The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

by Josh Waitzkin

Each loss was a lesson, each win a thrill.

I learned quickly that when I thought about the people watching, I played badly.

I insisted on some bad habits I had learned in the park—

Bruce had a fine line to tread. He had to teach me to be more disciplined without dampening my love for chess or suppressing my natural voice.

If I disagreed with him, we would have a discussion, not a lecture.

Bruce slowed me down by asking questions. Whenever I made an important decision, good or bad, he would ask me to explain my thought process. Were there other ways to accomplish the same aim? Had I looked for my opponent’s threats? Did I consider a different order of operations?

For me, competitive chess was not about perfection. It was more of a mental prizefight, with two opponents trading advantages, momentum going one way and then the other.

I was unhindered by internal conflict—a state of being that I have come to see as fundamental to the learning process.

The top board is a throne or a prison, depending on how you look at it. Everyone dreams of getting there, but then you arrive and find yourself all alone, trapped on a pedestal with a bull’s-eye on your forehead.

I had a choice of completely self-destructing or losing some material, regrouping, and then trying to fight back.

Growing up, I knew that come summertime, we would head off to sea no matter what else was happening in our lives,

Ritual... a good one

Times at sea are periods of renewal, coming together with family, being with nature, putting things back in perspective. I am able to let my conscious mind move away from my training, and to gain creative new angles on the next steps of my growth.

I learned at sea that virtually all situations can be handled as long as presence of mind is maintained.

Ecclesiastes 10:4

In my 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—

Losing is always a crisis instead of an opportunity for growth—if they were a winner because they won, this new losing must make them a loser.

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.

One of the most critical strengths of a superior competitor in any discipline—whether we are speaking about sports, business negotiations, or even presidential debates—is the ability to dictate the tone of the battle. Many of my young chess rivals preferred to keep the game in control.

They hankered for rating points, calculated what the next result would do to their national ranking, and their materialistic dispositions made them uncomfortable in the stormy positions in which I thrived.

The need to win keeps us conservative and then we don’t learn.

I have seen many people in diverse fields take some version of the 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.

While a fixation on results is certainly unhealthy, short-term goals can be useful developmental tools if they are balanced within a nurturing long-term philosophy.

She should praise good concentration, a good day’s work, a lesson learned.

When we have worked hard and succeed at something, we should be allowed to smell the roses. The key, in my opinion, is to recognize that the beauty of those roses lies in their transience.

We need to put ourselves out there, give it our all, and reap the lesson, win or lose. The fact of the matter is that there will be nothing learned from any challenge in which we don’t try our hardest. Growth comes at the point of resistance. We learn by pushing ourselves and finding what really lies at the outer reaches of our abilities.

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.

first we learn to flow with whatever comes. Then we learn to use whatever comes to our advantage.

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.

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.

She wasn’t hurt, but instead of reacting with alertness, she was spooked into anger,

I found myself playing to live up to Hollywood expectations instead of for love of the game.

A key component of high-level learning is cultivating a resilient awareness that is the older, conscious embodiment of a child’s playful obliviousness.

I believe that one of the most critical factors in the transition to becoming a conscious high performer is the degree to which your relationship to your pursuit stays in harmony with your unique disposition.

To my mind, the fields of learning and performance are an exploration of greyness—of the in-between.

I gradually overextended because I always felt on the brink of connecting, and before I knew it I was way off balance and stumbling in one direction or another.

If a big strong guy comes into a martial arts studio and someone pushes him, he wants to resist and push the guy back to prove that he is a big strong guy. The problem is that he isn’t learning anything by doing this. In order to grow, he needs to give up his current mind-set. He needs to lose to win.

it seemed that many other students were frozen in place, repeating their errors over and over, unable to improve because of a fear of releasing old habits. When Chen made suggestions, they would explain their thinking in an attempt to justify themselves. They were locked up by the need to be correct.

I have long believed that if a student of virtually any discipline could avoid ever repeating the same mistake twice—both technical and psychological—he or she would skyrocket to the top of their field.

So the aim is to minimize repetition as much as possible, by having an eye for consistent psychological and technical themes of error.

My response is that it is essential to have a liberating incremental approach that allows for times when you are not in a peak performance state.

What made him the greatest was not perfection, but a willingness to put himself on the line as a way of life.

The learning principle is to plunge into the detailed mystery of the micro in order to understand what makes the macro tick.

Once I experienced these principles, I could apply them to complex positions because they were in my mental framework.

It would be absurd to try to teach a new figure skater the principle of relaxation on the ice by launching straight into triple axels. She should begin with the fundamentals of gliding along the ice, turning, and skating backwards with deepening relaxation. Then, step by step, more and more complicated maneuvers can be absorbed, while she maintains the sense of ease that was initially experienced within the simplest skill set.

I call this method “Making Smaller Circles.”

In both fields, 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.

Surely many of my opponents knew more about Tai Chi than I did, but I was very good at what I did know.

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.

In software, this is not necessarily a particular language. More likely a problem domain, a market, an algorithm.

Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential.

On the video his hands look like bullets, but in the match they felt like clouds, gently rolling toward me, easily dodged, neutralized, pulled into overextension, exploited. No thought, just presence, pure flow . . . like a chess game.

In both cases, distraction was converted into fuel for high performance. In the chess scene, the shaking jolted my mind into clarity and I discovered the critical solution to the position.

In software development, that is often the thing. Finding a good solution.