I hope that I succeeded in conveying the importance of maintaining the tension in the game I played against Gregory Kaidanov. The stakes were quite high given that it was a crucial round of the US Championship, and the position was painfully difficult to play - we were both burning to do something drastic, but we also knew that the correct way of handling the position was to let all the complications hang in the air. The question that naturally arises is how do different players feel when engaged in such positions? Do we all shudder from the pressure, or do some of us keep cooler than others? I think that the answer to this question may lie in one's basic philosophical approach to the chess experience. Have you ever asked yourself, after spending years at some job or hobby or pursuit: what am I in this for anyway? Do I play chess or the guitar or do I write or read to bolster my ego or to grow as a human being? Am I in this for glory or wisdom? Is it the process or the result that I value most?

	Developmental psychologists have done extensive research on this question and on the effect of a student's attitude on his or her ability to learn and ultimately master material. Dr. Carol Dweck, a leading researcher in the field of developmental psychology, and a woman who I have enjoyed studying with at Columbia University, makes the distinction between entity and learning theories of intelligence. Children who are "entity theorists" are prone to use language like "I am smart at this" and to attribute their success or failure to an ingrained and unalterable level of ability at a particular task or of intelligence altogether. "Learning theorists" are more prone to describe their results with sentences like "I got it because I worked very hard at it" or "I should have tried harder." While this research is very extensive, and I can't begin to explain it in a few paragraphs, suffice it to say that when challenged by difficult material, learning theorists are far more likely to rise to the level of the game, while entity theorists are more brittle and prone to quit.

	I have long preferred the question to the answer. In fact, I don't really believe in answers in the unequivocal sense in which they are usually referred to, because they always open the mind to larger enigmas. I see the journey as a passage from one question to the next, and hopefully we will continue to ask better and better ones. Maybe we can approach the truth, but I believe there is a dangerous degree of hubris in the very notion of certainty. In the words of the great ancient Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu, "The mind stops with recognition." When we attach some static value on our object or issue of focus, we immediately lose presence to ever-evolving nuances. In a chess game, the second we think we've got it wrapped up, the position changes character and our stiff state of mind can't adjust. Similarly, the art of chess holds infinitely more value to me as a medium for my growth as a human being than as a path to glory. The hollow external accolades pale in comparison to the deeply rewarding sense of internal nourishment that I experience after an intense day of study. Maybe these values were imbedded in me from a young age because of the strong unmaterialistic, and artistically vibrant influence of my family, or maybe I just learned from childhood competitions that external success is hollow because there is always someone - be it a rival or time itself - ready to tear you down from the lonely pinnacle of success. 

	In any case, I believe that performers are consistently undone by materialism. When I have begun to smell the win, and my imagination drifted to the feeling of victory and the post-tournament celebration, I have inevitably blown the position. Similarly, when students of mine have said during analysis of one of their games "Now I knew I was winning," they have inevitably made errors that let the opponent back into the struggle. Also, when players tell themselves "now I am busted" or "this position is completely lost" they shut their minds off to the rest of the struggle and miss countless chances to get back into the game. 

	Thinking about the result of the game takes us out of the moment - your consciousness is like a kite soaring with the wind that smashes headlong into a tree. Suddenly your creativity stops. Flow is gone. But the wind blows right along, only now it is without you. Imagine two timelines running parallel to one another - one is your awareness (the kite) and the other is the immediate situation on the chess board (the wind). When you start to drift towards materialistic thoughts your timeline stops and the chess position continues right along. The resulting layer of detachment is very dangerous and playing through it has the feeling of staring into thick fog. Interestingly, I have observed that the first things to go when this detachment sets in are the sense of danger and alertness to slightly unusual possibilities.

	But how can we fight the natural tendency to think about winning when we are competing and the obvious goal is to win? This is a difficult question, and one that should not be tackled glibly. First of all, I would recommend a relationship to chess which has more to do with the process than with results. This is not to say that we don't want to win - I am an incredibly competitive guy and when I play I play to win - but there can be a broader perspective that focuses on the larger growth process and the long term ramifications of every moment. For example, when I was 8-years-old I lost a huge game in the last round of my first national championships. Of course I was devastated in the moment, but in retrospect that was the best thing that ever could have happened to me because I worked the whole next year and won the next championship. I learned that you have to sweat to win, and I gained a respect for hard work. In contrast, I have seen many young players who had so much easy early success that they never associated work with victory, and when the going inevitably got rough they quit because they were not prepared to buckle down. 

	Whether you fool around with chess for a few weeks, delve into it for a few years, or spend a lifetime enjoying its ever-expanding mysteries, the art will teach you about yourself. If you open to the learning process the experience will be intensely rewarding on many levels. So don't worry if you lose a game, but learn from your errors; and don't become over-inflated when you win, but maintain the humility of a true learner. Chess is not about perfection. If it were, the game would lose much of its mystery and artistry, and would quickly be dominated by computers. Human beings can access and create the music of chess because the game is a channel for our creative spirits. But our creativity is blunted by thoughts that take us out of the struggle. 

	The first game on this topic is one in which I wrestled with the demons of result-oriented thought in a hilariously drawn out manner. I would be completely winning, take the result for granted and blow it, and then fight back only to give my opponent chances once again. In retrospect, this game of cold sweats has the feeling of a Peter Sellers "Pink Panther" movie, where Inspector Clouseau bumbles through the simplest of tasks. The next few examples will be taken from the games of a talented student of mine named Lee Gardner. Lee recently won the Pan Am games and is a wonderful young man coming into his own as both a human being and a chess player. One recurrent theme that we found in his games is that Lee has a tendency to judge a position with unwarranted finality and then miss future chances because he somehow closes off his mind to the possibility of their existence. It should be interesting to see how the same tendency can take hold in completely different types of positions. Let's take a look.