What We Can Learn From Chess Grandmasters

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal. Today I am sharing a mental model that I think is a hidden superpower of all great entrepreneurs. Let's hop into it. So I was scrolling through Hacker News, which is one of my favorite sources for just interesting tech and startup content, and one of the most upvoted posts on Hacker Cracker News on the day that I was looking at it was an article called Notes on Puzzles. I was intrigued, so I clicked on the link and I started reading this piece by a guy named Nabil Qureshi, who worked at Palantir for 7 years, and he's now on a sabbatical traveling the world and writing. This article was about Nabil's lessons from a book called Think Like a Super GM, which is about what we can learn about decision-making and thinking based on a study that was done comparing the thought process of different skill-level chess players from amateurs all the way up to grand Masters, and my favorite lesson that Nabil shares is about something he calls the falsification ratio. The falsification ratio is the ratio of time you spend trying to falsify an idea that you came up with to the time it took you to come up with the idea in the first place. So just to use an example, let's say I spent an hour thinking about the future of Founders Journal, and I decided that I wanted to expand Founders Journal into a second. interview-style show with other founders and operators. That is the time spent thinking of the idea. And then let's say I spent a half hour thinking about all of the reasons that idea wouldn't work or why it isn't the right move. Maybe it's too crowded of a space with tons of interview podcasts, or maybe it would dilute my time and decrease the quality of not only the second show but my current show. Or maybe I'm better in a monologue format than an interview format. And all of that thought process That is my time spent falsifying the idea. So the falsification ratio for me would be the amount of time I took to falsify my idea, which was 30 minutes, to the amount of time I took to come up with the idea in the first place, which was 1 hour. So my falsification ratio there would be 0.5. In Think Like a Super GM, the authors found that the falsification ratio for grandmaster chess players is 4 to 1, meaning they spend 4 minutes falsifying an idea for every minute they spend coming up with the idea, whereas an amateur chess player's falsification ratio was on average 0.5. And I find that to be such a profound lesson, not just for chess, but for any intellectually rigorous activity like building a company. Said differently, I think it's a fair assumption to make that the best entrepreneurs have a high falsification ratio like grandmaster chess players. They have an ability not to just generate amazing ideas for how to continue to serve their customers, and build their businesses, but they also have the ability to think clearly and at length about why those ideas are bad, wrong, or suboptimal. While rationally, I'm sure this concept of being able to debate both sides of an idea or argument is a no-brainer to you, in practice it is wildly difficult. And I want to explain why it's wildly difficult, what those reasons are, and how you can break out of that. But before I get into the reasons why it's wildly difficult and how you can break out of those things, Let's take a quick break. Now that we know what the falsification ratio is, it might seem pretty straightforward to turn on this way of thinking. But in reality, it's really difficult to pull off. And here are the reasons. Reason one is that humans have emotions. We're not robots. And within business, entrepreneurs are like artists when it comes to our ideas. We are romantics about them and we feel an emotional attachment to being right about our ideas. But that's what separates good from great founders. The great ones have a level of maturity and intellectual honesty that separates their feelings from their actions. They are okay being short-term wrong about their ideas so they're not long-term wrong about their businesses. To falsify your ideas well is to separate yourself from your emotions, even when it's painful. Reason 2 is that falsifying ideas takes a lot of work. We are naturally complacent as human beings. It is likely a survival mechanism, but our brains don't want to work as hard as possible for as long as possible and use up a ton of energy. This is why I'm convinced that when I started writing the script for this very podcast episode, the urge to pick up my phone and scroll through Twitter was painfully enticing. That's a far easier, far more complacent activity than thinking about how I'm going to write something that gets you to listen and benefit moving forward. Another reason I think great entrepreneurs are so great is they have a will to think deeply. They put in the time and effort to push beyond how most of us react to puzzles and challenges by saying it's good enough. They don't stop at good enough. They stop when they reach intellectual perfection. So now the real question is, how do you apply this to your work? How do you have a falsification ratio that looks more like that of a grandmaster and less like your 8-year-old cousin playing chess? First, I think it's about having an awareness around the tendencies of our lizard brains. We are complex. We have emotions. Emotions are unavoidable, and if left unchecked, they can impact our decision-making. We also don't like putting effort into thinking. It's uncomfortable, and when tempted, we'll do anything else to avoid the discomfort. Second, as a founder, you have to remember why you're doing what you're doing. Your job has always been to fall in love with the problem you're trying to solve, rather than the exact solution. If you knew that your attachment to a specific solution would prevent you from ever solving the problem, would you stay attached? I hope the answer is no. Third, force yourself to ask a set of questions any time you have a new idea or a big decision that you're thinking about pushing forward with. Ask yourself, if you had to make an argument for why this idea is bad or why this decision is wrong, what would the argument be? And then ask yourself if that argument proves to be correct, that your idea is in fact bad or your decision is in fact wrong. What are the consequences that you'd have to deal with? Write those thoughts down and then leave them for 24 hours. This is called the Seinfeld effect. There is an old story about how Jerry Seinfeld would write his jokes and then he wouldn't revisit them for 24 hours to see how they actually sat with him after he slept on them. So for you, come back to your answers once your emotions have subsided and force yourself to make a decision now. that you have debated for and against your idea or decision. I'm gonna link to Nabil's full post in the show notes, but I really hope you reflect on this idea of falsifying your ideas and how it can be a superpower for making clear-headed decisions as a founder. As always, thank you so much for listening to Founders Journal, and I'll catch you next episode. Thank you.