Josh Waitzkin
Written by Josh Waitzkin, a former chess prodigy and world champion, as well as a martial artist. The book was first published in 2007 and is a memoir that combines Waitzkin’s experiences in the world of competitive chess and martial arts with insights on the learning process and personal growth.
In the book, Waitzkin explores the principles and techniques that have helped him excel in both chess and martial arts. He discusses his journey from being a young chess prodigy, winning numerous national and international championships, to transitioning into the world of Tai Chi Push Hands, where he also achieved remarkable success.
Some key themes and concepts explored in “The Art of Learning” include:
It offers valuable insights into the mindset, strategies, and principles that can lead to mastery in various fields. While the book’s primary focus is on chess and martial arts, the principles discussed within it can be applied to virtually any area of life where skill development and learning are essential.
[I had kept journals of my chess study, making psychological observations along the way, now I was doing the same with Tai Chi.]
I quoted this because it makes me re-evaluate the importance of accepting that learning is a process, and keeping up with this process requires conscious observation of self too. Most people are prone to give up.
Book consists of 3 main chapters. Foundation, My Second Art, Bringing it All Together.
First part starts with writer explaining his childhood and how it led him to be a good chess student&player,
[Even as a young boy I was encouraged to take part in the spirited dinner party debates about art and politics in my family’s living room. I was taught to express my opinion and to think about the ideas of others- not to follow authority blindly.] (p.9)
When we consider learning as a unidirectional activity, we have to force the student to be the passive part (or the one who takes). In my opinion, this makes learning harder than necessary, because our mind doesn’t like to sit quietly when it’s working. It needs to understand that it learned, and that requires some reaction. So it’s important to allow your mind to question things when learning.
In the second part, writer talks about the post experience his first big loss.
[The ocean has always healed me, brought me back to life when I have needed it … and as an eight-year-old child in the midst of an existential crisis, I needed it.] (p.18)
Think in terms of jobs; an eight-year-old child means a person with 8 years of experience (life experience), and it’s a lot however you look at it. Remembering what we lived, what we thought and have gone through at those ages would help us to understand our current situation better. Maybe it will even help to and solve some of our current problems. Life is a single big entity, childhood is also a main part of it.
[I rediscovered myself as a child, ran around the island with my friends Kier and Kino.] (p.19)
At some point, writer talks about how he was concentrated on studying chess and his parents were worried,
[My parents worried that I had become too serious about chess, and my dad periodically told me that it was okay if I wanted to quit. They didn’t understand that quitting was not an option.] (p.24)
This may sound weird when it’s told by an 8-year-old to his parents, but when we look at this as a job again, this is perfectly normal. If you are an 8 year old software engineer, you know that you know things and you compare each opinion with your own opinions. It’s possible that sometimes your opinion might seem better. Parents (or more senior software engineers) also should be able to accept this.
Third part talks about entity and incremental theory of learning.
[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. The hermit crab is a colorful example of a creature that lives by this aspect of the growth process (albeit without our psychological baggage). As the crab gers big,get, it needs to find a more spacious shell. So the slow, lumbering creature goes on a quest for a new home.] (p.33)
[lessons learned from the pursuit of excellence mean much more than the immediate trophies] (p.33)
[This child was paralyzed by an ever-deepening cycle entity indoctrination.] (p.37)
[what kept me on my path was a love for learning that has its roots in my first chess lessons as a six-year-old boy.] (p.39)
All these 4 quotes are connected to each other. They help us to understand that we choose our how we approach to life, and trophies are not the aim. Struggle for learning and growing itself is what makes challenges worth to pursue.
[A key ingredient to my success in those years was that my style on the chessboard was a direct expression of my personality.]
[I have seen many people in diverse fields take some version of process-first philosophy and transform it into an excuse for never putting themselves on the line or pretending not to care about results. They claim to be egoless, to care only about learning, but really this is an excuse to avoid confronting themselves.]
Below is a partial quote about a story of Danny (kid chess player) and his mother, after he loses one important game.
