WonderTour

Hello and welcome back to Wonder Tour episode 130.

We are wrapping up our discussion of the Queen's Gambit, the Netflix mini series, and also
wrapping up our series on trusting the process.

In our first episode on the Queen's Gambit, we talked about our main character Beth, about
how her single-minded focus on becoming extraordinary at chess both allowed her to make

her geographic world much bigger and to experience a great deal of success in the world.

But the flip side of that was she managed to make her personal world quite small indeed
and kind of keep everybody at arm's length and had not successfully figured out how to

navigate balancing those attributes in her life.

So in this episode, we're going to talk a little bit more about that challenge and about
what examples she might be able to find in her world of how to navigate that.

But just see where we start with her in the middle of this series.

She is young, she's beautiful, she's relatively wealthy, she's got her own house, she's
successful in the world, she's out there playing chess tournaments.

She's winning a lot, but she doesn't win all the time.

In particular, there's the one mountain she can't climb, the lead Russian, world number
one, Mr.

Borgov.

And he beats her a couple times in a row, and it just destroys her.

She just falls apart afterwards because her whole...

worldview is organized around being the best at chess and she doesn't really have a
mechanism to do anything else.

And so not winning is pretty hard for her to take.

So Drew, that's my question for you this episode.

So Drew, that's my question for you this episode.

How do you learn to love losing?

So much fun, truly, because I think this is a lesson that literally each one of us has to
learn.

And if you're thinking about it now and you're feeling like you haven't learned it yet,
then maybe this episode is for you.

Because I think I had in my life definitely times where I just wouldn't even, I didn't
want to engage.

I didn't want to play games because I knew I wasn't good at them.

I didn't want to do a thing because I just felt like if I did, then I was just going to
see how bad I was at it.

And other people might see how bad I was at it.

And I needed to keep up this pristine image with everybody that, you know, I'm just so
skilled and so good at things.

And I think there's different reasons that Beth has this.

There's different reasons that you, the listener might have this, but we all struggle with
this.

We all want to win.

And so I want to bring in this quote from Bruce Lee here.

Like everyone else, you want to learn the way to win, but never to accept the way to lose.

To accept defeat, to learn to die, is to be liberated from it.

So when tomorrow comes, you must free your ambitious mind and learn the art of dying.

And that's heavy.

That's definitely a heavy quote right there.

And it's paraphrasing Seneca and it's got some other paraphrases, I'm sure, philosophers
of ancient times.

Yes, no, I'm on board with the free or ambitious mind park, but talk to me about learning
the art of dying, Drew.

I don't think I'm there yet.

What are you thinking?

So what does this say to you?

this is so wonderful because it's all about being able to accept first and foremost,
losing for what it is, which is an opportunity to learn.

That's the first thing I think.

And I think that's the primary lesson that we see Beth learn here.

She learns that losing isn't just about losing.

It's about growing and that you can grow more when you lose to Borgav, for example.

than you can when you win.

And it's easier if you embrace losing than it is if you fight back against it and send
yourself into a death spiral where you're drinking yourself into missing your press

appointments and stuff like that.

So there's, one element there to it, but I want to bring in a quick story and I'm not
going to tell the full story, but you could probably Google it and find it.

This is a story of Tyler Staten that he gave on a recent sermon that he gave, but great
story where he

Every quarter he does this contemplative practice of going off and going into silence and
solitude and learning and journaling and reading and doing all this kind of weekend

exercise.

When he came back, he felt like, you know what?

Like, I think there's a blessing on the horizon.

think something good is going to happen.

think there's going to be happiness and joy.

That's kind of unexpectedly dropped on me.

And what he was very quickly met with was a text message.

from somebody that he loved dearly, great friend, that said, hey, we need to talk about
something.

Let's meet up on Friday.

And what he could immediately tell was that, hmm, this doesn't sound like this is, yeah,
this doesn't feel like a blessing.

This feels like there's about to be a gap identified in my life that I didn't previously
know about potentially that I'm gonna be asked to improve.

And sure enough, when Friday rolls around,

He gets to the meeting and anybody's going to be apprehensive going into a meeting like
that.

But it's with somebody that you love and you've known for a while.

you, you go into it.

