Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.

Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.

In mid-2020 quarantine boredom and monotony had begun to wear on me, when something wildly captivating grabbed my attention and refused to let go. I was scrolling through youtube during a study break following morning classes and stumbled upon a video by GothamChess. Looking for a change of pace from my usual comedy or video game content, I gave it a try. Little did I know, as a result of this video, chess would become one of my favorite pastimes and a large part of my life. After watching this video about the English opening, I headed to chess.com to try out a few games. As it was one of my first chess experiences, I lost most of these games, but I was fascinated and decided to pursue chess further during this time when I was mostly inside. I started playing several dozen games a day, studying opening ideas, tactics, and honing my calculation skills to become a solid chess player. I see myself as someone who has an artistic nature and an analytical mind, and as a result, chess’s combination of artistic style and concrete concepts resonated with me. It was not only a view into a new creative world, but a way of recognizing skills that translated to other parts of my life. As I have studied chess, the game has taught me many things, but most importantly it has given me the ability to think two steps ahead. Choosing which opening you will play is critical to how your game ends. Whether it's attacking and flexible like the Sicilian or the Catalan, or a more solid choice like the Berlin which likely leads to a draw, one seemingly trivial decision in the game’s beginning has long-lasting effects 20 moves into the future. After entering the middlegame, much of this remains the same. Rather than playing a move which may seem most attractive at a certain moment, it’s important to consider how each move will align with your game plan down the line. In interviews after matches grandmasters often talk about a moment where they calculated 30 or 40 moves ahead to determine whether their position was winning, or whether they should attempt to force a draw. This ability is developed to some extent in all chess players; although I don’t have the calculating ability of Magnus Carlsen or Garry Kasparov, I too have been able to gain the skill of thinking far into the future as a result of chess. While I may have anticipated that chess could help me academically with critical thinking, my newfound skill of thinking far ahead had one extremely unexpected outcome related to another pursuit. As a baseball player, I initially thought that chess and baseball couldn’t be more different; one is largely mental, the other is physical and heavily reliant on athletic capability. However, I have discovered a major overlap between the two when it comes to pitch-calling in baseball. As a catcher, it is my responsibility to signal the pitcher what pitch to throw in each situation throughout the game. Similarly to how one must analyze several moves into the future with chess, when calling pitches a catcher must think far ahead. For example, against a power hitter, I will frequently call several high fastballs, eventually followed by a curveball in the dirt. This changes the batter’s eye level, and they will generally miss the curveball after acclimating to the trajectory of the previous pitches. When hitting, I can use the same process, reverse engineering the same ideas in order to better predict what pitches will be thrown to me in specific situations. This unexpected connection has led me to appreciate the fact that skills gained in one area can be used in another even if they may not appear to be related. It is my hope that I will continue to discover these types of links between my pursuits.