[First of all, she shouldn’t say that it doesn’t matter…]
[I think this mother should give her son a hug. If he is crying, let him cry on her shoulder. She should tell him how proud of him she is. She can tell Danny that it is okay to be sad, that she understands and that she loves him. Disappointment is a part of the road to greatness. When a few moments pass, in a quiet voice, she can ask Danny if he knows what happened in the game. Hopefully the language between parent and child will already be established so Danny knows his mom is asking about psychology, not chess moves…]
[Danny will have an idea about his psychological slip, and taking on that issue will be a short-term goal in the continuing process.]
[Through these dialogues, Danny will learn that every loss is an opportunity for growth. He will become increasingly astute psychologically and sensitive to bad habits.]
[I had used an earthquake to reach a higher state of consciousness and discover a chess solution I may not have otherwise found. As this book evolves, I will gradually lay out my current methodology for triggering such states of creative flow.]
[The initial step along this path is to attain what sports psychologists call The Soft Zone. Envision the Zone as your performance state.]
[You flow with whatever comes, integrating every ripple of life into your creative moment. This Soft Zone is resilient, like a flexible blade of grass that can move with and survive hurricane-force winds.]
[When uncomfortable, my instinct is not to avoid the discomfort but to become at peace with it.]
[I have always visualized two lines moving parallel to one another in space. One line is time, the other is our perception of the moment. When we are present to what is, we are right up front with the expansion of time, but when we make a mistake and get frozen in what was, a layer of detachment builds. Time goes on and we stop.]
[When I looked at the critical position from my tournament game, what had stumped me a few days or hours or weeks before now seemed perfectly apparent. I saw the best move, felt the correct plan, understood the evaluation of the position. I couldn’t explain this new knowledge with variations or words. It felt more elemental, like rippling water or a light breeze. My chess intuition had deepened. This was the study of numbers to leave numbers.]
[Once I recognized that deeply buried secrets in a competitor tend to surface under intense pressure, my study of chess became a form of psychoanalysis.]
[Razuvaev pointed out that I could learn Karpov from Kasparov]
[Bonnie explains that there are two basic ways of taming a wild horse. One is to tie it up and freak it out. Shake paper bags, rattle cans, drive it crazy until it submits to any noise. Make it endure the humiliation of being controlled by a rope and pole. Once it is partially submissive, you tack the horse, get on top, spur it, show it who’s boss the horse fights, bucks, twists, turns, runs, but there is no escape. Finally the beast drops to its knees and submits to being domesticated. The horse goes through pain, rage, frustration, exhaustion, to near death … then it finally yields. This is the method some like to call shock and awe.]
[When the horse is very young, a foal, we gentle it. The horse is always handled. You pet it, feed it, groom it, stroke it, it gets used to you, likes you. You get on it and there is no fight, nothing to fight.” So you guide the horse toward doing what you want to do because he wants to do it. You synchronize desires, speak the same language. You don’t break the horse’s spirit. My mom goes on: “If you walk straight toward a horse, it will look at you and probably run away. You don’t have to oppose the horse in that way. Approach indirectly, without confrontation.]
This chapter focuses on the importance of the initial steps when one starts to learn something new. It’s crucial to be really careful, awake, alert at all times to learn/understand/notice each small detail about the thing we learn.
[If aggression meets empty space it tends to defeat itself. I guess the perfect image is Lucy snatching the football away time and again as Charlie Brown tries to kick it. Poor Charlie just keeps on flipping himself into the air. The Tai Chi practitioner’s body needs to learn how to react quickly and naturally slip away from every conceivable strike. The problem is that we are conditioned to tense up and resist incoming or hostile force, so we have to learn an entirely new physiological response to aggression. Before learning the body mechanics of nonresistance, I had to unlearn my current physical paradigm. Easier said than done.]
[It is common knowledge that Jordan made more last-minute shots to win the game for his team than any other player in the history of the NBA. What is not so well known, is that Jordan also missed more last-minute shots to lose the game for his team than any other player in the history of the game. What made him the greatest was not perfection, but a willingness to put himself on the line as a way of life.]
