I was so happy to learn about the Netflix's show The Queen's Gambit. I started playing chess a bit more regularly in 2017, when I was stuck in traffic on my daily 45-minute commute in Beijing. 

I wasn't really good at chess, perhaps I was switching too much between my WeChat and got distracted in my online chess game—that is to say that I much better like to play chess offline. The only problem was that noone was interested in playing chess with me until The Queen's Gambit.

It's crazy what power Netflix has over us to influence our interest. For the longest time chess has not seen such a soar in interest: Since then global online search of 'chess' has at least doubled; the world's largest chess community Chess.com has reported an all-time record in new member sign-ups of 100k+ new chess players every day (I would recommend lichess.org if you wanted to start though... 

Also lucky for me, Ebay saw a 250% increase in searches for the term "chess sets" and actual chess set sales rose 87% and chess books sales rose by 603% in the US alone.

Finally, it wasn't hard anymore to find people who would play chess with me  Thank you Netflix!

On a more serious note: 

I notice that chess helps me to sharpen my strategic thinking. Somehow, when I play chess and think about my next move, I'm using the same brain when I think about strategic decisions or absorb new information. It has especially helped me to navigate business politics and be better prepared for surprises by thinking through options and second and third degree consequences.

For example, in my first 1on1s some key personnel revealed that they were going to quit the company, some that would take leave and so forth and with every new piece of information, the chessboard (or situation) changed and I would respond by positioning my pieces the best way possible (in this case I promoted an employee and merged some workstreams).

Chess teaches me the ability to take a step back and take in the whole situation of all battles fought simultaneously on the board and decide which battles are okay to lose and which ones are key to win.

Side note: I also started replaying the chess games of Grandmasters (Magnus Carlsen is the current world champion and this YouTuber does a fantastic job explaining moves). I realize that once you get to Grandmaster level, it has less and less to do with strategic thinking and crunching scenarios with your own brain and more with "pattern recognition" and playing "learned strategies". At least, I say this as a humble beginner, who may not be capable of wrapping her head around the brilliance of Grandmasters