And of course, yes, this, is a thing that has been identified an opportunity for Tyler to
improve and it's painful, right?

Anytime somebody identifies an opportunity where

we're not living our life in accordance with the mission, the vision that we have.

And as a result, you know, I don't know what the specific example that he had was, but as
a result, guess what we're probably doing?

We're probably damaging the people around us in a certain way.

And so you can look at that and you can see that moment and you can say, well, where's the
blessing?

Or you can look at that like Tyler did and say, this losing, that's the blessing.

That was what I was looking forward to was recognizing that each gap that somebody
identifies, it's an opportunity.

And instead of running away from it, instead of drowning myself, when somebody comes in
and criticizes me, instead to relish it and say, thank you, thank you, this is an

opportunity to grow.

You've just shown me, you've made me aware of the difference between who I'd like to be
and who I currently am.

And that makes sense to me, right?

Cause I, my answer to the question of how do you learn to love losing is still, I don't
want to like, I'm not going to love losing, right?

But I can imagine loving learning more.

I can imagine accepting losing because I can look for like, this next time, next time I'm
going to get it right on next time.

I'm going to be a lot wiser.

I'm going to be less clumsy.

I'm going to be more insightful or something.

I love those moments.

love the moment after the, my God, was incredibly unskillful.

I was incredibly clumsy.

was incredibly harsh, right?

I don't like those moments, but the moment afterwards of when you see it coming and you're
like, this would be better.

I could do this.

Those are great.

So maybe that's the, close as I'm going to get to loving losing is being excited about the
potential learnings on the other side of my unskillfulness.

I love that example, Brian.

mean, that's realistic and that's where most of us are at we're still attached to the
incentive on the other side, which is learning.

I don't know that we have time to go into it today, but I think there's a whole lot more
to this Bruce Lee quote.

If you just look at the second half, so when tomorrow comes, you must free your ambitious
mind and learn the art of dying because the art of dying is not about learning.

definitely not all about learning.

It's about submission.

It's about self-sacrifice and service and recognition that it's not about you.

Hmm, it's not about you.

I feel like I've heard that quote before on WonderTour All right, well, we're gonna get
back to the Queen's Gambit and Beth's journey to wisdom.

But first, let's do the intro.

Hi, I'm Brian Nutwell And we are on a journey to lead wisely, to become better leaders by
touring fantastic worlds and inspiring lore by going on this Wonder Tour.

We connect leadership concepts to story context because it sticks to our brains better.

You can find out more at wondertorpodcast.com or by searching on YouTube, Lead Wisely.

Also, if you visit wondertourpodcast.com, you can find our fabulous merch and you too
could be walking the streets in the Wonder Tour logo.

All right.

So back to our friend Beth.

So Beth is, as of the middle of this series, she is highly skilled at winning.

She's highly skilled at chess.

She is...

Maybe highly skilled at drinking and aside from that has very little to offer the world.

She figured out her fashion sense.

But she is very, very bad at losing.

And dealing with the aftermath of losing because as we talked about, she has isolated
herself so thoroughly.

I think this is really the punchline for me, right?

She's done such a thorough job of icing in yourself.

She made it all about her.

It was all about Beth.

Right?

She made it all about her, which meant that it wasn't about anybody else, which meant that
nobody else was around.

So when you fail, it's all about you.

There's nobody else to blame.

There's nobody else's fault that it can be.

There's nobody to tell you what you could have done better or that it's going to be okay
tomorrow.

Like it's just you.

And that, we've been there.

That is deeply lonely.

That's really hard to process.

Yeah, failing into loneliness is, that's really tough, That's where it's hard to resonate
with this idea that we should embrace losing, embrace death.

It's tough because you're like, well, there's nothing here, but the opportunity then is,
okay, well, what if there's others to share it with?

Because when you're relishing in your losses or becoming the type of person who can relish
in their losses, I think we're developing a new

angle on what we talk about here on Wonder Tour, which is the magnanimous leader.

the magnanimous leader loves losing because it's an opportunity, right?

We love winning, but we love losing equally because it's an opportunity to grow, but not
just to grow so that we can say that we're the best, But to grow so that we can serve

others in a more meaningful way so that we can close the gap between who we thought we
were.

and who we actually are and in doing so become less damaging to the people around us.