[This method is similar to my early study of chess, where I explored endgame positions of reduced complexity—for example king and pawn against king, only three pieces on the board—in order to touch high-level principles such as the power of empty space, zugzwang (where any move of the opponent will destroy his position), tempo, or structural planning. Once I experienced these principles, I could apply them to complex positions because they were in my mental framework.]
[One thing I have 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.]
[The clearest way to approach this discussion is with the imagery of chunking and carved neural pathways. Chunking relates to the mind’s ability to assimilate large amounts of information into a cluster that is bound together by certain patterns or principles particular to a given discipline. The initial studies on this topic were, conveniently, performed on chess players who were considered to be the clearest example of sophisticated unconscious pattern integration. The Dutch psychologist Adrian de Groot (1965) and years later the team of William Simon and Herbert Chase (1973) put chess players of varying skill levels in front of chess positions and then asked them to re-create those positions on an adjacent empty board. The psychologists taped and studied the eye patterns and timing of the players while they performed the tasks. The relevant conclusions were that stronger players had better memories when the positions were taken out of the games of other strong players, because they re-created the positions by taking parts of the board (say five or six pieces) and chunking (merging) them in the mind by their inter-relationships. The stronger the player, the more sophisticated was his or her ability to quickly discover connecting logical patterns between the pieces (attack, defense, tension, pawn chains, etc.) and thus they had better chess]
[Most people would be surprised to discover that if you compare the thought process of a Grandmaster to that of an expert (a much weaker, but quite competent chess player), you will often find that the Grandmaster consciously looks at less, not more. That said, 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.]
[By the time I moved into the competitive martial arts, I was very much in tune with my tells, and was quite good at manipulating opponents’ impressions of my state of mind. I had also reached a fairly high level of reading psychological wrinkles. It was during these years that I began to cultivate methods of systematically controlling my opponents’ intention.]
Story of a man who encounters a jaguar in the forest, and importance of presence at the moment.
[In your performance training, the first step to mastering the zone is to practice the ebb and flow of stress and recovery.]
[So we created the following routine:]
[1. Eat a light consistent snack for 10 minutes] [2. 15 minutes of meditation] [3. 10 minutes of stretching] [4. 10 minutes of listening to Bob Dylan] [5. Play ball]
[He was playing outside of the rules so a natural defense mechanism of mine was anger and righteous indignation.]
[Instead of getting mad, I just rolled with his attacks and threw him out of the ring. His tactics didn’t touch me emotionally, and when unclouded, I was simply at a much higher level than him. It was amazing how easy it all felt when I didn’t take the bait.]
[There were two components to this work. One related to my approach to learning, the other to performance. On the learning side, I had to get comfortable dealing with guys playing outside the rules and targeting my neck, eyes, groin, etc. This involved some technical growth, and in order to make those steps I had to recognize the relationship between anger, ego, and fear.]
[We must be prepared for imperfection. If we rely on having no nerves, on not being thrown off by a big miss, or on the exact replication of a certain mindset, then when the pressure is high enough, or when the pain is too piercing to ignore, our ideal state will shatter.]
[We are built to be sharpest when in danger, but protected lives have distanced us from our natural abilities to channel our ener gies. Instead of running from our emotions or being swept away by their initial gusts, we should learn to sit with them, become at peace with their unique flavors, and ultimately discover deep pools of inspiration. I have found that this is a natural process. Once we build our tolerance for tur bulence and are no longer upended by the swells of our emotional life, we can ride them and even pick up speed with their slopes.]
[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.]
[In my experience the greatest of artists and competitors are masters of navigating their own psychologies, playing on their strengths, controlling the tone of battle so that it fits with their personalities.]
[How do we make that leap from technical virtuosity to unique creativity? The real art in learning takes place as we move beyond proficiency, when our work becomes an expression of our essence.]
[At this point the decisive factor is rarely who knows more, but who dictates the tone of the battle.]
[I’m down 2-0. Trouble. Gotta dig deep. Find something.]