The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

by Josh Waitzkin

I caught myself thinking about how I looked thinking instead of losing myself in thought.

My whole life I had studied techniques, principles, and theory until they were integrated into the unconscious.

It might sound absurd, but I believe that year, from eight to nine, was the defining period of my life.

This fits Raj Chetty’s research about third grade.

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 gets bigger, it needs to find a more spacious shell. So the slow, lumbering creature goes on a quest for a new home. If an appropriate new shell is not found quickly, a terribly delicate moment of truth arises. A soft creature that is used to the protection of built-in armor must now go out into the world, exposed to predators in all its mushy vulnerability. That learning phase in between shells is where our growth can spring from.

A key ingredient to my success in those years was that my style on the chessboard was a direct expression of my personality.

Growth comes at the point of resistance.

In performance training, first we learn to flow with whatever comes. Then we learn to use whatever comes to our advantage. Finally, we learn to be completely self-sufficient and create our own earthquakes, so our mental process feeds itself explosive inspirations without the need for outside stimulus.

A man wants to walk across the land, but the earth is covered with thorns. He has two options—one is to pave his road, to tame all of nature into compliance. The other is to make sandals.

was having terrible and hilarious noise problems, and then one day I had a breakthrough. I was playing a tournament in Philadelphia with a Phil Collins song rattling away in my brain when I realized that I could think to the beat of the song. My chess calculations began to move to the rhythm of the music, and I played an inspired game. After this moment, I took the bull by the horns and began training to have a more resilient concentration. I realized that in top-rank competition I couldn’t count on the world being silent, so my 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 my own devices, I am always looking for ways to become more and more psychologically impregnable. When uncomfortable, my 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, I try to avoid painkillers and to change the sensation of pain into a feeling that is not necessarily negative. My instinct is always to seek out challenges as opposed to avoiding them.

For a period of time, almost all my chess errors came in a moment immediately following or preceding a big change.

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. I unearthed my subtlest foibles through chess, and the link between my personal and artistic sides was undeniable. The psychological theme could range from transitions to resilient concentration, fluidity of mind, control, leaps into the unknown, sitting with tension, the downward spiral, being at peace with discomfort, giving into fatigue, emotional turbulence, and invariably the chess moves paralleled the life moment. Whenever I noticed a weakness, I took it on.

The more I knew about the game, the more I realized how much there was to know. I emerged from each good work session in slightly deeper awe of the mystery of chess, and with a building sense of humility. Increasingly, I felt more tender about my work than fierce. Art was truly becoming for art’s sake.

Knowledge comes more readily from love than from competition.

Jackson Pollock could draw like a camera, but instead he chose to splatter paint in a wild manner that pulsed with emotion. He studied form to leave form.

Depth beats breadth any day of the week,

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.

Tactics come easy once principles are in the blood.

In the end, mastery involves discovering the most resonant information and integrating it so deeply and fully it disappears and allows us to fly free.