The Crooked Line

In chess, there are two players and six types of pieces. After each player's first turn, there are 400 possible positions. By the time each side has moved five times, there are over 69 trillion possible games. In fact, the total number of possible chess games exceeds the number of atoms in the observable universe.

All of that chaos on a fixed 8x8 board. Fixed pieces. Fixed rules. Perfect information—both players can see everything. And still: incomprehensible.

And yet...chess is the easy case. It has a board.

Creative work doesn't have a board.

No fixed squares. No agreed-upon rules. No turns. No win condition. You don't even know who you're playing against, or whether there's a game at all. At least the chess player knows what a bishop does. The writer, the founder, the person trying to build something—they're making up the pieces as they go.

Steven Pressfield writes, "The birth of anything—stars and galaxies as well as people and animals—takes place amid disorder, confusion, and chaos. That's our novel, our non-profit, our Korean vegan restaurant. You and I must teach ourselves to be comfortable working in darkness and in crooked lines."

Working in darkness. Crooked lines. Not as a failure of planning but as the actual shape of the work.