The Essence of Chess

I recently had an epiphany about the nature of chess at its most fundamental level. This may seem trivial to those who have already thought about it, but I came to the following conclusion:

Chess is all about mistakes. Once you achieve a winning position, conversion is its own area of study, but in essence it's fairly easy to understand: one side is trying to convert their winning advantage into an eventual checkmate (technically, any winning poistion is forced mate, even if the opponent can prolong it for forty moves). However, the struggle to obtain such an advantage is not so simple. How should each side act? What should they do? How should they play? Many ideas about tactics and strategy have been developed, but they're all underpinned by one key thing: mistakes.

A winning advantage can only be obtained if one side makes a severe enough mistake. Thus, the essence of chess is very, very simple: don't make mistakes, and capitalize on your opponent's mistakes. This much is obvious. Improving one's ablility to do both these things is the aim of studying tactics.

But the fundamental aim of strategy, of positional play, involves playing moves that maximize your opponent's chances of blundering while minimizing your own. If they understand chess, both players will attempt to do this, and if one of them does blunder, it's a matter of conversion. In many cases, you must capitalize on a blunder using a tactic; this fact justifies the idea that tactics flow from a superior position, a superior position being one that provides the opponent with very few equality-maintaining moves, but the superior player many.

Does this make sense? Would you say that it is correct? I'd like to hear people's thoughts on this.

I mean, you could play that way only, but I would add that it is much more successful to force capture your opponent's pieces and box him in.