Because let's be honest, if we all look at it, there's times, in fact, as I've been
learning this lesson that the Queen's Gambit has been teaching me there's just absolute

pure joy in the moments.

You might cry, you might be broken when you realize there's a gap between who I am and who
I thought I was.

And as a result, I am not.

properly treating the people around me.

But once you have that awareness, that's the first step to being able to make a change and
that's the joy.

Yeah.

So let's, I'd like to look at some examples because we have characters in this series
around Beth who have clearly internalized this, right?

She starts learning to play chess from the janitor in the basement of her orphanage, Mr.

Shidle.

And he doesn't talk much.

He mostly just sets her chess problems and he's kind of gruff and, you know, he's kind of
setting up for success, she learns how to play.

And then like three weeks, she's just beating him consistently at chess, And

He's not, he's not all been out of shape about it.

He's not like throwing the chessboard away and kicking her out of the basement, never
talking to her again.

he has this genuine sense of joy is like, I've just found this nine year old girl who's
really good at this.

And this is kind of amazing to watch.

I'm going to tell my chess friends and I'm going to encourage her and give her some books
and some challenges and kind of coach her.

Like he leans into the fact that he's found somebody that can exceed him.

Right.

When she beats Harry Beltyk and the whatever Kentucky state championship the first time.

He's, you know, he's not happy about it, but he circles back to her.

He admires her.

he's actually really excited about this new person in his orbit.

That's like, that can share chess with him the way that he is as much as he loves chess
more than he loves chess.

Right.

But he, wants to share it with her.

She has the same thing like these other chess players, as she works her way up and starts
beating them.

A lot of them are like, wow, nobody's ever done that.

You really love this as much as I love this.

let's hang out.

Let's go play speed chess.

Let's talk about things.

Let's do things together.

Right.

She keeps encountering people that can share joy, even when they're losing.

and she doesn't learn that lesson at all.

She's, she's just checking them off one by one.

Okay.

I got past that or, okay, no, I don't have to worry about Harry anymore.

Okay.

I got past Benny.

can, I'm okay.

No, Borgov's the next one.

I got to get him.

Like she's just working her way up the chain, but she's never noticing that this lesson,
she's never noticing this opportunity.

but there's a limit to that.

if you are extraordinarily focused and extraordinarily talented, you can become among the
very best in the world at something.

You can become among the best in your environment.

But what we see here, I think in our mountaintop moment is that Beth starts to realize she
goes up against Borgov a couple of times and loses to him.

And she's starting to realize that she's not going to get past it, that her...

Her success is too brittle.

Her technique is not flexible enough.

Her approach to thinking about chess and more broadly to thinking about being a
professional is not robust enough to handle his level of maturity.

But it's not this.

That's the thing.

think up in we're starting to see like us as the audience is experiencing that.

we're realizing over the course of the middle and later episodes of the series.

Yeah, maybe she isn't going to be able to beat Borgov.

Maybe this does end in a tragedy because she's not doing the things that are required to
learn from the losses that she's taking.

she's static at that point.

It doesn't seem like she's going to until we get to season.

harder and harder and harder into the drinking, into the jet setting, into the
isolationism, into the me, me, me, me, me.

It's all about Beth, But then when you lose that confidence, when it's like, well, I'm not
sure all about Beth is enough to beat Borgov, like, I'm not sure that'll work, Then what

do you do because you got nothing else?

You got nobody to rely on.

You got your intuition and your...

brilliance and your medication is what's gotten you to this point.

At least that's what she thinks has gotten her to this point.

At least that's what she thinks has gotten her to this point.

And it's a limiting belief that she has about herself.

And this is just pause for a minute and humor us on just how great of a story is told
here, right?

And the way that the story is told through the scenes and the order in which they're
delivered and the symbolism and the connection between the scenes.

It's amazing, right?

Because if you're to summarize everything in the Queen's Gambit,

And it's a lot, it's complicated, but if you're to just summarize it all, basically the
whole story is about Beth's resolution to her trauma and by resolving her trauma, becoming

free from these constraints that she's had on herself.

it's only a little bit of pieces of it that we get to see up until the last episode.

And then the last episode, it's an outward expression of this limit break that Beth is
going through.

where she is finally has the recognition.

