Why I Wrote This Book

A formation story—and an honest account of what it cost to write it

This book took longer than I planned.

Not because the ideas were difficult to find—they had been forming for four decades, through twenty books that arrived at exactly the moments life demanded them. But because writing honestly about strategy, judgment and endurance requires you to be honest about the moments when your own strategy failed, your judgment was wrong, and your endurance ran out before the problem did.

The Checkmate Strategy is not a book about what I did right. It is a book about what I learned to notice—and what I wish I had noticed earlier.

It began with a question I kept encountering in different forms across different seasons of professional life. Why do some people carry responsibility well over a long period of time—while others, equally capable and equally committed, quietly lose something essential along the way? Not dramatically. Not through failure or scandal. Simply through the slow accumulation of decisions made without a clear reference point, at a pace that never quite allowed for reflection.

I saw this pattern in clients I advised as a tax practitioner. I saw it in the profession I edited a magazine for. I saw it in the businesses I helped to build and finance. And I saw it in myself—more than once, and more clearly in retrospect than at the time.

The answer, I came to believe, is not talent or discipline or good fortune. It is balance—and the willingness to return to it. Four disciplines, held together, that allow the work to remain human under pressure: The Soul, The Mind, The Win, and The Battle.

Part I of the book traces how those disciplines were formed—through twenty books, each arriving when life demanded it, from chess and faith and fiction and economics and business.

Part II names the pattern they revealed.

Part III translates them into six practical programmes for situations leaders recognise from the inside—when pace outruns purpose, when judgment is under pressure, when strain becomes constant, and when success begins to cost more than it returns.

The book arrived from the printer on 14 July 2026 and I was honoured to surprise the team at Firestarter Business Solutions with the soft launch. Fifty copies went to guests at my 50th birthday party—a surprise, because no one knew I had been writing it.

This blog is where the thinking continues—one lesson per week, drawn from the 42 lessons in Part III, for those who want to go deeper than a single reading allows.

The first lesson arrives on 28 July.

If you want to receive it directly, subscribe below.

Chris Mattos, July 2026