The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

by Josh Waitzkin

The martial philosophy behind Push Hands, in the language of the Tai Chi Classics, is “to defeat a thousand pounds with four ounces.”

you have read about the idea of nonresistance. Give it a try. Try to maintain your stance without resisting at all and without moving faster than your opponent. Odds are that unless you are a trained martial artist, this notion feels unnatural.

investment in loss. Investment in loss is giving yourself to the learning process. In Push Hands it is letting yourself be pushed without reverting back to old habits—training yourself to be soft and receptive when your body doesn’t have any idea how to do it and wants to tighten up.

my training became more and more vigorous and I learned how to dissolve away from attacks while staying rooted to the ground. It is a sublime feeling when your root kicks in, as if you are not standing on the ground but anchored many feet deep into the earth. The key is relaxed hip joints and spring-like body mechanics, so you can easily receive force by coiling it down through your structure. Working on my root, I began to feel like a tree, swaying in the wind up top, but deeply planted down low.

Periodically, I have had to take apart my game and go through a rough patch. 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. A gifted boxer with a fabulous right and no left will get beat up while he tries to learn the jab.

If a young athlete is expected to perform brilliantly in his first games within this new system, he will surely disappoint. He needs time to internalize the new skills before he will improve.

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. True enough. This was a huge problem for me in my chess career after the movie came out. Psychologically, I didn’t give myself the room to invest in loss.

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. Consider Michael Jordan. 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.

given the assignment to write a five-hundred-word story about her town. She can’t write a word. The town seems so small, so incidental—what could possibly be interesting enough to write about? Phaedrus liberates the girl from her writer’s block by changing the assignment. He asks her to write about the front of the opera house outside her classroom on a small street in a small neighborhood of that same dull town. She should begin with the upper-left hand brick. At first the student is incredulous, but then a torrent of creativity unleashes and she can’t stop writing. The next day she comes to class with twenty inspired pages. I believe this little anecdote has the potential to distinguish success from failure in the pursuit of excellence. The theme is depth over breadth. The learning principle is to plunge into the detailed mystery of the micro in order to understand what makes the macro tick.

The constant supply of stimulus has the potential to turn us into addicts, always hungering for something new and prefabricated to keep us entertained. When nothing exciting is going on, we might get bored, distracted, separated from the moment. So we look for new entertainment, surf channels, flip through magazines. If caught in these rhythms, we are like tiny current-bound surface fish, floating along a two-dimensional world without any sense for the gorgeous abyss below. When these societally induced tendencies translate into the learning process, they have devastating effect.

At times I repeated segments of the form over and over, honing certain techniques while refining my body mechanics and deepening my sense of relaxation. I focused on small movements, sometimes spending hours moving my hand out a few inches, then releasing it back, energizing outwards, connecting my feet to my fingertips with less and less obstruction. Practicing in this manner, I was able to sharpen my feeling for Tai Chi. When through painstaking refinement of a small movement I had the improved feeling, I could translate it onto other parts of the form, and suddenly everything would start flowing at a higher level. The key was to recognize that the principles making one simple technique tick were the same fundamentals that fueled the whole expansive system of Tai Chi Chuan. 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.

The next phase of my martial growth would involve turning the large into the small. My understanding of this process, in the spirit of my numbers to leave numbers method of chess study, is to touch the essence (for example, highly refined and deeply internalized body mechanics or feeling) of a technique, and then to incrementally condense the external manifestation of the technique while keeping true to its essence. Over time expansiveness decreases while potency increases. I call this method “Making Smaller Circles.”

this learning process on a punch is super interesting but too long to highlight

players tend to get attached to fancy techniques and fail to recognize that subtle internalization and refinement is much more important than the quantity of what is learned.

It is rarely a mysterious technique that drives us to the top, but rather a profound mastery of what may well be a basic skill set. Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential.

behind me, and mostly did sensitivity work with training partners I trusted. We moved slowly, standing up, without throws, doing classical Push Hands in which the two players try to feel each other’s centers, neutralize attacks, and subtly unbalance the partner. This isn’t ego clashing or direct martial work, but an important method of heightening sensitivity to incoming power and intention—something akin to cooperative martial meditation. It is very important for athletes to do this kind of visualization work, in a form appropriate to their discipline, but often when we are caught up in the intense routine of training and competition, it feels like we have no time for the internal stuff.

