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I am going to steal this little story from Raj Rattan.

I hope he doesn’t mind (I haven’t asked him) but he did deliver it in a lecture on Friday at the lecture day I was at and it really struck a chord with me.

I must have seen Raj lecture before because I think everybody has seen Raj lecture, but I didn’t remember quite how good he was, quite how accomplished and how relaxed and disarming he is as a lecturer.

His lecture title was ‘Perspectives on success’ and it was a personal essay about what success is to him but also what success can be to other people.

It culminated with the story of his chess club.

When he was at school he managed to convince his Headmaster that chess was a sport and could be substituted for rugby (“I didn’t want to play rugby because I didn’t want to get hurt”)

He therefore spent Wednesday afternoons with several other boys playing chess with one of the masters at school who was happy to host the chess club.

When he went to University this continued and they would continue to meet up on Wednesday afternoons for chess club, even after qualification for some years – what a wonderful thing!

The master, the teacher giving instructions in chess though was clearly a genius and the lesson he imparted was this:

Live life like you play chess - sometimes you move forwards, sometimes you move sideways and sometimes you have to move backwards but you can’t play unless you stay on the board.

You can’t always go forwards, life isn’t about always going forwards. You can’t even accept a sideways step, sometimes it’s two steps or worse backwards.

The truth is that it is the same for everybody, regardless of what they say, what it looks like or what they tell you.

Everybody in the audience got that and they ranged from undergraduates to retired dentists. Some of the older guys nodded knowingly and the younger guys sat wide eyed wondering what the backwards steps might look like.

It was a wonderful experience listening to Raj lecture on Friday. Wonderful to be in a group of 200 – 250 dentist who were keen to come together to listen to things not just about dentistry, to listen to life lessons from people who have seen things and done things beyond our own experiences in amongst a group of people keen to learn.

Blog Post Number: 1929