One thing about the business and investing world that I connect to very intimately is that there is little room to deny the harsh realities of your mistakes. A bad call can lose you many millions.

One of the main focuses of my training sessions is to help individuals find their unique voices in the learning process. We all have our strengths, our weaknesses, our styles of learning, our personalities. Developing introspective sensitivity to these issues is critical to long-term success.

My coach and my parents both had this relationship to what I was doing, which was allowing me to express myself with chess. And so I could love it. I had a passion for it. I was expressing myself through chess, and I was learning about myself through chess.

Our minds are all different and I believe cultivating a keen introspective sensitivity is absolutely essential in discovering our potential.

The key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not to live in a shell of static, safe mediocrity. Usually, growth comes at the expense of previous comfort or safety.

The moment we believe that success is determined by an ingrained level of ability as opposed to resilience and hard work, we will be brittle in the face of adversity.

I believe an appreciation for simplicity, the everyday - the ability to dive deeply into the banal and discover life's hidden richness - is where success, let alone happiness, emerges.