The importance of undulating between external and internal (or concrete and abstract; technical and intuitive) training applies to all disciplines, and unfortunately the internal tends to be neglected. Most intelligent NFL players, for example, use the off-season to look at their schemes more abstractly, study tapes, break down aerial views of the field, notice offensive and defensive patterns. Then, during the season they sometimes fall into tunnel vision, because the routine of constant pain requires every last bit of reserves. I have 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.

was a big fish at the school and now was their moment to dominate me. They had two hands, I had one, and they intended to exploit the advantage. Clearly, I had to approach these situations with openness to being tossed around. If I wasn’t prepared to invest in loss, there would be no way to do this work. That said, it was fascinating to see how my body reacted. My left arm instinctively became like two arms, with my elbow neutralizing my opponent’s right hand and my hand controlling his left arm. I had no idea the body could work this way, and after a few days of this training, the notion that I was playing at a disadvantage faded. I felt completely comfortable with one hand against two, so long as I was a bit more skilled than my partner.

Let setbacks deepen your resolve. You should always come off an injury or a loss better than when you went down.

intuition is our most valuable compass in this world. It is the bridge between the unconscious and the conscious mind, and it is hugely important to keep in touch with what makes it tick.

my vision of the road to mastery—you start with the fundamentals, get a solid foundation fueled by understanding the principles of your discipline, 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.

why intuition only gets better with training, often misunderstood by amateurs

omg this section in chunking is the best articulation of why people think i have a good memory but i don’t. IE my ability to work without any notes

So, in a nutshell, chunking relates to the mind’s ability to take lots of information, find a harmonizing/logically consistent strain, and put it together into one mental file that can be accessed as if it were a single piece of information.

my mind works where it first identifies the pattern, then integrates its existing understanding of that pattern (yet people seem to think it’s accessing memories or resolving patterns in real time).

By “carved neural pathways” I am referring to the process of creating chunks and the navigation system between chunks. I am not making a literal physical description, so much as illustrating the way the brain operates.

how i review strategy

Recall that initially I experienced the whole throw as a blur, too fast to decipher, and now we are talking about a tiny portion of the throw involving many distinct moments. When it felt like a blur, my conscious mind was trying to make sense of unfamiliar terrain. Now my unconscious navigates a huge network of subtly programmed technical information, and my conscious mind is free to focus on certain essential details that, because of their simplicity, I can see with tremendous precision, as if the blink in my opponent’s eyes takes many seconds. 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

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. Experientially, because I am looking at less,

The similarity is that a life-or-death scenario kicks the human mind into a very narrow area of focus. Time feels slowed down because we instinctively zero in on a tiny amount of critical information

The volunteer is answering questions, following, trying to look good onstage. In the midst of all this, and in a blur that no one in the audience notices, the illusionist flashes a card. This is the sleight of hand. The critical point is that the volunteer must unconsciously notice the card without the observation registering in his conscious mind. He is engaged in the banter of the illusionist, and then suddenly has a seed planted in his mind. When asked to envision a card, that choice has already been made for him.

if you are a master of reading and manipulating footwork, then you are a force to be reckoned with. So let’s build a game around the simple principle of weight redistribution. There are two intertwined components to this process. The first is condensed technique. The second is enhanced perception.

We cannot expect to touch excellence if “going through the motions” is the norm of our lives. On the other hand, if deep, fluid presence becomes second nature, then life, art, and learning take on a richness that will continually surprise and delight. Those who excel are those who maximize each moment’s creative potential—for these masters of living, presence to the day-to-day learning process is akin to that purity of focus others dream of achieving in rare climactic moments when everything is on the line. 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, the operating table, the big stage.

I had learned as a boy how to deal with distraction in a given moment, but the larger distractions of my life were overwhelming me. In an isolated situation, I could overcome the issues—I’ve always been able to bring it for the big game—but the kind of reckless intensity this required sapped me. At a high level the chess world has many big games and in long, grueling tournaments they tend to follow one another, over and over, for days and weeks at a time. I knew how to block out my issues in a sprint, but in marathons I ran out of gas.

