The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

by Josh Waitzkin

People were saying that I was a future World Champion, but I didn’t hear them. I was a competitor who knew winning and losing and the hair’s breadth between. My rivals didn’t care about reputation—they just wanted to crush me and I had to keep it real.

From one perspective the opponent is the enemy. On the other hand there is no one who knows you more intimately, no one who challenges you so profoundly or pushes you to excellence and growth so relentlessly. Sitting at a chessboard, just feet away from the other, you can hear every breath, feel each quiver, sense any flicker of fear or exhilaration. Hours pass with your entire being tapping into your opponent’s psyche, while the other follows your thoughts like a shadow and yearns for your demise. Brilliant minds all around the world devote themselves to the intense study of this mysterious, brutal intellectual sport, and then the best of them collide in distant outposts.

Beautiful. On competition.

Across from me was the Indian National Champion, and between the two of us lay the critical position of our struggle. We were three hours into the battle and I had been thinking for twenty minutes. A curious thing happened in that time. So far I had been grinding my way through this game. It was the first round, I had no flow, no inspired ideas, the pieces were alien, the position strange. After about ten minutes of thought, I began to lose myself in the variations. It is a strange feeling. First you are a person looking at a chessboard. You calculate through the various alternatives, the mind gaining speed as it pores through the complexities, until consciousness of one’s separation from the position ebbs away and what remains is the sensation of being inside the energetic

On flow

chess flow. Then the mind moves with the speed of an electrical current, complex problems are breezed through with an intuitive clarity, you get deeper and deeper into the soul of the chess position, time falls away, the concept of “I” is gone, all that exists is blissful engagement, pure presence, absolute flow. I was in the zone and then there was an earthquake.

When ego vanishes then magic ensues. Flow and merging with the activity. This is where we must aspire to live

This intense moment of my life was the launching point for my serious investigation of the nuances of performance psychology.

will gradually lay out my current methodology for triggering such states of creative flow.

But the first obstacle I had to overcome as a young chess player was to avoid being distracted by random, unexpected events—by the mini earthquakes that afflict all of our days. In performance training, first we learn to flow with whatever comes. Then we

On flow

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. The initial step along this path is to attain what sports psychologists call The Soft Zone. Envision the Zone as your performance state.I

You are concentrated on the task at hand, whether it be a piece of music, a legal brief, a financial document, driving a car, anything. Then something happens. Maybe your spouse comes home, your baby wakes up and starts screaming, your boss calls you with an unreasonable demand, a truck has a blowout in front of you. The nature of your state of concentration will determine the first phase of your reaction—if you are tense, with your fingers jammed in your ears and your whole body straining to fight off distraction, then you are in a Hard Zone that demands a cooperative world for you to function.

Flow: soft zone vs hard zone

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 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.

Soft zone

Another way of envisioning the importance of the Soft Zone is through an ancient Indian parable that has been quite instructive in my life for many years: 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. Making sandals is the internal solution. Like the Soft Zone, it does not base success on a submissive world or overpowering force, but on intelligent preparation and cultivated resilience.

Soft zone: sandals vs paving the road to walk on thorns. Love this analogy

In the last chapter I mentioned that as my chess understanding grew more sophisticated and I transitioned to adult tournaments, my games tended to last longer, sometimes going on for six or eight hours. Kids have trouble focusing for so long and strange things can happen to a young mind straining under intense pressure. One day I was working my way through a complex position in a tournament at the Manhattan Chess Club, and a Bon Jovi song I had heard earlier in the day entered my mind. I tried to push it away and return to my calculation, but it just wouldn’t leave me alone. At first this seemed funny, but soon the music eclipsed the chess game. I couldn’t think, and ended up blundering and losing.

This might sound trivial, but for me it was disastrous—there I’d be, eleven years old, facing down a wily old chess master, and the theme song from Ghostbusters would be hammering away in my brain. The more I tried to block out the distraction, the louder it would get in my head. As a young boy I felt alone with this problem, but in recent years while lecturing on performance psychology, I have found that many high-stress performers have similar symptoms.

I 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.

