"Avoid the crowd, Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece." - Ralph Charell

This quote is talking about how you should be free to live your own life, and don't let anyone live it for you. If you let someone live your life for you, you will have learned nothing and wasted your life. His analogy to chess is simple. The chess player is the one who decides how the game goes by thinking about what piece he wanted to move, where he should go to put the other person in checkmate. The chess piece is not a person. It's just a thing, a tool for playing a game. The chess piece has nothing to live for, because they don't live their own life. Sometimes people just become chess pieces because they want to float through life without having to make any of the hard decisions. They let someone else make them for them, but that can backfire. Because in chess, a pawn must be sacrificed in order for the queen to put the king in checkmate. And if your a chess piece, you never know what position you're in until something happens to you.