And this isn't our mountaintop moment, but there's multiple things that lead up to this,
right?

It's her going down into the janitor's closet at the old orphanage and realizing that
despite the fact that she never even paid back Mr.

Scheidel's $5 or $10 that she owed him, he continued to root her on despite that she never
came back to see him again.

He always believed in her.

He cared.

And I think she realizes in that moment what relationships are actually about.

And that it's not about going it alone.

and that's compounded by her seeing Jolene and seeing how Jolene has matured in her life
and developed and not just become all about herself, but become about making a change in

the world.

Right.

And she sees the similar thing happening even with these previous chess master love
interest things that she has going on.

Right.

We're like,

They're also willing to grow and adapt.

And it all builds us up to our mountaintop moment here where she has a choice of how she's
going to proceed forward.

Is she going to learn and grow or is she going to continue to make the same mistakes and
lose to Borgov

And she's so she works her way through this chess tournament in Moscow.

She's beating successively more impressive, Russian chess grandmasters.

She beats the grizzled white haired veteran chess grandmaster who again demonstrates to
her, shakes her hand and says, this was a real honor.

You're the best chess player I've ever seen.

Which, you know, coming from a Russian grandmaster in the sixties is a pretty strong
statement.

Like, you know, he's got joy in that moment.

He's not like, my God, this is.

I can't believe I lost to this girl.

He's like, wow, that was amazing.

I just got to watch genius in action, She sees these things.

She's still, they're not quite penetrating.

she's got the Jolene example.

She's got the Mr.

Shidel example.

She's got the, you know, the chess players example.

She's in the middle of this match with Borghoff and there are 40 moves in and they're both
going strong.

And she's like, I'm not sure this is going to work.

I've never beat him before.

You know, she's got a lot of anxiety about this.

They adjourned for the night.

And as she's wandering the halls of this, the hotel or wherever they're the facility where
they've got this, she sees the Russians, Borgov and three or four of his compatriots in a

side room and they're sharing some drinks and they're gathered over a chess table and
they're all talking strategy.

They're basically talking about how to beat her.

And she gets a little window into this room.

As an audience, we're watching that as like, is she going to try to steal their strategy?

Is she jealous?

Is she lonely?

Is she going to go and want to be friends?

You know, what's, she just kind of, closed the door and she walks away.

But she sees that.

And I think what happens is that she realizes that she's not just playing Borgov it
finally occurs to her that the thing that he has that she doesn't have is not special

brilliance.

He's clearly equally brilliant to anybody in the world at playing chess.

Like he's the world number one and he's in his forties or something, which is, which is
quite rare.

And they make a point of this.

But the thing that he has that she does not have is he has community.

He has friends that he trusts.

And when you get to that level, when you get to that, I want to be the best in the world
at something.

The best one brain in the world is never going to be better than the best other five
brains in the world.

Right?

The people that you trust that will help you even when it doesn't benefit them.

even when it's just because they want you to succeed, She's trying to climb that mountain
all by herself.

And the thing that he has learned, the thing that this Borov character has learned is to
not do it by himself, Is to take the weight on as the champion, as the world number one,

as the person sitting across the chessboard, but to be willing to accept relationships
with other people and help them and be part of the community and be helped in real.

Hmm.

Yeah, she, as I'm realizing it right now, she's learning what Ricky Bobby learns.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

It's always, it's always the lesson the hero has to learn.

It's not about you.

She's learning that if, if this whole thing is for you to summit the mountain by yourself
and plan a flag and show the world that you're the greatest, maybe you can do that.

Maybe you can't, but

When you do it, what will you become?

And we see this contrast in between how she acts before this moment and how she acts after
where now after we get, assumedly Harry is getting these people together in the United

States and they're going to provide her advice based on the information that they've
gotten about the adjournment, about the current position of the game from the first day,

going into the second day.

And previously, right, Beth just.

She always stiff arms these guys.

They're always trying to help her and she's like, no, no, no.

Yeah, maybe I'll play against you, but I'm going to learn what I want to learn, not what
you want to teach me.

I'm better than you.

then, yeah, she's very resistant to support.

And yeah, and so they're on this incredibly expensive international telephone call with
six people in New York.

