How does chess help your career?

Mikhail Bonvinnik is both a successful chess player and an engineer. I believe he is also a mechanical engineer like me.

I wonder if chess success also relates to career success. I dont think I am really succesful in chess and maybe that's why I am not that successful also as Botvinnik with my engineering career.

As a mechanical engineer by trade, my work experience and expertise leaned towards Project Management. I have extensive experience as a Project Engineer whose task is to manage and supervise CAPEX projects which involves designs, installations, constructions and commissioning of facilities and equipment. My work involves a lot of planning where my chess thinking helps me to formulate plans and make decisive actions. Though I think I am doing my job well, I still dont think that I am that successful because I still dont have my own company yet.

In an article I read that there is an IT Billionaire who is also a strong correspendence chess player (elo around 2600?) and I wonder if some of you out there is the same.

Is there a proof that chess strength also relates to specific intelligence necessary to be successful in any career?

What are your thoughts on the matter?

Chess has helped me because I'm sure without it I would have punched a customer in the face by now.

In my opinion, chess can help out a lot in life if people are truthful about it. I personally have learned to be brutally objective when assessing my own performance, and I have also learned to be more flexible while thinking. When studying tactics puzzles, you often play moves which at first glance may seem crazy, but in fact are rooted in logic. It is the same with life, you must be flexible enough to consider many ideas and possibilities if you truly want to excel. Before I played chess, I would tend to be egotistical and rule out ideas that differed from my own.

Success in chess is related to one's thinking power - naturally it might help in whatever profession we pursue which involves a lot of thinking - not other professions which depend on other skills like physical prowess, artistic talent, management skills or language fluency.

Im currently getting a degree in pure mathematics, and I'm pretty sure chess has helped me. The problems that seem impossible, but once you start thinking through all the possibilities you finally see the solution, much like chess. So yes, i think being a strong chess player can help your career. I don't see how it could hinder you.

Your views guys is really a contributing factor for an intellectual ideas that will help me in the future.  keep up!

I know brilliant chess players who drive taxi cabs and sleep on park benches too.

Maybe only the skills which allow you play chess allow you to be successfull in your work as well. This is only one factor and it cannot be enough IMHO however I think playing chess (as well as doing anything else/similar) can improve some of skills and abilities which can be essential in your job.

What an excellent question. This will definately require some thought. Everytime my mind attempts to process the question it becomes clouded primarily by its inability to seperate chess from who I am. I am unsure that it can be used as a tool or a measure of success, it has always been an expression of logic in a competitive environment.

I am a very natural chess player, I dont study it or obsess over it, I take chances in games that I would simply never take in business. Perhaps if I applied my business mind to a chess game I would achieve greater success but then again it wouldnt be half as much fun. What kind of chess game would you play if you knew that the result may mean your staff not getting paid for the month?

Anyway, dont want to bore you with my ramblings. Thanks for the great question.

In both career and chess, there is failure and more importantly, success. There is always a long and challenging path where success is concerned. The mastery of the skills acquired from playing chess can help us to be successful in our careers, (and in life)if applied. Some of the skills,I have found that, chess can help sharpen are foresight, goal planning, risk assessment, good judgement, instinct, opportunity cost management, time management and endurance. This is a very good topic for disscussion and I could go on for hours, but I have to go work on my career now;P

Uhm, I think it might help you to acquire the ability to think long over a problem without getting desperate (maybe temperance is the word to describe this). I'm not sure it will help you in thinking truly novel solutions to problems or thinking creatively...maybe it could even be detrimental.

By the way, citing some successfull people who also are good at chess won't prove much of a point...it's probably that their personal abilities make them good at both, and not because there is a causal link between chess and being successfull at whatever.

I find chess helps me in my ability to focus on a specific issue and to look for a course to follow.  How that relates to my career I am not really sure but I keep a board with an active game at my desk and think that removing myself from the issues I face at work and taking time to limit my focus to the spaces on the board is so very helpful.  Life/work has so many distractions, A place you have some control over can help you survive.  And sometimes survival is how you succeed.

Let me give concrete, recent examples of how chess has helped me.

Benefit at Work:I fix computers, Point-Of-Sales equipments, printers, scanners, etc. Recently I was sent on a call on its last day of SLA (service level agreement - if call could not be completed that day, our company has to pay money as compensation). As usual, the wrong part was ordered. Register was turning on, but there was no display, monitor was OK. 99% people jump to the conclusion it is a bad mainboard. I took the error code, and called tech support what it signified for that register/pc. They said bad memory. But memory was not shippable the same day. Now in chess I examine every possible check and capture - every possible move. So I thought, it may be a bad memory, or a bad socket, or simply the RAM(memory chip) was not connecting properly. I cleaned contacts and reseated, nope. Then I reseated in another socket, and viola! It worked. So I saved precious time by pin-pointing the problem.

That is what chess has done for me - giving the habit to examine every possibility in work, even personal life.

Benefit in personal life. My two friends were arguing. My chess-trained analytical mind immediately detected they were at cross-purposes. I told A, "You were meaning this... but was saying this... and B was understanding this..." Both immediately agreed! 

Benefit mentally.  I am never lonely!

Though I am a beginner I find that chess forces me to think at least 3 moves ahead. This will make you less reactive and more proactive in your career/life. So instead of being shocked by a layoff down the road I hope to have plans in place/moves already thought out which will allow me to land on my feet or move forward if that ever happened.  Some people also think you can do whatever ever you want but the player you face in life is the world around you. The world changes but maybe a chess player will account for that and flexible in his/her life strategies. Say the US economy collapses further into a worse depression than the 1930s? I might hop on my Bishop and slash across the world to a better economy while non-chess players think they are out of moves. There are often options.

Also, chess definitely helps my tennis game and gives my brain a workout. :-) I also study music theory and I find both make my brain sharper.

if you spend all your day long in chess.com playing blitz instead of doing your actual job it wont boost your career. quite the opposite

It takes time away from my actual profession.

As we all know,

Time = Money

and

Money = Evil

therefore

Chess makes me less evil in my profession.

THIS

i'll say that it "can" help you, but umm... don't play chess thinking of that, because it just doesn't work that way.
i find that the underlying question in a lot of these discussions is "if i get better at chess, will it make me better at life" and the answer, in general, is just no.

the parallels with "planning" and such might or might not be useful, but in any case... once you get above a certain level, there's pretty much nothing new that you can learn, take and apply in "real life".

I am not employed but when I was it did not help at all. 

[COMMENT DELETED]

He: I am a GM. 

She: Oh, really, what do you do for a living, then?