability, no one could defeat me. And I believed that until the day I retired in March 2005. How, then, can I explain my loss to my countryman Kramnik in our 2000 world championship match? In chapter 2 we looked at his success purely at the chess level, by analyzing how he succeeded in selecting and controlling the battlefield for our contest. The strategic failure on my part had deeper origins, however.
In great part my own success had made it difficult, if not impossible, for me to see what was going on in the championship tournament against Kramnik. In the two years prior to the October 2000 match, I had been playing some of the best chess of my life, refuting the critics who had predicted the end of my reign at the top. They kept citing my advanced age; at thirty-five I was already a decade older than most of my opponents. But I kept winning. In 1999 I pushed my record rating to new heights and was in the middle of a “grand slam” tournament winning streak when I started preparations for the world championship match. I felt as though I could move mountains at the chessboard. So how did Kramnik’s infuriating Berlin Defense stop me in my tracks?
Ironically, my years of success had made me vulnerable. One of the strongest points of my game had always been my ability to adapt and meet new challenges, and Kramnik used that strategy against me. Despite my discomfort in the positions he led me into, I kept insisting to myself that I could adjust as the match played out and that I had enough time to recover and win. In my first world championship match, with Karpov in 1984–85, there had been no limit to the number of games we would play, and I was able to adapt, alter my strategy, and recover the lead. But in a match of just sixteen games there just wasn’t enough time.
I had been outprepared by my young opponent, and I was so stunned that I was incapable of even acknowledging that I was in serious trouble. When the realization finally hit me, it was already late in the short match and I went from feeling sure I would recover to believing it was impossible. I put up a little fight toward the end, but it wasn’t enough. I ended the fifteen-game match with two losses and not a single win.
I lost because I was overconfident and complacent. Even while it was happening, it was difficult for me to credit my onetime student with possessing the talent to outfox me. Nor did it ever occur to me that Kramnik could—or would—prepare better than I had. I had also neglected to consider that he had been one of my assistants in my 1995 world championship match against Anand. He knew all my habits and all my tactics. Instead of devising a strategy to use that knowledge against him, I ignored it. And flush with past success, I couldn’t conceive there were any serious weaknesses in my game.
This is what I call the gravity of past success. Winning creates the illusion that everything is fine. We think only of the positive result without considering all the things that went wrong—or that could have gone wrong—along the way. After a victory we want to celebrate, not analyze. We replay the triumphant moment in our mind until it looks as though it were inevitable.
Most of us are guilty of the same bad habit in our day-to-day lives. My advice? The old saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” should be left to the plumbing trade and never applied to how we lead our lives at home and at work. Question the status quo at all times, especially when things are going well. When something goes wrong, you naturally want to do it better the next time, but you must train yourself to want to do it better even when things go right. Failing to do this leads to stagnation and eventual breakdown. For me, it led to a crushing defeat.
Competition and Anticomplacency Tactics
Failure due to complacency exists in every enterprise. In competitive environments such as the military and the corporate world, it almost always springs from doing “business as usual” while the competition is catching up and surpassing us. The consequences of resting on reputation and outdated experience can be dire.
In 1919, during the Russian civil war, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov— a favorite of Stalin’s—routed the White Guard with a swarm of massed cavalry units. In the years before mechanized warfare, it worked brilliantly. But when the Germans invaded in 1941, the Red Army veterans leading the Soviet troops foolishly still believed that horses were paramount. When the Nazi armored divisions rolled in, the mounted Red Army was completely ineffectual, and Hitler’s tanks encircled Leningrad.
Horses were no match for tanks and artillery. American car companies in the seventies were no match for new Japanese production and management techniques. Constant reinvention is a necessity in fast-moving areas such as manufacturing and technology.
So how do we inspire ourselves to keep pushing for better results? Competition is one inspiring way. After all, who runs a race wanting to come in second? Who grows up wanting to be the vice president? Who sits down at a chessboard ready to relinquish his king? Athletes often talk about finding motivation in the desire to meet their own challenges and play their own best game, without worrying about their opponents. Though there is some truth to this, I find it a little disingenuous. While everyone has a unique way to get motivated and stay that way, all athletes thrive on competition, and that means beating someone else, not just setting a personal best. Ask the Olympic runner who breaks his personal record, or even the world record, and finishes a close second how good he feels. We don’t need to wonder if he would trade a tenth of a second for a gold medal instead of silver.
We all work harder, run faster, when we know someone is right on our heels. Some of my best performances came in the heat of close competition. Just as racing dogs go much faster after a “rabbit,” we push ourselves to greater exertions if we have a competitor matching us stride for stride to the finish line.