Yes

The victims of my training method were my parents and sister. A few times a week, while studying chess in my bedroom, I blasted music. Sometimes it was music I liked, sometimes music I didn’t like. For a period of many months I blared booming Gyuto monk chants, which drove my sister, Katya, to utter distraction. My family’s little apartment was besieged by my bizarre training concept, and it’s amazing they put up with me. My idea was to become at peace with distraction, whatever it was. During

Training method: ugly music.

Gyuto monk chants

Many of these new rivals were armed with a repertoire of psychological “tricks” that presented serious challenges.

He explained that in the climactic moments of the struggle, when I had to buckle down and patiently work my way through the complications to find a precise solution, this boy would start to tap a chess piece on the side

Subtle distraction/hypnosis techniques

of the table, barely audible, but at a pace that entered and slightly quickened my mental process. This subtle tactic was highly effective and I later found out that it was an offspring of the Soviet study of hypnosis and mind control. The next time we played, I was on the lookout for the tapping and sure enough, in the critical moment it was right there. Hilarious. Once I was aware of what was happening, I was able to turn the tables in our rivalry.

The problem is that when I got angry, I was thrown off my game. I tried to stay level-headed, but this one rival of mine had no limits. He would push me to the point of utter exasperation and I would often self-destruct.

our emotions, but in learning to use them to our advantage. Instead of stifling myself, I needed to channel my mood into heightened focus—and I can’t honestly say that I figured out how to do this consistently until years into my martial arts career when dirty opponents tried to take out my knees, target the groin, or head-butt me in the nose in competition.III

Mental resilience is arguably the most critical trait of a world-class performer, and it should be nurtured continuously.

My instinct is always to seek out challenges as opposed to avoiding them.

This was a muscle I built up by training myself to be at peace with the unclear and tumultuous—and most of the training was in everyday life. For example, since my teens, when I play cards, say gin rummy, I rarely arrange my hand. I leave the melds all over the place and do the organization in my head. I’ve never been a neat guy by nature, and I furthered my messiness for years by consciously leaving my living area chaotic so I could practice organizing things mentally and being mellow in the madness.

Of course this process is never complete. As I am writing this section, a lawn mower just went into gear right outside. A few minutes ago I got up to close the window, but then I sat back down and left it open. The irony was too

One idea I taught was the importance of regaining 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 error creates a devastating chain reaction.

People speak about momentum as if it were an entity of its own, an unpredictable player on the field, and from my own competitive experience, I can vouch for it seeming that way. The key is to bring that player onto your team by riding the psychological wave

Wow great insight

when it is behind you, and snapping back into a fresh presence when your clarity of mind begins to be swept away.

With young chess players, the downward spiral dominates competitive lives. In game after game, beginners fall to pieces after making the first mistake. With older, more accomplished players the mistakes are subtler, but the pattern of error begetting error ...

Your heart starts to pound because of the disconcerting chasm between what was and what is.

At a high level, pressing for wins in equal positions often results in losing.

defeat. All great performers have learned this lesson. Top-rate actors often miss a line but improvise their way back on track. The audience rarely notices because of the perfect ease with which the performer glides from troubled waters into the tranquility of the script. Even more impressively, the truly great ones can make the moment work for them, heightening performance with improvisations that shine with immediacy and life. Musicians, actors, athletes, philosophers, scientists, writers understand that brilliant creations are often born of small errors. Problems set in if the performer has a brittle dependence on the safety of absolute perfection or duplication. Then an error triggers fear, detachment, uncertainty, or confusion that muddies the decision-making process.

Lesson - improvise mistakes.

if I felt dull during a difficult struggle, I would occasionally leave the playing hall and sprint fifty yards outside. This may have seemed strange to spectators, but it served as a complete physiological flushing, and I returned, albeit a bit sweaty, in a brand-new state of mind.

State change - do a sprint

an eighteen-year-old, I had not yet refined my methodology for snapping into pure presence—this system is the subject of the chapter, Building Your Trigger, in Part III—but I understood that avoiding the ripple effect of compounding errors had broad application. Then something happened in my life that drove this rule into my soul.

The biker lurched away at the last second and gave her a solid but harmless bump. In my memory, time stops right here. This was the critical moment in the woman’s life. She could have walked away unscathed if she had just stepped back onto the pavement, but instead she turned and cursed the fast-pedaling bicyclist.

