A Chess Puzzle I recently encountered a chess puzzle that revolved around capturing my opponents material due to a forced mate in one threat. While exploring various permutations of moves, I struggled to choose the right piece (between the bishop and the knight) to simultaneously block my opponent’s mate in one threat while allowing me to freely capture a few of his minor pieces. After a brief though I played Knight C3 -> D5, blocking my opponents mate threat on g2 and adding an additional attacker to the black knight on F6.

For some people, not red lining all the time is a skill in and of itself. Why wait until you have an injury or a mental health crisis to take a breath? Reflection I was brushing my teeth recently, paused, turned to my girlfriend and proclaimed that I wasted all four years of college on two degrees that were not challenging. I said that I should’ve majored in something “more difficult” like Engineering, Math or Computer Science because “I could have” and people wouldn’t “default to questioning my abilities”.

Stress I’ve been meaning to jot down my thoughts on this for a while, but I keep running into things that tweak my mental model about stress. Recently, I watched some old home videos. Twenty years ago, my parents moved us into the home we still live in today. Around this time, my dad filmed a video of my brother and I walking the quarter mile from our house to a canal that runs through metropolitan Phoenix.