There can be no finer example of the inspiring powers of competition to shatter the status quo than Hungary’s Judit Polgar. Polgar, the only woman among the top several hundred players on the international rating list, gained fame for her sparkling attacking chess. If, based on Polgar’s games, to “play like a girl” meant anything in chess, it would mean relentless aggression. Polgar first came on the international scene at the age of ten, and at twelve was winning open international tournaments. In 1991 she broke Bobby Fischer’s thirty-year-old record to become the youngest Grandmaster ever at the age of fifteen. (That record has since become a popular target and, thanks to the proliferation of the once rare GM title, has been broken many times. It is now held by Ukraine’s Sergey Karjakin, who in 2002 became a GM at twelve years, seven months.)
Along with her two chess-playing older sisters, Susan and Sofia, Polgar was homeschooled by her father, Lazlo, who had a theory that “geniuses can be created.” The experimental curriculum he devised for the girls focused on chess, and it’s hard to argue with the results. The issue of nature versus nurture has always been a hot topic in chess. I suppose that since the Polgars are sisters they don’t resolve the debate either way, but their upbringing and development certainly make a good case for nurture.
Enclaves where women’s chess was traditional had produced some strong players, but for most of the game’s history the few women who played chess competently were regarded as curiosities. The former Soviet republic of Georgia boasted Nona Gaprindashvili and Maia Chiburdanidze, two of the first women to make inroads into the international chess world in the sixties and seventies. Like most women players they limited their growth by concentrating on women-only events, especially in the critical early years of their development. Over time, everyone had simply accepted that that was the way it was.
The Polgars changed all that. With a few exceptions for official events such as the women’s Chess Olympiad—where the sisters twice composed the first three boards of the winning Hungarian team—they shunned women-only events and sought out the toughest competition. Susan, the eldest, was pushed out into the rough-and-tumble world of international tournament chess as a teenager and became one of the first women to receive the “men’s” Grandmaster title. At the age of fourteen, in Rome, middle sister Sofia scored one of the astonishing open tournament results on record, battering a field of Grandmasters. And after winning the Hungarian national championship in 1991 at the age of fifteen, Judit said she would only consider playing on the “men’s” Chess Olympiad team. What could the Hungarian federation say? Thanks to the Polgars the adjective men’s before events and the “affirmative action” women’s titles such as Woman Grandmaster have become anachronisms (though they are still in use).
By seeking out and often besting the toughest competition, the Pol-gars showed that there are no inherent limitations to their aptitude—an idea that many male players refused to accept until they had unceremoniously been crushed by a twelve-year-old with a ponytail. In 2005, Judit returned to chess after taking a year off to have a child. Her first engagement after her return was a tough one, the Corus supertournament in the Netherlands, and she finished with a positive score and gained rating points. On the October 2005 rating list, Judit Polgar, at twenty-nine, was ranked number eight in the world, just four points behind Vladimir Kramnik.
It may well be that the Polgars were partly pushed to excellence by their desire to prove that women can be as capable at the board as men. What’s most notable for our purposes is that they became better players than any other women by facing tougher competition than those women.
I too would have been unable to reach my potential without a nemesis like Karpov breathing down my neck and pushing me every step of the way. When a new generation of chess players emerged in the nineties and Karpov ceased to be the main threat to my dominant position, I had to refocus and find new sources of inspiration. So I dedicated myself to fighting back against the new wave of talented young stars, something few world champions had managed to do for long.
Without Karpov to focus my energies on, I became more heavily involved with chess politics and sponsorship activities. This period also marked my increased involvement in computer chess and other exhibitions. Not until 1998, after my loss to IBM’s computer Deep Blue, did I realize I had become distracted from chess. I rededicated myself to working harder than ever on my game—and on beating human opponents. The results were evident, and despite my match loss to Kramnik in 2000 I played some of the best chess of my life in the years 1999–2001.
Every good player has his or her own methods. After a fifty-year career, the amazing Viktor Korchnoi has kept his competitive fires burning and is still playing high-level chess well into his seventies. “Viktor the Terrible” has led a difficult and colorful life both on and off the board, defecting from the USSR in 1976 after years of battles with the Soviet authorities. He became even more of a thorn in their side after he fled to the West, first to the Netherlands and then to his current home in Switzerland. It became difficult for the Soviet censors to keep the defector’s name out of the news when he was winning so many tournaments and defeating the top Soviet players. Three times he faced the much younger Karpov in world championship contests, failing each time but comforting himself with his bittersweet title: Strongest Player Never to Become World Champion. Korchnoi has had a revenge of sorts by continuing to play competitive chess while Karpov—twenty years younger— has largely retired from the rigors of tournament play. When he was the age at which I retired, Korchnoi was not yet at his peak!
Despite his impressive career Korchnoi has always been able to play as if he has something more to prove. Defying age is not nearly enough for him; he is not content just to turn up and move the pieces around. Korchnoi enjoys showing players a half century his junior that they still have something to learn from him. At a tournament in 2004, Korchnoi defeated the Norwegian prodigy Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, a triumph of a seventy-three-year-old over a fourteen-year-old.
Korchnoi has maintained his drive by refusing to look back at what would be the glory days for just about anyone else. He is still driven by the game of chess and by an earnest desire to beat his opponent, not merely to do his best. Korchnoi is an inspiration to me because I also believe it’s essential to have benchmarks in our lives to keep us alert. In chess and other sports we have ratings, opponents, and tournaments, so things seem clear, but as I’ve left the professional world of chess, I see that more is required.