As I walked into the school, dumbstruck by the severity of what I had just witnessed, I felt compelled to share a version of the story with my students. I left out the gravity of her injuries but I linked life and chess in a way that appeared to move them—this tragedy needn’t have happened. I explained how this woman’s first mistake was looking the wrong way and stepping into the street in front of traffic. Maybe wearing headphones put her in her own world, a little removed from the immediacy of the moment. Then the biker should have been a wake-up call. She wasn’t hurt, but instead of reacting with alertness, she was spooked into anger, irritated that her quiet had been shattered.

parallel to the chess player’s downward spiral—after making an error, it is so easy 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 clear thinker is suddenly at war with himself and flow is lost.

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. I showed my students these lines with my hands, moving through the air. 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. Suddenly we are living, playing chess, crossing the street with our eyes closed in memory. And then comes the taxicab. That chess lesson was surely the most emotional I’ve ever taught.

Powerful lesson on time as arrow and perception running parallel. Gap between them is bad!

I had always been a creative, attacking player who loved the wild side of chess.

While I found this work interesting, the effects of moving away from my natural voice as a competitor were disturbing. Instead of following my instincts, my coach urged me to ask myself, “What would Karpov do here?” But Karpov had cold blood and mine boiled. When he searched for tiny strategic advantages, I yearned for wild dynamics.

My strengths as a young champion—consistency, competitive presence, focus, drive, passion, creativity—were elusive and moving out of reach. I still loved chess, but it no longer felt like an extension of my being.

I studied chess and literature and traveled the world with my notebook and a rucksack.

I worked on the game tirelessly, but was now moved less by ambition than by a yearning for self-discovery. While my understanding of the game deepened, I continued to be uneven and, at times, self-defeating in competition. I was consistently unhappy before leaving for tournaments, preferring my lifestyle of introspection and young romance. When I dragged myself off to tournaments, some days I would play brilliant chess and others I would feel disconnected, like a poet without his muse. In order to make my new knowledge manifest over the board, I had to figure out how to release myself from the baggage I had acquired, and I developed a method of study that made chess and life begin to merge in my being.

Poet w/o a muse. Ugh

These moments, where the technical and psychological collide, are where I directed my study of the game. In the course of a nine-round chess tournament, I’d arrive at around four or five critical positions that I didn’t quite understand or in which I made an error. Immediately after each of my games, I quickly entered the moves into my computer, noting my thought process and how I felt emotionally at various stages of the battle. Then after the tournament, armed with these fresh impressions, I went back to Vrholvje and studied the critical moments.

Study the critical moments. By writing them all down you will subconsciously record them more deeply

Usually long study sessions went like this: I began with the critical position from one of my games, where my intuitive understanding had not been up to the challenge. At first my mind was like a runner on a cold winter morning—stiff, unhappy about the coming jog, dreary. Then I began to move, recalling my attacking ideas in the struggle and how nothing had fully connected. I tried to pick apart my opponent’s position and discovered new layers of his defensive resources, all the while my mind thawing, integrating the evolving structural dynamics it had not quite understood before. Over time my blood started flowing, sweat came, I settled into the rhythm of analysis, soaked in countless patterns of evolving sophistication as I pored over what a computer would consider billions of variations. Like a runner in stride, my thinking became unhindered, free-flowing, faster and faster as I lost

myself in the position. Sometimes the study would take six hours in one sitting, sometimes thirty hours over a week. I felt like I was living, breathing, sleeping in that maze, and then, as if from nowhere, all the complications dissolved and I understood. 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.I

Flow - analysis of position.

A fascinating offshoot of this method of analysis was that I began to see connections between the leaps of chess understanding and my changing vision of the world. During my study of the critical positions, I noted the feeling I had during the actual chess game. I explained above how in the pressure of tournaments, the tension in the mind mounts with the tension in the position, and an error on the board usually parallels a psychological collapse of sorts. Almost invariably, there was a consistent psychological strain to my errors in a given tournament, and what I began to notice is that my problems on the chessboard usually were manifesting themselves in my life outside of chess.

Analysis cont.

When I finally noticed this connection, I tackled transitions in both chess and life. In chess games, I would take some deep breaths and clear my mind when the character of the struggle shifted. In life, I worked on embracing change instead of fighting it. With awareness and action, in both life and chess my weakness was transformed into a strength.

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.

Brilliant.