Sun Tzu Would Be a SportsCenter Addict
Sports is an act of humans entering into a chess match to play with their bodies.
I never understood this! Thanks to a brilliant athlete I recently chatted with, I have come to understand and respect the art and strategy of sports.
Am I writing a blog about discovering the wheel right now?
To the nerds out there, like me, I have to tell you something: sports are fascinating. Instead of seeing it – like yesterday me – as big animals playing with toys, my friends, oh no.
Watching sports is watching a Mortal Kombat style of chess. There is a strategy behind every player and each move. New plays are invented or outskilled at any moment.
For example – boxing. If a boxer’s back leg is placed a certain way, her opponent knows immediately how to initiate a sequence of moves to get that boxer onto the ground. There are hundreds and even thousands of these sequences in each athlete’s mind bank. Seeing that she has initiated the knockout sequence, the other boxer then initiates a counter-attack sequence.
This is the dance. It flows. Like art. Like chess.
Once you see the interior of sports it becomes quite fascinating. It is a diligently trained life of physical chess where each piece is consciously outmaneuvering another – physically and mentally.
I don’t believe athletes receive enough credit for the thousands of chess moves they memorize. Any coder who ever learned </> BASIC <\> probably retains a fraction of such sequences in comparison to a college athlete. And, they can’t consult with Google on the field if they forget.
It is incredible to think about the physicality when combined with the cognitive aspects involved in actually playing a sport.
I am certain that if Sun Tzu were still around, he would be quite the fan.
*The greatest discoveries come from an open mindset. Consider something you’ve never bothered with before; you might even find a new passion.
About.
Jessica Higgins is an agent of change for public, private and non-profit organizations around the world. Her focus is on facilitating the development of an enterprise’s authentic voice as a means of conveying their core values to stakeholders through their internal and external words and actions.
Beyond her advisory work, Ms. Higgins is a best-selling author as her first book: 10 Skills For Business Communication, reached #1 in Amazon.com New Releases for Communication and Social Skills books. Her work has also been published in over ten thousand media outlets including Forbes, Entrepreneur, Thrive Global, Huffington Post, CBS, and Newsweek.
In addition to serving as a Partner of R+I, Ms. Higgins is the President of Curated Financial, an investment fund manager she founded in order to streamline the cultivation of bespoke investment opportunities for private clients after finding a general lack of cohesion in the investment selection process of alternative investment options. Curated Financial advises a venture capital fund and a fund of funds focused on the selection of emerging managers.
Ms. Higgins holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Behavioral Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin and a Juris Doctorate / Master of Business Administration from the University of Miami. In addition, Ms. Higgins is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Certification holder with specialty in Systems Design and holds an executive education certificate in Behavior Design from the Design Lab at Stanford University.
Learn more about her work in finance at curatedfinancial.com, her venture accelerator is researchinnovation.co and her marketing agency is digital-unicorns.com.
She currently resides in Miami Beach, FL full-time.
