The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin is a captivating exploration of the principles and strategies that underlie high performance and mastery. Based on his own experiences as a world-class chess player and martial artist, Waitzkin offers a unique perspective on the process of learning and growth. He argues that mastery is not solely about talent or innate ability, but rather a product of hard work, dedication, and a strategic approach to learning.
Part I: The Foundation
Two approaches to learning
First, what is the difference that allows some to fit into that narrow window to the top? And second, what is the point? If ambition spells probable disappointment, why pursue excellence? In his opinion, the answer to both questions lies in a well-thought-out approach that inspires resilience, the ability to make connections between diverse pursuits, and day-to-day enjoyment of the process.
Dr Carol Dweck, a leading psychologist, makes the distinction between entity and incremental theories of intelligence.
- Children who are “entity theorists” — that is, kids who have been influenced by their parents and teachers to think in this manner — are prone to use language like “I am smart at this” and to attribute their success or failure to an ingrained and unalterable level of ability. They see their overall intelligence or skill level at a certain discipline to be a fixed entity, a thing that cannot evolve.
If a young basketball player is taught that winning is the only thing that winners do, then he will crumble when he misses his first big shot. - Incremental theorists, who have picked up a different modality of learning — let’s call them learning theorists — are more prone to describe their results with sentences like “I got it because I worked very hard at it” or “I should have tried harder.” A child with a learning theory of intelligence tends to sense that with hard work, difficult material can be grasped — step by step, incrementally, the novice can become the master.
Dweck’s research has shown that when challenged by difficult material, learning theorists are far more likely to rise to the level of the game, while entity theorists are more brittle and prone to quit. Children who associate success with hard work tend to have a “mastery-oriented response” to challenging situations, while children who see themselves as just plain “smart” or “dumb,” or “good” or “bad” at something, have a “learned helplessness orientation.”
Very smart kids with entity theories tend to be far more brittle when challenged than kids with learning theories who would be considered not quite as sharp. In fact, some of the brightest kids prove to be the most vulnerable to becoming helpless, because they feel the need to live up to and maintain a perfectionist image that is easily and inevitably shattered. Some of the most gifted players are the worst under pressure and have the hardest time rebounding from defeat.
Associate effort with success and feels that we can become good at anything with some hard work
The key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not to live in a shell of static, safe mediocrity. Usually, growth comes at the expense of previous comfort or safety.
In his experience, successful people shoot for the stars, put their hearts on the line in every battle, and ultimately discover that the lessons learned from the pursuit of excellence mean much more than the immediate trophies and glory. In the long run, painful losses may prove much more valuable than wins — those who are armed with a healthy attitude and are able to draw wisdom from every experience, “good” or “bad,” are the ones who make it down the road. They are also the ones who are happier along the way. Of course, the real challenge is to stay in range of this long-term perspective when you are under fire and hurting in the middle of the war. This, maybe our biggest hurdle, is at the core of the art of learning.
Loving the game
One of the most critical strengths of a superior competitor in any discipline is the ability to dictate the tone of the battle. Good competitors tend to rise to the level of the opposition.
It is okay to enjoy a win. When we have worked hard and succeeded at something, we should be allowed to smell the roses.
Disappointment is a part of the road to greatness. Every loss is an opportunity for growth. Growth comes at the point of resistance. We learn by pushing ourselves and finding what really lies at the outer reaches of our abilities. As the author matured as a chess player, there were constant leaps into the unknown.
The Soft Zone
“Lose Yourself”
Envision the Soft Zone as the performance state.
You are concentrating on the task at hand. Then something happens and you are being disturbed. The nature of your state of concentration will determine your first phase of reaction; you can be in the Hard Zone that demands a cooperative world for you to function. Like a dry twig, you are brittle, ready to snap under pressure. The alternative is for you to be quietly, intensely focused, apparently relaxed with a serene look on your face, but inside all the mental juices are churning, You couldn’t count on the world being silent, so your only option was to become at peace with the noise.
Mental resilience is arguably the most critical trait of a world-class performer, and it should be nurtured continuously. Left to the author’s own devices, he is always looking for ways to become more and more psychologically impregnable. When uncomfortable, his instinct is not to avoid the discomfort but to become at peace with it. When injured, which happens frequently in the life of a martial artist, he tries to avoid painkillers and to change the sensation of pain into a feeling that is not necessarily negative. His instinct is always to seek out challenges as opposed to avoiding them.
The downward spiral
One important lesson is the ability to regain presence and clarity of mind after making a serious error. This is a hard lesson for all competitors and performers. The first mistake rarely proves disastrous but the downward spiral of the second, third and fourth errors creates a devastating chain reaction.
Beware of the downward spiral. Being present at critical moments of competitions can losses into wins. Take two or three deep breaths or splash cold water on their faces to snap out of bad states of mind.