The next morning, Striegel and Loehr told me about their concept of Stress and Recovery. The physiologists at LGE had discovered that in virtually every discipline, one of the most telling features of a dominant performer is the routine use of recovery periods. Players who are able to relax in brief moments of inactivity are almost always the ones who end up coming through when the game is on the line. This is why the eminent tennis players of their day, such as Ivan Lendl and Pete Sampras, had those strangely predictable routines of serenely picking their rackets between points, whether they won or lost the last exchange, while their rivals fumed at a bad call or pumped a fist in excitement. Consider Tiger Woods, strolling to his next shot, with a relaxed focus in his eyes. Remember Michael Jordan sitting on the bench, a towel on his shoulders, letting it all go for a two-minute break before coming back in the game? Jordan was completely serene on the bench even though the Bulls desperately needed him on the court. He had the fastest recovery time of any athlete I’ve ever seen.

At LGE, they made a science of the gathering and release of intensity, and found that, regardless of the discipline, the better we are at recovering, the greater potential we have to endure and perform under stress.

At LGE they had discovered that there is a clear physiological connection when it comes to recovery—cardiovascular interval training can have a profound effect on your ability to quickly release tension and recover from mental exhaustion. What is more, physical flushing and mental clarity are very much intertwined.

Ultimately, with incremental training very much like what I described in the chapter Making Smaller Circles, recovery time can become nearly instantaneous. And once the act of recovery is in our blood, we’ll be able to access it under the most strained of circumstances, becoming masters of creating tiny havens for renewal, even where observers could not conceive of such a break.

One of the biggest roadblocks to releasing the tension during breaks of intense competition or in any other kind of challenging environment is the fear of whether we will be able to get it back.

Fueling up is much more important than last-minute cramming—and at a higher level, the ability to recover will be pivotal.

But far more critical than these rare climactic explosions, I believe that this type of condensing practice can do wonders to raise our quality of life. Once a simple inhalation can trigger a state of tremendous alertness, our moment-to-moment awareness becomes blissful, like that of someone half-blind who puts on glasses for the first time. We see more as we walk down the street. The everyday becomes exquisitely beautiful. The notion of boredom becomes alien and absurd as we naturally soak in the lovely subtleties of the “banal.”

I’ll focus on one of the most decisive emotions, one that can make or break a competitor: Anger. As we enter into this discussion, please keep in mind the three steps I described as being critical to resilient, self-sufficient performance. 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.

Time and again in critical moments of our games, Boris would pull out some dirty trick, and I would get irritated and make an error.

would get pissed off and have a meltdown. It took me some time to realize that blocking out my natural emotions was not the solution. I had to learn to use my moment organically. Instead of being thrown off by or denying my irritation, I had to somehow channel it into a profound state of concentration.

The first step I had to make was to recognize that the problem was mine, not Frank’s. There will always be creeps in the world, and I had to learn how to deal with them with a cool head. Getting pissed off would get me nowhere in life.

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.

I had to develop the habit of taking on my technical weaknesses whenever someone pushed my limits instead of falling back into a self-protective indignant pose. Once that adjustment was made, I was free to learn. If someone got into my head, they were doing me a favor, exposing a weakness. They were giving me a valuable opportunity to expand my threshold for turbulence. Dirty players were my best teachers.

First of all, I had to keep my head on straight no matter what. But this was only the initial step of the process. The fact of the matter is that we have our natural responses to situations for a reason. Feelings of anger and fear and elation emerge from deep inside of us and I think blocking them out is an artificial habit.

The Soft Zone approach is much more organic and useful than denial. The next steps of my growth would be to do with anger what I had with distraction years before. Instead of denying my emotional reality under fire, I had to learn how to sit with it, use it, channel it into a heightened state of intensity.

As a teenager I was thrown off by emotion and tried to block it out. Then, in my early twenties, during my initial experiments with Buddhist and Taoist meditation, I worked on letting my emotions pass like a cloud. This was interesting as it opened up a working relationship with my emotional reality very much like how I described working with the unconscious in the chapter Slowing Down Time. Instead of being dominated by or denying my passions, I slowly learned how to observe them and feel how they infused my moment with creativity, freshness, or darkness.

Once I had a working relationship with my emotions, I began to take on my psychological reaction to foul play in the martial arts with a bit more subtlety. I believe that at the highest levels, performers and artists must be true to themselves. There can be no denial, no repression of true personality, or else the creation will be false—the performer will be alienated from his or her intuitive voice.

The next step in my training would be to channel my gut reaction into intensity. This is not so hard once you get comfortable in that heated-up place. It is more about sweeping away the cobwebs than about learning anything new. We are built to be sharpest when in danger, but protected lives have distanced us from our natural abilities to channel our energies. 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 turbulence and are no longer upended by the swells of our emotional life, we can ride them and even pick up speed with their slopes.