The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

by Josh Waitzkin

Then we have another thought and stop before exhaling. The result is shallow breathing and deficient flushing of carbon dioxide from our systems, so our cells never have as much pure oxygen as they could. Tai Chi meditation is, among other things, a haven of unimpaired oxygenation.

it seemed like a natural progression: I was able to stay relaxed when doing Tai Chi on my own, and now the challenge would be to maintain and ultimately deepen that relaxation under increasing pressure.

the essence of Tai Chi Chuan as a martial art is not to clash with the opponent but to blend with his energy, yield to it, and overcome with softness. This was enigmatic and interesting, and maybe I’d be able to apply it to the rest of my life.

The martial philosophy behind Push Hands, in the language of the Tai Chi Classics, is “to defeat a thousand pounds with four ounces.”

there are countless manifestations of this principle inside and outside of Tai Chi—some physical, some psychological. If aggression meets empty space it tends to defeat itself.

The Tai Chi practitioner’s body needs to learn how to react quickly and naturally slip away from every conceivable strike. The problem is that we are conditioned to tense up and resist incoming or hostile force, so we have to learn an entirely new physiological response to aggression.

Before learning the body mechanics of nonresistance, I had to unlearn my current physical paradigm. Easier said than done.

one of the most challenging leaps for Push Hands students is to release the ego enough to allow themselves to be tossed around while they learn how not to resist.

he needs to give up his current mind-set. He needs to lose to win.

William Chen calls this investment in loss. Investment in loss is giving yourself to the learning process.

While I learned with open pores—no ego in the way—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.

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.

Of course such a feat is impossible—we are bound to repeat thematic errors, if only because many themes are elusive and difficult to pinpoint.

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

I was intimate with competition, so offbeat strategic dynamics were in my blood. I would notice structural flaws in someone’s posture, just as I might pick apart a chess position, or I’d play with combinations in a manner people were not familiar with. Pattern recognition was a strength of mine as well, and I quickly picked up on people’s tells.

The key is relaxed hip joints and spring-like body mechanics, so you can easily receive force by coiling it down through your structure. Working on my root, I began to feel like a tree, swaying in the wind up top, but deeply planted down low.

a large part of Tai Chi is releasing tension from your body through the practice of the meditative form. This is effectively a clearing of interference. Now, add in the coordination of breathing with the movements of the form, and what you have is body and mind energizing into action out of stillness.

With practice, the stillness is increasingly profound and the transition into motion can be quite explosive—this is where the dynamic pushing or striking power of Tai Chi emerges: the radical change from emptiness into fullness.

It’s clear that if in the beginning I had needed to look good to satisfy my ego, then I would have avoided that opportunity and all the pain that accompanied it.

Thinking back on my competitive life, I realize how defining these themes of Beginner’s Mind and Investment in Loss have been. Periodically, I have had to take apart my game and go through a rough patch.

In all disciplines, there are times when a performer is ready for action, and times when he or she is soft, in flux, broken-down or in a period of growth. Learners in this phase are inevitably vulnerable.

It is important to have perspective on this and allow yourself protected p...

How can we incorporate these ideas into the real world? In certain competitive arenas—our working lives, for example—there are seldom weeks in which performance does not matter.

it is not so difficult to have a beginner’s mind and to be willing to invest in loss when you are truly a beginner, but it is much harder to maintain that humility and openness to learning when people are watching and expecting you to perform.

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. We must take responsibility for ourselves, and not expect the rest of the world to understand what it takes to become the best that we can become.

It is common knowledge that Jordan made more last-minute shots to win the game for his team than any other player in the history of the NBA. What is not so well known, is that Jordan also missed more last-minute shots to lose the game for his team than any other player in the history of the game. What made him the greatest was not perfection, but a willingness to put himself on the line as a way of life.

My search for the essential principles lying at the hearts of and connecting chess, the martial arts, and in a broader sense the learning process, was inspired to a certain extent by Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

I believe this little anecdote has the potential to distinguish success from failure in the pursuit of excellence. The theme is depth over breadth. The learning principle is to plunge into the detailed mystery of the micro in order to understand what makes the macro tick.

