I can’t believe how I’ve gotten away with what I’ve gotten away with even though I’m so stupid.
I was having a weird argument yesterday with my ex-wife. I was trying to say, “I’m stupid” so she was disagreeing and accusing me of lying. So I kept insisting.
“I got bad grades all through high school, graduating in the bottom half of my class, and then I got thrown out of graduate school.”
“How’d you even get into college then?” Very skeptical.
Well, very simple, I had swindled my way into winning New Jersey’s junior chess championship.
How can you swindle that?1
There were two tournaments: Southern and Northern New Jersey. Then the winners of each tournament would meet and play each other for the championship.
I went out of my way to play in the SOUTHERN New Jersey tournament.
It may come as no surprise but Southern New Jersey is less intelligent than Northern New Jersey so my choice was very deliberate.
Northern New Jersey has all the people who were only recently kicked out of New York City (smarter) whereas Southern New Jersey occasionally threatens to secede from the United States (stupid).
So I played there and won. And then I played the winner from the North, who happened to be the winner the year before. All I can say is: I got lucky and I beat him. In one game, anything can happen.1
Then my college application went to the top of the pile. Then my graduate school application went to the top of the pile and then I got any job I wanted. It was that simple.
Read More: Don’t Try To Self-Publish Until You Read This…
I had mediocre grades throughout college. I was thrown out of graduate school, and in my second day at work I crashed the entire network and lost all of the CEO’s emails.
When I was applying to graduate school, I hacked into the emails of one of the professors who I asked to write me a recommendation. I thought he liked me.
I read all his emails, including love letters to both wife and mistress. In his “recommendation” for me he said, “DO NOT accept this student to your school.”
He turned out to be correct. But I was still upset.
I had already sent out all my applications and references, including his. I got rejected by every school except the one school that was working on a chess computer. That chess computer became my office mate.
So game playing got me into school. And then game-playing got me thrown out because I got obsessed with a game called, GO, and it’s all I did while I was at graduate school. Well, it was one of three things I did. But none of those things had anything to do with school.
Whenever I got frustrated with my life I would basically stop anything and just play games 18 hours a day. That’s how I’ve known at any point that I needed a big change. I needed big changes in 1990, 1994, 1997, 1999, 2002, 2006, 2008, and 2009.
So in the past 25 years I’ve mastered, at different points: chess, poker, backgammon, Go, hearts, Scrabble, checkers, othello, and probably a few others (I would say Monopoly but I’ve never played in a tournament so I can’t claim that I’ve “mastered” it whereas all of the other games I can point to some proof).
The most valuable skill when mastering any game is the ability to say “Look here!” when all the action is happening at some other “There!” (continue reading)