And they're all scheming different ways to approach the current position on the board and
what the strategies are and what Borgo is probably going to do and what the other Russians

are going to tell them to do.

And she gets this vast menu of options that she doesn't have to come up with herself.

And at the same time, her former

sort of love interest towns comes back into town.

comes into Moscow to cover the tournament for his hometown paper and he's become a
journalist now.

And so she sort of lets him into her orbit.

She's getting increasingly these adoring crowds outside the competition every day in
Moscow.

There's like three people the first day and by the last day when they adjourn with her
journey to the program, it's just like a mob scene and people are following her moves

outside and they're asking for signatures and showing the babies

You know, she's getting this crowd around her.

And like you said, she's finally starting to let them in.

And so she lets her.

Yeah.

because she's finally after she processes her initial trauma of the scene that happens
with her mother at the beginning of the movie, the realization that it happened on

purpose, the car crash, and she has to go through and understand what that means for her
and how she's going to go forward.

Is she going to become like her mother, like Alma, or is she going to overcome that?

So she gets off the alcohol and the drugs.

She's able to see clearly for a moment.

Like you said, she lets towns in.

because Townes comes in and Townes is, he's meant to be this kind of like amazing
character, right?

But he is because he comes in and he doesn't play to all the tropes that she always falls
back into, He comes in in the same spot that Cleo comes in in Paris, but this time he's

just there to help.

He's like, I'm not trying to use you for anything.

I'm not trying to get anything out of you.

I'm not trying to use you to help me overcome my own trauma.

I'm just here to help you.

And I think she sees that and that opens the door.

And then finally it leads us up to the amazing moment that we have at the end where she's
able to have this realization that her ability to see that chessboard on the ceiling

didn't have anything to do with the drugs that she was taking in the first place.

That was a self-limiting belief that her ability was not better when she was on the drugs,
but that that was her innate ability to play chess.

the entire time and that she had been holding on to this belief that this was the only way
for her to harness it.

but she had to let go, right?

She had to be willing to lose and be willing to learn.

And finally,

as we close out this mountaintop moment, I think what's important is at the end, when she
finally overcomes Borgov, yes, there's this internal win.

Yes, it's a team win for everybody that helped Beth.

But what about how Borgov responds to it?

You see at first there's this sadness and he does a good job of, you know, in the Russian
way showing his facial expression here, but then afterwards,

It gives way when he resigns to a smile and he hugs Beth.

this is the world number one, the guy who hates to lose.

But he's learned that losing it's OK sometimes he has to grow, he has to learn, and really
it's not all about him.

Somehow he learned that lesson and we were privy to it because of the mountaintop moment
where he's in this room.

He's helping the other guys.

He's listening to them.

He doesn't see this as him winning when he wins.

He sees it as us winning when Borgov wins.

And she's had that example in front of her for years now and not taken the right lessons
from it, But he shows the same joy in that moment of like, wow, that was an amazing match.

And I saw something I never seen before and I'm really proud to have this new colleague.

And this was so cool.

He's able to process that and get some joy from it.

And I think as the audience, we've enjoyed watching her beat up on older dudes in chess
the entire series.

That's part of the joy of this series is just watching this thing happen.

But also to some extent, this almost feels like the first win that she really earned, This
is the payoff of she figured out what this is all for.

she's got all the Americans behind her.

She's got all the Russians behind her.

She's got the chess players behind her.

She's got Jolene behind her.

She's got all these people that were like on her side.

And she finally figured out that she wasn't just playing for herself.

She was playing for all those people.

in the way that Hollywood does, that unlocks her success.

She rises to the top of the mountain.

She's now the world number one.

She's defeated the best chess player in the world.

So then take us to our closing scene because I think this is really the most powerful,
this is just the perfect way to cap this thing.

Yeah, so much good closure in this final episode, but nothing is better than the closing
scene because I don't think that you could argue that Beth is a leader at all up into this

Yeah, so much good closure in this final episode, but nothing is better than the closing
scene because I don't think that you could argue that Beth is a leader at all up into this

point.

In all of the minutes of watch time, Beth doesn't do one thing that would lead you to
believe that she's a leader up until the last moment.

