The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

by Josh Waitzkin

Once you know what good feels like, you can zero in on it, search it out regardless of the pursuit.

It’s amazing how you can land on your feet and balanced if you know how to stay calm and principled, embrace the chaos, while you are spun with a torque that sends sweat hitting walls ten feet away. But

When I think about creativity, it is always in relation to a foundation. We have our knowledge. It becomes deeply internalized until we can access it without thinking about it. Then we have a leap that uses what we know to go one or two steps further. We make a discovery. Most people stop here and hope that they will become inspired and reach that state of “divine insight” again. In my mind, this is a missed opportunity. Imagine that you are building a pyramid of knowledge. Every level is constructed of technical information and principles that explain that information and condense it into chunks (as I explained in the chapter Slowing Down Time).

In time, with years of creative training and a willingness to invest in loss, to take blow after blow and get blasted off the pedestals as a way of life, the game starts to slow down.

At the highest level of the sport, you are living inside your opponent’s head and directing what he comes at you with.

The only thing we can really count on is getting surprised. No matter how much preparation we do, in the real tests of our lives, we’ll be in unfamiliar terrain. Conditions might not be calm or reasonable. It may feel as though the whole world is stacked against us. This is when we have to perform better than we ever conceived of performing.

I believe the key is to have prepared in a manner that allows for inspiration, to have laid the foundation for us to create under the wildest pressures we ever imagined.

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.