The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

by Josh Waitzkin

One has to investigate the principle in one thing or one event exhaustively . . . Things and the self are governed by the same principle. If you understand one, you understand the other, for the truth within and the truth without are identical.

but none of this was helping my search for excellence, let alone for happiness.

I had spent my life devoted to artistic growth and was used to the sweaty-palmed sense of contentment one gets after many hours of intense reflection.

This peaceful feeling had nothing to do with external adulation, and I yearned for a return to that innocent, fertile time.

After thousands of slow-motion, ever-refined repetitions of certain movements, my body could become that shape instinctively.

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

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Once I was giving a forty-board simultaneous chess exhibition in Memphis and I realized halfway through that I had been playing all the games as Tai Chi. I wasn’t calculating with chess notation or thinking about opening variations . . . I was feeling flow, filling space left behind, riding waves like I do at sea or in martial arts. This was wild! I was winning chess games without playing chess.

My fascination with consciousness, study of chess and Tai Chi, love for literature and the ocean, for meditation and philosophy, all coalesced around the theme of tapping into the mind’s potential via complete immersion into one and all activities.

Love

My growth became defined by barrierlessness. Pure concentration didn’t allow thoughts or false constructions to impede my awareness, and I observed clear connections between different life experiences through the common mode of consciousness by which they were perceived.

Wow wow

As I cultivated openness to these connections, my life became flooded with intense learning experiences. I remember sitting on a Bermuda cliff one stormy afternoon, watching waves pound into the rocks. I was focused on the water trickling back out to sea and suddenly knew the answer to a chess problem I had been wrestling with for weeks.

love this

I felt as though I had transferred the essence of my chess understanding into my Tai Chi practice. But this didn’t make much sense, especially outside of my own head. What does essence really mean anyway? And how does one transfer it from a mental to a physical discipline?

I discovered some interesting foundations for my experience in ancient Indian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Greek texts—Upanishadic essence, Taoist receptivity, Neo-Confucian principle, Buddhist nonduality, and the Platonic forms all seemed to be a bizarre cross-cultural trace of what I was searching for.

I had to come to a deeper sense of concepts like essence, quality, principle, intuition, and wisdom in order to understand my own experience, let alone have any chance of communicating it.

In both my chess and martial arts lives, there is a method of study that has been critical to my growth. I sometimes refer to it as the study of numbers to leave numbers, or form to leave form.

Eventually the foundation is so deeply internalized that it is no longer consciously considered, but is lived. This process continuously cycles along as deeper layers of the art are soaked in.

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In order to write for beginners, I had to break down my chess knowledge incrementally, whereas for years I had been cultivating a seamless integration of the critical information.

I thrived under adversity. My style was to make the game complex and then work my way through the chaos. When the position was wild, I had huge confidence.

Bruce and I also spent a lot of time studying endgames, where the board is nearly empty and high-level principles combine with deep calculations to create fascinating battles.

While my opponents wanted to win in the openings, right off the bat, I guided positions into complicated middlegames and abstract endings. So as the game went on, th...

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

I have come to understand that these little breaks from the competitive intensity of my life have been and still are an integral part of my success. 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.

The boating life has also been a wonderful training ground for performance psychology. Living on the water requires constant presence, and the release of control.

A boat is always moving with the sea, lurching beneath your feet, and the only way to survive is to sink into rhythm with the waves and be ready for anything.

I learned at sea that virtually all situations can be handled as long as presenc...

that was about much more than fun and glory. It was about love and pain and passion and pushing myself to overcome.

the defining period of my life. I responded to heartbreak with hard work. I was self-motivated and moved by a powerful resolve.

The unconscious alerts the conscious player that there is something to be found, and then the search begins. I started calculating, putting things together. Slowly the plan crystallized in my mind.

Two questions arise. First, what is the difference that allows some to fit into that narrow window to the top? And second, what is the point?

If ambition spells probable disappointment, why pursue excellence?

In my opinion, the answer to both questions lies in a well-thought-out approach that inspires resilience, the ability to make connections between diverse pursuits, and day-to-day enjoyment of the process.

why ppl pursue excellence

Children who are “entity theorists”—that is, kids who have been influenced by their parents and teachers to think in this manner—are prone to use language like “I am smart at this” and to attribute their success or failure to an ingrained and unalterable level of ability.

They see their overall intelligence or skill level at a certain discipline to be a fixed entity, a thing that cannot evolve.

Incremental theorists, who have picked up a different modality of learning—let’s call them learning theorists—are more prone to describe their results with sentences like “I got it because I wor...

A child with a learning theory of intelligence tends to sense that with hard work, difficult material can be grasped—step by step, incrementally, the novice can become the master.

key: perspective to have on learning

Children who associate success with hard work tend to have a “mastery-oriented response” to challenging situations, while children who see themselves as just plain “smart” or “dumb,” or “good” or “bad” at something, have a “learned helplessness orientation.”

super imp

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.

mindset to hold

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.

the healthier and happier attitude to have

Layer by layer we built up my knowledge and my understanding of how to transform axioms into fuel for creative insight.

study the basics, the building blocks of creative insight

I was also gradually internalizing a marvelous methodology of learning—the play between knowledge, intuition, and creativity. From both educational and technical perspectives, I learned from the foundation up.

START AT THE FOUNDATION & love it

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.

“Since childhood, inclement conditions have inspired me, and as a young competitor I would guide critical chess games into positions of tremendous complexity with the confidence that I would be able to sort through the mayhem more effectively than my opponents.”

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.

good caution against faux process people

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.

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. It is drifting away even as we inhale.

good way to think about it

We enjoy the win fully while taking a deep breath, then we exhale, note the lesson learned, and move on to the next adventure.

nice analogy

When a few moments pass, in a quiet voice, she can ask Danny if he knows what happened in the game. Hopefully the language between parent and child will already be established so Danny knows his mom is asking about psychology, not chess moves (almost all mistakes have both technical and mental components—the chess lessons should be left for after the tournament, when Danny and his teacher study the games).

mistakes have technical and mental components

Did he lose his concentration? Did he fall into a downward spiral and make a bunch of mistakes in a row? Was he overconfident? Impatient? Did he get psyched out by a trash talker? Was he tired? Danny will have an idea about his psychological slip, and taking on that issue will be a short-term goal in the continuing process—

psych mistakes

Through these dialogues, Danny will learn that every loss is an opportunity for growth. He will become increasingly astute psychologically and sensitive to bad habits.

As adults, we have to take responsibility for ourselves and nurture a healthy, liberated mind-set. We need to put ourselves out there, give it our all, and reap the lesson, win or lose.

Of course there were plateaus, periods when my results leveled off while I internalized the information necessary for my next growth spurt, but I didn’t mind. I had a burning love for chess and so I pushed through the rocky periods with a can-do attitude.