In serious chess games, every move is written down. That way, every choice made by either player can be analyzed, by anyone, even centuries later.
The notation itself is very concise. Bh4. Nxd5. The Bishop moves here. The Knight captures the pawn there. A whole game can be reduced to a paragraph the size of a newspaper classified ad.
In chess books, analysts will sometimes annotate certain moves with praise or criticism. To indicate an exceptionally good move, they add an exclamation mark. Nxg6!
To a chess nerd, the “!” is very exciting. It means the move wasn’t just good, but that it gained more for its player than seemed available at that moment.
The exclamation mark signals a hint of genius — a moment in which a player sees through the position’s usual pitfalls and predictable struggles, and puts them behind him with the single push of a pawn. Boom! With a sudden punch out of nowhere, the game has changed.
On many occasions, I’ve witnessed people do things in real life that seemed clever and unexpected enough to deserve a “!” -– simple, right-to-the-bone power moves that cut through the struggles and stalemates one might have expected.
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I'm David, and Raptitude is a blog about getting better at being human -- things we can do to improve our lives today.
The ice cream example made me laugh. Even getting exactly what we wanted can turn straight into reaching for the next spoonful. Using just one inbreath as the starting point makes this feel much more approachable than setting out to “be still for twenty minutes”.