As a lifelong chess player – a passion passed on to his son and Rockport Co-Founder Will Trepp – Rick Trepp has incorporated myriad lessons learned on the board into running successful businesses.
Chess teaches you to think spatially and temporally, defending your territory and considering options in multiple directions. Typically thinking many moves ahead as you work through all the alternative outcomes, chess also reconfigures your thinking beyond where you are right now to where you’re moving toward.
It’s a game of skill and a superb exercise for the mind, and a pastime between father and son on the Rockport terrace in New York City. As a board member of the National Scholastic Chess Foundation, Rick Trepp makes time to ensure that these important life skills are being passed on to future generations.
At the center of the Rockport story is our legendary leader, Rick Trepp, of Trepp® fame. Rick has over 40 years of experience as a pioneer in the CRE industry - founding and managing five successful companies built from the ground up. We carry this rich history and deep industry knowledge through everything we do.
To find out more about Rockport and the Trepp legacy behind it, visit www.therockportgroup.com
It is tremendous in terms of thinking. Everybody thinks of chest as having the most material. That's just a small piece of it. Its material is very much temporal time moving over time and where you're going not where you are today, but what you're moving towards. It is spatial. Spatial in terms of control of territory and spatial in terms of the ability to work into multiple directions. What people don't realize, it's also extremely psychological. People will say, oh, they're chess players, and they think strategic all the time, which we do.
One of the things that chess does is it teaches you to work through all the alternatives and think deep into it. In a chess game, if you're looking at openings, you pretty much know the first twenty moves. And so, you very much are analyzing what you want to do. I sit on the board of the National Scholastic Chess Foundation. We've got three or four thousand kids in our program. Will has put together a platform at the local elementary school. About fifteen percent of the school participates in the National Scholastic Chess Foundation Program.
Chess is a game that's not of luck, it's of skill. Even just the ability to play across the board, think across the board, it is a tremendous exercise for the mind. And in fact, if talk to Will, he'll tell you that the majority of his success comes from his learning in chess.