Beware of the downward spiral and the desire to cling to the emotional comfort zone of what was but there is also that unsettling sense that things have changed for the worse (“the woman and the bike”). The clear thinker is suddenly at war with himself and flow is lost. One line is time, the other is our perception of the moment.
Changing voice
It is important to understand that by “numbers to leave numbers”, or “form to leave form”, the author is describing a process in which technical information is integrated into what feels like natural intelligence. Sometimes there will literally be numbers. Other times, there will be principles, patterns, variations, techniques, and ideas. What was once seen mathematically is now felt intuitively.
Through chess, the author discovers himself. He saw the art as a movement closer and closer to an unattainable truth as if he was travelling through a tunnel that continuously deepened and widened as he progressed. The more he knew about the game, the more he realized how much there was to know. He emerged from each session in a slightly deeper awe of the mystery of chess and with a building sense of humility. Increasingly, he felt more tender about his work than fierce.
Breaking stallions
A life of ambition is like existing on a balance beam. While a child can make the beam a playground, high-stress performers often transform the beam into a tightrope. Any slip becomes a crisis.
The author believes that one of the most critical factors in the transition to becoming a conscious high performer is the degree to which your relationship with your pursuit stays in harmony with your unique disposition. There will inevitably be times when we need to try new ideas and release our current knowledge to take in new information — but it is critical to integrate this new information in a manner that does not violate who we are.
Muscles and minds need to stretch to grow, but if stretched too thin, they will snap. A competitor needs to be process-oriented and always look for stronger opponents to spur growth, but it is also important to keep on winning enough to maintain confidence.
Navigating our way to excellence is tricky. The effects of moving away from my natural voice as a competitor were particularly devasting. But with the perspective of time, he understood that he was offered a rare opportunity to grow.
Part II: My Second Art
Beginner’s mind
It is Chen’s opinion that a large obstacle to a calm, healthy, present existence is the constant interruption of our natural breathing patterns. A thought or ringing phone or honking car interrupts an out-breath and so we stop and begin to inhale. Then we have another thought and stop before exhaling. The result is shallow breathing and deficient flushing of carbon dioxide from our systems, so our cells never have as much pure oxygen as they could. Tai Chi meditation is, among other things, a haven of unimpaired oxygenation.
Investment in loss
Investment in loss is giving yourself to the learning process.
In all disciplines, there are times when a performer is ready for action and times when he or she is soft, in flux, broken down or in a period of growth. Learners in this phase are inevitably vulnerable. It is important to have perspective on this and allow yourself protected periods for cultivation. If a young athlete is expected to perform brilliantly in his first games with this new system, he will surely disappointed. He needs time to internalise the new skills before he will improve.
In certain competitive arenas — our working lives, for example — there are seldom weeks in which performance does not matter. Similarly, it is not so difficult to have a beginner’s mind and to be willing to invest in loss when you are truly a beginner, but it is much harder to maintain that humility and openness to learning when people are watching and expecting you to perform. It is essential to have a liberating incremental approach that allows for times when you are not in a peak performance state. We must take responsibility for ourselves and not expect the rest of the world to understand what it takes to become the best that we can become. Great ones are willing to get burned time and again as they sharpen their swords in the fire. What made Michael Jordan the greatest was not perfection, but a willingness to put himself on the line as a way of life. But he was willing to look bad on the road to basketball immortality.
Making smaller circles
Making smaller circles refers to the strategy of narrowing your focus to the core fundamentals of a skill or concept before branching out into more complex details. This approach is based on the idea that a strong foundation is essential for building mastery. Here’s a breakdown of the concept:
- Start with the basics: Identify the fundamental elements of what you’re trying to learn.
- Practice intensively: Focus on mastering these core concepts through deliberate practice.
- Expand gradually: Once you have a solid understanding of the basics, gradually introduce more complex elements or variations.
By following this approach, you can avoid overwhelming yourself with too much information and build a strong, sustainable skill base.
Depth beats breadth any day of the week because it opens a channel for the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential.
Using adversity
First, we have to learn to be at peace with imperfection — the blade of grass bending to hurricane-force winds in contrast to a brittle twig snapping under pressure.
Next, in our performance training, we learn to use that imperfection to our advantage — for example, thinking to the beat of the music or using a shaking world as a catalyst for insight.
The third step of this process, as it pertains to performance psychology, is to learn to create ripples in our consciousness, little jolts to spur us along, so we are constantly inspired whether or not external conditions are inspiring.
The author has heard quite a few NFL quarterbacks who had minor injuries and were forced to sit out a game or two, speak of the injury as a valuable opportunity to concentrate on the mental side of their games. When they return, they play at a higher level. In all athletic disciplines, it is the internal work that makes the physical mat time click, but it is easy to lose touch with this reality in the middle of the grind.
