Intelligent people who create the future must choose that path for themselves. Chess isn't preventing people from making that choice. If chess didn't exist, most chess players would probably just be playing some other game instead of STEM careers or whatever your definition of creating the future is. Also plenty of very strong chess players do ultimately wind up pursuing other career paths. And then there's also the fact that a good number of the top chess players have shown themselves to be highly dysfunctional people who are unfit for the professional world such as Bobby Fischer and Vladimir Kramnik.
The stereotype of the absent-minded professor is a great illustration of how norms view the world. What WE see as focus, norms see as .. not conforming?
Focus is crucial. To be great at chess you need to focus on it. To be great at creating the future you need to focus on it. By definition you can’t focus on both
If you aren’t sacrificing, you aren’t focusing. I’m not saying you need to sacrifice everything else. But definitely you need to choose very carefully.
ps. Creating the future is easy to define. Look at OpenAI, Starship, Optimus, mass scale photovoltaic manufacturing in China. Someone had to make those happen and it took focus
We literally had a chemistry Nobel Prize winner crediting chess for making him curious about thinking and intelligence and ultimately to find DeepMind.