And so the final closing scene is when she's driving in the car away.

from the win that she gets against Borgov and she asks to get out and she's walking down
the street in the park and she walks off towards this group of older folks, these Russian

people, they're not wearing nice clothes, they're not highly regarded by society, they're
just lovers of chess.

She walks in and she's immediately celebrated.

And you can see that it's genuine joy in the community.

she has joy, they have joy.

Even though she just beat their Russian champion, Borgov, they celebrate her because she's
a great chess player.

And what does she do?

She walks over and finds an old man and sits down across the table from him.

And this is the first time where you really see Beth start to smile because she's free.

It's no longer all about I have to beat everybody.

have to prove myself to everybody.

She sees herself as a part of a group of people that are passionate about something.

In fact, she might even be capable of being a leader of that group of people that are
passionate about something, which means it's not about going back and taking the

interviews and being in the magazines.

It's about finding the people that are passionate about it.

and serving them and that's really what she does.

This is the first selfless act in the entire show for her.

Yes, she is finally part of a community.

Having benefited from a community, the entire series, she's finally engaged with being
part of the community and giving back to it, even if it's just by sitting down in the park

and sharing joy of chess.

Right?

So yeah, you're right.

this is the first thing that she does in the entire series that isn't all about her.

And somehow we've been rooting for her the whole time.

which is a really impressive, job of just crafting this whole narrative that we kind of
wanted her to succeed, even though she's kind of being a terrible human being.

But I think that goes back to what we talked about in the first episode, right?

The lessons of how people are going to regard you are two things, right?

You get credit for being good at something, even if it's not their thing, you get credit
for providing value in the world of being really great at something and committed to

something.

But you also, they will judge with you and relate with you based on how you interact with
them.

And it's not until this moment where she starts to even recognize the second one of those,
right?

Where she's like, okay.

I can let all that it's all about me stuff go long enough to just like enjoy something
with other people when I'm not going to get anything out of it.

Every other time she plays chess, every single other chess match that we watch her play in
this entire series is because she wants to win to get to the next level.

She wants to prove that she's good to successive levels of people.

Right?

And this is the first time that she's probably playing just for fun.

Even when she's having fun hanging out with Benny and all of his friends in New York and
whatever, and they're playing speed chess, she's winning money.

She's either winning or losing the entire time.

And it's for something, proving how great she is.

And this is the final, like, I have nothing to prove moment.

And so you're right.

She is not yet a leader in what we consider to be a magnanimous leader in the, in the
Wondertour sense, but she has opened the door to...

having those skills.

She's opened the door to people relating with her in a way that they might actually
follow.

Yeah.

And I think that example, comes from Mr.

Shaddell, it comes from Jolene, it comes from even in fractions, people like Harry, who
she sees and she's like, that's what it's actually about.

It was never about being just the best in the world.

It was about using that to do something, using that to help people.

I don't know where this goes, right?

Because this is a mini series.

We never get anything else.

But you imagine that this can be the beginning of Beth not just being a hero, but being a
leader as well.

being a key force, maybe the American chess players form this sort of collaborative
network as the Russians already have and build themselves up to be a world power rather

than individually trying to outshine each other.

Yeah.

maybe Beth just sits down and as the conquering hero of the world plays a game with the
orphan, with the person who has no business sitting and playing with Beth technically if

all she cares about is Elo.

But, but in that moment that's Beth developing the leadership superpower of compassion and
understanding that just to be with somebody where they're currently at.

serve them in a small way with no expectation of anything in return, that changes the
world.

Well, I think that's the right place to leave this one.

That was a lot of fun.

We got some cool stuff out of this series and I, definitely am motivated to go play some
more chess.

all right.

So that's all for this episode.

Thank you for joining us on our continuing journey to become better leaders, to lead
wisely.

In our next episode, we're going to start a new series related to trust the process.

We're going to start talking about game theory.

talk about taking maybe an analytical approach to the world and to the many possibilities
that it holds.

So we're going to dive into a deeply analytical and serious movie as our first one.

think Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning is our choice on deck.

maybe it won't be that serious.

Maybe it won't be that analytical.

But there will be explosions and Tom Cruise performing his own stunts.

We hope you join us for that one.

In the meantime, just remember as always, character is destiny and I'm going to add our
second tagline, but character can be cultivated.