Regardless of the methods we use to motivate ourselves, we have to create our own goals and standards and then keep raising them. It can feel a bit paradoxical to muster up the confidence that we are the best but still compete as if we were outsiders and underdogs. But that’s what it takes. It is just as hard to change a working formula, but anyone who wants to excel over a long career will find it necessary to do both things: nurture your inherent strengths but be nimble enough to develop new avenues of attack. Despite having won eight gold medals over three Olympics, Carl Lewis still wanted more at the age of thirty-five. To qualify for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, he embarked on an entirely new training program, leaving behind everything that had worked for him. He knew that his age and injuries created new challenges. He went on to win another gold in Atlanta, and he did it by not being afraid to change what worked.
Finding ways to maintain our concentration and motivation is the key to fighting complacency. Maybe you don’t have a rating system at work or at home the way professional chess or tennis players do, but that doesn’t mean you can’t develop one. What metrics can you contrive to measure your performance? Certainly money can be valued and easily measured, but it can’t be the only thing. Perhaps you should create your own “happiness index,” which can be as simple as a mental or actual list of things that motivate you and give you pleasure and satisfaction.
Before you can fight, you have to know what you are fighting for. Every parent says he or she wants to spend more time with his or her kids, but how many people actually know, down to the hour, how much time they do spend together each week, each month? How many hours at work do you waste playing solitaire or surfing the Web? What if you kept track and knew the answer? Then you would have a target to pursue. Most of us need to develop a more helpful technique than the vague promise of the cliché “Just do it.” Anticipating Nike’s ad agency by two centuries, Goethe wrote, “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”
The motivation to question our methods can come from within, or it may come from without. In the business world, only an unusual boss will hire employees who approach things differently and who will challenge his ideas and practices. It takes great willpower and self-confidence to surround ourselves with smart, talented people who we know will confront us. No one enjoys being contradicted or “corrected”—there’s a constant risk of losing authority or creating an anarchy of mixed messages. But the leader who is willing to risk these things has the potential for extraordinary success.
These people are extraordinary because they have overcome the dread of being challenged, which is the same as the childish fear of simply being wrong. This fear can be crippling to your development and success. I’ve learned from my years of playing competitive chess to trust in my ability to use the opposition to make myself stronger and to gather more information about the process at hand. Whenever you feel threatened, remember the words of Emerson, who wrote, “Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”
Feudal and caste systems have just about died out in most nations across the globe, but they are alive and well in the chess world. National and international federations establish classes and categories based on a complex rating system that allows players to compete for prizes against opponents who are at a similar level. First-category players aren’t allowed to participate in the second-category competition any more than a twenty-year-old could play in the under-twelve championship. Of course there are no restrictions in the opposite direction. An ambitious novice is free to get killed in the “open” section where the highest-rated players compete. So no one could complain that it was unfair when I won the Soviet national under-eighteen tournament at the age of twelve.
If it is challenges that help us improve, why then—apart from prize money—doesn’t everyone want to play in the open section of a tournament? There’s no doubt about it: you’ll learn more from nine losses to strong opponents than from six wins and three losses against players who are at roughly your own level. The same thing holds true with players who don’t attend tournaments but play against chess software. A PC program at its maximum strength will wipe out any casual player without mercy. Ironically, the main task of chess software companies today is to find ways to make the program weaker, not stronger, and to provide enough options that any user can pick from different levels and the machine will try to make enough mistakes to give him a chance. So how much of a chance should you ask for against the mighty machine?
Every person has to find the right balance between confidence and correction, but my rule of thumb is, lose as often as you can take it. Playing in the open section and going 0-9 every time is going to crush your spirit long before you get good enough to make a decent score. Unless you have a superhuman ego, or totally lack one, a constant stream of negativity will leave you too depressed and antagonized to make the necessary changes.
But as much as you enjoy winning, remember that winning every time is not ideal. Setbacks and losses are both inevitable and essential if you’re going to improve and become a good, even great, competitor. The art is in avoiding catastrophic losses in the key battles. This same principle also applies in the real world, where, if you’re well insulated by your supporters and staff, you can believe that you are right virtually all of the time. It’s not only dictators and pharaohs who are always right. Politicians and CEOs tend to both attract and hire like-minded staffers and employees. They gain energy by talking with their avid supporters and accuse critics of not being supportive. When things go wrong, they assign the blame to others. It is dangerously easy to go from succeeding in business or politics because you are often correct to surrounding yourself with others who tell you you are correct because of who you are.
The Difference Between Better and Different
If you can learn to accept criticism and invite your people to present new information—particularly that which may contradict an idea or practice that you hold dear—you will quickly learn to adopt new and potentially powerful methods into your game plan. Learn to see value in other methods and take what you need from them to improve—but not necessarily replace—your own.