One thing he has learned as a competitor is that there are clear distinctions between what it takes to be decent, what it takes to be good, what it takes to be great, and what it takes to be among the best. If you want to be the best, you have to take risks others would avoid, always optimizing the learning potential of the moment and turning adversity to your advantage. That said, there are times when the body needs to heal, but those are ripe opportunities to deepen the mental, technical, and internal side of your game.
When aiming for the top, your path requires an engaged, searching mind. You have to make obstacles spur you to create new angles in the learning process. Let setbacks deepen your resolve. It would be best if you always came off an injury or a loss better than when you went down. Another angle on this issue is the unfortunate correlation, for some, between consistency and monotony. It is all too easy to get caught up in the routines of our lives and to lose creativity in the learning process. Even people who are completely devoted to cultivating a certain discipline often fall into a mental rut, a disengaged lifestyle that implies excellence can be obtained by going through the motions. We lose presence. Then an injury or some other kind of setback throws a wrench into the gears. We are forced to get imaginative.
Once we learn how to use adversity to our advantage, we can manufacture helpful growth opportunities without actual danger or injury. I call this tool the internal solution — we can notice external events that trigger helpful growth or performance opportunities, and then internalize the effects of those events without their actually happening. In this way, adversity becomes a tremendous source of creative inspiration.
Slowing down time
The author’s numbers-to-leave-numbers approach to chess study was his way of having a working relationship with the unconscious parts of his mind.
The author described his vision of the road to mastery:
You start with the fundamentals, get a solid foundation fueled by understanding the principles of your discipline, and then you expand and refine your repertoire, guided by your individual predispositions, while keeping in touch, however abstractly, with what you feel to be the essential core of the art. What results is a network of deeply internalized, interconnected knowledge that expands from a central, personal locus point. The question of intuition relates to how that network is navigated and used as fuel for creative insight.
The stronger the player, the more sophisticated his or her ability to quickly discover connecting logical patterns between the pieces (attack, defence, tension, pawn chains, etc.) and thus they had better chess memories.
Each piece’s power is purely relational, depending upon such variables as pawn structure and surrounding forces. Over time each chess principle loses rigidity, and you get better and better at reading the subtle signs of qualitative relativity. Soon enough, learning becomes unlearning. The stronger chess player is often the one who is less attached to a dogmatic interpretation of the principles. This leads to a whole new layer of principles — those that consist of the exceptions to the initial principles. The next step is for those counterintuitive signs to become internalized just as the initial movements of the pieces were. The network of his chess knowledge now involves principles, patterns, and chunks of information, accessed through a whole new set of navigational principles, patterns, and chunks of information, which are soon followed by another set of principles and chunks designed to assist in the interpretation of the last. Learning chess at this level becomes sitting with paradox, being at peace with and navigating the tension of competing truths, and letting go of any notion of solidity.
We are at the moment when psychology begins to transcend technique. Everyone at a high level has a huge amount of chess understanding, and much of what separates the great from the very good is the deep presence, and relaxation of the conscious mind, which allows the unconscious to flow unhindered. The idea is to shift the primary role from the conscious to the unconscious without blessing out and losing the precision the conscious can provide.
The Grandmaster consciously looks at less, not more. The chunks of information that have been put together in his mind allow him to see much more with much less conscious thought. So, he is looking at very little and seeing quite a lot. This is the critical idea.
The key to this process is understanding that the conscious mind, for all its magnificence, can only take in and work with a certain limited amount of information in a unit of time — envision that capacity as one page on your computer screen. If it is presented with a large amount of information, then the font will have to be very small in order to fit it all on the page. You will not be able to see the details of the letters. But if that same tool (the conscious mind) is used for a much smaller amount of information in the same amount of time, then we can see every detail of each letter. Now time feels slowed down.
Another way of understanding this difference in perception is with the analogy of a camera. With practice, I am making networks of chunks and paving more and more neural pathways, which effectively take huge piles of data and throw it over to my high-speed processor — the unconscious. Now my conscious mind, focusing on less, seems to rev up its shutter speed from, say, four frames per second to 300 or 400 frames per second. The key is to understand that my trained mind is not necessarily working much faster than an untrained mind — it is simply working more effectively, which means that my conscious mind has less to deal with.
The illusion of the mystical
This is where Making Smaller Circles and Slowing Down Time come into play. When working with highly skilled and mentally tough opponents, the psychological game gets increasingly subtle. The battle becomes about reading breath patterns and blinks of the eye, playing in frames the opponent is unaware of, and invisible technical manipulation that slowly creates response patterns.