Our obstacle is that we live in an attention-deficit culture. We are bombarded with more and more information on television, radio, cell phones, video games, the Internet. The constant supply of stimulus has the potential to turn us into addicts, always hungering for something new and prefabricated to keep us entertained.

When nothing exciting is going on, we might get bored, distracted, separated from the moment. So we look for new entertainment, s...

If caught in these rhythms, we are like tiny current-bound surface fish, floating along a two-dimensional world without any sense for the gorgeous abyss below. When these societally induced tendencies translate...

This leads to the most common error in the learning of martial arts: to take on too much at once.

Everyone races to learn more and more, but nothing is done deeply. Things look pretty but they are superficial, without a sound body mechanic or principled foundation.

Nothing is learned at a high level and what results are form collectors with fancy kicks and twirls that have absolutely no martial value. I had a different approach. From very early on, I felt that the moving meditation of Tai Chi Chuan has the primary martial purpose of allowing practitioners to refine certain fundamental principles.I

I practiced the Tai Chi meditative form diligently, many hours a day. At times I repeated segments of the form over and over, honing certain techniques while refining my body mechanics and deepening my sense of relaxation. I focused on small movements, sometimes spending hours moving my hand out a few inches, then releasing it back, energizing outwards, connecting my feet to my fingertips with less and less obstruction.

Practicing in this manner, I was able to sharpen my feeling for Tai Chi. When through painstaking refinement of a small movement I had the improved feeling, I could translate it onto other parts of the form, and suddenly everything would start flowing at a higher level.

The key was to recognize that the principles making one simple technique tick were the same fundamentals that fueled the whol...

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

However, if you study complicated chess openings and middlegames right off the bat, it is difficult to think in an abstract axiomatic language because all your energies are preoccupied with not blundering.

It soon became clear that the next step of my growth would involve making my existing repertoire more potent. It was time to take my new feeling and put it to action.

While some are content to call such abilities chi and stand in awe, I wanted to understand what was going on. The next phase of my martial growth would involve turning the large into the small.

My understanding of this process, in the spirit of my numbers to leave numbers method of chess study, is to touch the essence (for example, highly refined and deeply internalized body mechanics or feeling) of a technique, and then to incrementally condense the external manifestation of the technique while keeping true to its essence.

Over time expansiveness decreases while potency increases. I call this method “...

First, I practice the motion over and over in slow motion. We have to be able to do something slowly before we can have any hope of doing it correctly with speed.

Initially I’ll have tension in my shoulder or back, but then I’ll sooth it away, slowly repeating the movement until the correct body mechanics are in my skin. Over time, I’m not thinking about the path from foot to fist, I’m just feeling the ground connecting to my fingertips, as if my body is a conduit for the electrical impulse of a punch. Then I start speeding things up, winding up and delivering, over and over.

When hitting something instead of moving through empty space, I might start to get excited and throw my shoulder into the punch. This is a classic error. It breaks my structure and destroys the connection from foot to fingertip—many boxers make this mistake and come away with shoulder injuries. I want to punch without punching. No intention.

By now the body mechanics of the punch have been condensed in my mind to a feeling. I don’t need to hear or see any effect—my body knows when it is operating correctly by an internal sense of harmony.

A parallel would be a trained singer who, through years of practice, knows what the notes feel like vibrating inside. Then she is giving a concert in a big venue and the sound system is a nightmare. From onstage, she can’t hear herself at all—a surprisingly common occurrence. The great performer can deliver a virtuoso performance without hearing a thing, because she knows how the notes should feel coming out, even if her primary monitor—her ears—are temporarily unavailable.

This concept of Making Smaller Circles has been a critical component of my learning process in chess and the martial arts. 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.

I had condensed my body mechanics into a potent state, while most of my opponents had large, elegant, and relatively impractical repertoires. The fact is that when there is intense competition, those who succeed have slightly more honed skills than the rest.