Tactical Retreat

Tactical Retreat

This one is quite important, because, it is the hardest move to find.

One of the greatest players to never win a World Chess Championship is a guy you probably never heard of named Vassel Ivanchuck. He said the hardest move to find is a Knight Retreat.

Why is it so hard to find? There are really two reasons. First, tactical retreats in games and in life are always hard to see, because we often equate forward motion with progress. If we’re not moving directly towards a goal, it can often feel like a waste of time and energy. The second reason that a Knight Retreat is so hard to find is the result of the fact that the Knight itself moves in a completely different way than any other piece on the board. In particular, there’s one aspect of the knight’s peculiar movement pattern that can really screw with your mind. That is, it can jump over other pieces. When we combine these two things, we now have a piece that moves in a very strange way away from our goals. As a result, most people never stop to even consider these moves. But the truth is, sometimes taking a step back is in fact the fastest way to move forward.

For instance, one of my businesses back in 2018 was hyper focused on growth. We had poured a ton of money into infrastructure and machine for producing our products. Now we had to drive a lot of revenue to cover those expenses. At that time, we had one massive customer who accounted for nearly 10% of our yearly revenue. As you can imagine, we were terrified of losing this customer. So we would do pretty much anything and everything to keep them happy. The problem was, they were impossible to make happy. They called me at all hours of the night. They sent dozens of stressful emails every single day to our shipping manager. It got to the point that my team and I were spending more time dealing with them than we were with all of our other customers combined. Eventually, we got to the point where we finally saw the one move we’ve been overlooking the entire time.

The Tactical Retreat

We fired that customer. And overnight, our revenue plummeted by 10% at a time when we really needed that money. But the result of that retreat was that, it freed up so much of my team’s time and mental bandwidth that we could now pour into the other 90% of our customers, which led to a massive spike in revenue that far surpassed the 10% we’d given up only a few months prior.

The moral of this story is that, sometimes taking a step back is in fact the fastest and in many case the only way to move forward. The question I like to ask myself is, what is the move that I’m not even considering right now because it just looks so wrong? Maybe, that is quitting your job. Maybe, it is moving to another city. Maybe, it is ending a relationship that no longer serves you. Regardless of what it is, answering that question is often the key to finding the winning move.