Part III: Bringing It All Together
The power of presence
In every discipline, the ability to be clearheaded, present, and cool under fire is much of what separates the best from the mediocre. The secret is that everything is always on the line. The more present we are at practice, the more present we will be in competition, in the boardroom, at the exam, at the operating table, the big stage. If we have any hope of attaining excellence, let alone of showing what we’ve got under pressure, we have to be prepared by a lifestyle of reinforcement. Presence must be like breathing.
Searching for the zone
in virtually every discipline, one of the most telling features of a dominant performer is the routine use of recovery periods. Players who can relax in brief moments of inactivity are almost always the ones who end up coming through when the game is on the line.
If you are interested in really improving as a performer, the author would suggest incorporating the rhythm of stress and recovery into all aspects of your life.
Interval work is a critical building block to becoming a consistent long-term performer. If you spend a few months practising stress and recovery in your everyday life, you’ll lay the physiological foundation for becoming a resilient, dependable pressure player. The next step is to create your trigger for the zone.
Building your trigger
It is important to rest and relax and be patient to wait for the opportunity, to sum up the energy to strike where needed. We have to be good at waiting, we have to love it. Waiting is not waiting, it is life. Too many of us live without fully engaging our minds, waiting for that moment when our real lives begin. To have success in crunch time, you need to integrate certain healthy patterns into your day-to-day life so that they are completely natural to you when the pressure is on. The real power of incremental growth comes to bear when we truly are like water, steadily carving stone. We just keep on flowing when everything is on the line.
The author has observed that virtually all people have one or two activities that move them in this manner, but they usually dismiss them as “just taking a break.” If only they knew how valuable their breaks could be!
The point to this system of creating your own trigger is that a physiological connection is formed between the routine and the activity it precedes. Once the routine is internalized, it can be used before any activity and a similar state of mind will emerge. Your personal routine should be determined by your individual tastes
The next step of the process is to gradually alter the routine so that it is similar enough so as to have the same physiological effect, but slightly different so as to make the ‘trigger’ both lower-maintenance and more flexible. The key is to make the changes incrementally, slowly, so there is more similarity than difference from the last version of the routine. This way the body and mind have the same physiological reaction even if the preparation is slightly shorter.
At a high level, principles can be internalized to the point that they are barely recognizable even to the most skilled observers.
Making sandals
There are those elite performers who use emotion, observing their moment and then channelling everything into a deeper focus that generates a uniquely flavoured creativity. This is an interesting, resilient approach based on flexibility and subtle introspective awareness. Instead of being bullied by or denying their unconscious, these players let their internal movements flavour their fires.
First, we learn to flow with distraction, like that blade of grass bending to the wind. Then we learn to use distraction, inspiring ourselves with what initially would have thrown us off our games. Finally, we learn to re-create the inspiring settings internally. We learn to make sandals.
Two components: (a) my approach to learning and (b) performance.
It is important to integrate our natural emotions into creative states of inspiration
First, he learned to stay cool when training with dirty players, and then he started to use his passion to his advantage, to use his natural heat.
Once we are no longer swept away by our emotions and can sit with them even when under pressure, we will probably notice that certain states of mind inspire us more than others.
First, we cultivate The Soft Zone, we sit with our emotions, observe them, work with them, learn how to let them float away if they are rocking our boat, and how to use them when they are fueling our creativity. Then we turn our weaknesses into strengths until there is no denial of our natural eruptions and nerves sharpen our game, fear alerts us, and anger funnels into focus. Next, we discover what emotional states trigger our greatest performances. Introspect.
Bringing it all together
In Making Smaller Circles we take a single technique or idea and practice it until we feel its essence. Then we gradually condense the movements while maintaining their power, until we are left with an extremely potent and nearly invisible arsenal.
In Slowing Down Time, we again focus on a select group of techniques and internalize them until the mind perceives them in tremendous detail. After training in this manner, we can see more frames in an equal amount of time, so things feel slowed down.
In The Illusion of the Mystical, we use our cultivation of the last two principles to control the intention of the opponent — and again, we do this by zooming in on very small details to which others are completely oblivious.
When he thinks about creativity, it is always in relation to a foundation. We have our knowledge. It becomes deeply internalized until we can access it without thinking about it. Then we have a leap that uses what we know to go one or two steps further. We make a discovery. Most people stop here and hope that they will become inspired and reach that state of “divine insight” again.
Afterword
If I have learned anything over my first twenty-nine years, it is that we cannot calculate our important contests, adventures, and great loves to the end. The only thing we can really count on is getting surprised. No matter how much preparation we do, in the real tests of our lives, we’ll be in unfamiliar terrain. Conditions might not be calm or reasonable. It may feel as though the whole world is stacked against us. This is when we have to perform better than we ever conceived of performing. I believe the key is to have prepared in a manner that allows for inspiration, to have laid the foundation for us to create under the wildest pressures we ever imagined.
Mastery involves discovering the most resonant information and integrating it so deeply and fully that it disappears and allows us to fly free.
