When we have worked hard and succeed at something, we should be allowed to smell the roses. The key, in my opinion, is to recognise that the beauty of those roses lies in their transience. It is drifting away even as we inhale. We enjoy the win fully while taking a deep breath, then we exhale, note the lesson learned, and move on to the next adventure.  loc. 659

A key component of high-level learning is cultivating a resilient awareness that is the older, conscious embodiment of a child’s playful obliviousness.  loc. 1040

I rediscovered a relationship to ambition and art that has allowed me the freedom to create like a child under world championship pressure. This journey, from child back to child again, is at the very core of my understanding of success.  loc. 1042

If aggression meets empty space it tends to defeat itself.  loc. 1311

I recently finished reading ‘The Art of Learning' by Josh Waitzkin. It was an incredibly inspiring book. Josh weaves together a number of threads to explain his method for getting to world class performance, both in Chess and in Tai Chi Push Hands. The book is a beautiful demonstration of the importance of self awareness and reflection. Fundamentally, the truths therein have been discovered by Josh, simply through observation of himself, and critical reflection.

Below is first a video summarising the book, then a mind map, then my book notes in full. It took me a while to tie together the pieces of Josh's model in my mind. I hope that the following clearly conveys the book's essence.

 

Introduction

Numbers to leave numbers,  loc. 149., By ‘numbers to leave numbers’, Waitzkin is referring to how what, for the novice, begins as a formula, or steps to success, eventually becomes ingrained in the expert. This can occur to such an extent that it can be difficult for the expert to dissect their methods to then describe what they are actually doing. Waitzkin speaks of how the goal should be to move these fundamentals from procedural steps to instinct.

Part 1: The Foundation

1: Innocent Moves

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. Many teachers have no feel for this balance and try to force their students into cookie-cutter moulds. I have run into quite a few egomaniacal instructors like this over the years and have come to believe that their method is profoundly destructive for students in the long run—in any case, it certainly would not have worked with me.  loc. 260

Despite significant outside pressure, my parents and Bruce decided to keep me out of tournaments until I had been playing chess for a year or so, because they wanted my relationship to the game to be about learning and passion first, and competition a distant second.  loc. 285

2: Losing to Win

This quote highlights to me the importance of rest time, and even cross training, to help you to spark creativity and to remain inspired:

There have been many years when leaving my New York life felt like career suicide—my chess rivals were taking lessons and competing in every weekend tournament while I was on a boat crashing through big waves. But I would come back with new ideas and a full tank of energy and determination.  loc. 352

 3: Two Approaches to Learning

In this chapter, Waitzkin introduces readers to the importance of mindset.

This child was paralyzed by an ever-deepening cycle of entity indoctrination.  loc. 564

4: Loving the Game

This chapter is all about competition and dealing with the fallout, whether it be success or failure:

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.  loc. 607 

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. This issue of process vs. goal is very delicate, and I want to carefully define how I feel the question should be navigated.  loc. 635

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. We enjoy the win fully while taking a deep breath, then we exhale, note the lesson learned, and move on to the next adventure.  loc. 659

Of course there were plateaus, periods when my results levelled off while I internalised the information necessary for my next growth spurt, but I didn’t mind.  loc. 703

5: The Soft Zone “Lose Yourself”

When Waitzkin writes of ‘The Soft Zone' he is talking about a psychological state. This is analogous to the concept of ‘flow'. In order to enter the soft zone, and to stay there, it is necessary to spend time learning to work with your emotions. 

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.  loc. 759

On the disruptive tactic of one of Josh's chess opponents: 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 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.  loc. 801

6: The Downward Spiral

7: Changing Voice

This chapter is vital to understand about being true to your own voice, and playing to your strengths.

My whole chess psychology was about holding on to what was, because I was fundamentally homesick. When I finally noticed this connection, I tackled transitions in both chess and life. loc. 1001

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.  loc. 1004

8: Breaking Stallions

A key component of high-level learning is cultivating a resilient awareness that is the older, conscious embodiment of a child’s playful obliviousness.  loc. 1040

I rediscovered a relationship to ambition and art that has allowed me the freedom to create like a child under world championship pressure. This journey, from child back to child again, is at the very core of my understanding of success.  loc. 1042

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. There will inevitably be times when we need to try new ideas, release our current knowledge to take in new information—but it is critical to integrate this new information in a manner that does not violate who we are. By taking away our natural voice, we leave ourselves without a center of gravity to balance us as we navigate the countless obstacles along our way.  loc. 1044

In the following, Dvoretsky is a famous chess player who had a very rigid style, in contrast to the more improvisational style of Waitzkin: As it was, perhaps because of his own playing style, my full-time coach was drawn to Dvoretsky’s conclusions—and so from the age of sixteen a large part of my chess education involved distancing myself from my natural talents and integrating this Karpovian brand of chess. As a result, I lost my center of gravity as a competitor.  loc. 1138

Part II: My Second Art

9: Beginner’s Mind

This chapter is about the importance of patience

I’ve seen many emerge bored from Chen’s most inspiring classes, because they wanted to be spoonfed and did not open their receptors to his subtleties.  loc. 1244

10: Investment in Loss

If aggression meets empty space it tends to defeat itself.  loc. 1311

Thinking back on my competitive life, I realise how defining these themes of Beginner’s Mind and Investment in Loss have been.  loc. 1392

11: Making Smaller Circles

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.  loc. 1423

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 “Making Smaller Circles.”  loc. 1472

This is where Making Smaller Circles comes into play. 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.  loc. 1497

Now I begin to slowly, incrementally, condense my movements while maintaining that feeling. Instead of a big wind-up in the hips, I coil a little less, and then I release the punch.  loc. 1503

The fact is that when there is intense competition, those who succeed have slightly more honed skills than the rest. 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. Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential.  loc. 1523

12: Using Adversity

How can we turn our seeming disadvantages into advantages?

there are three critical steps in a resilient performer’s evolving relationship to chaotic situations.  loc. 1552. 1: Learn to be at peace with imperfection, 2: Use imperfection to your advantage, 3: Learn to create ripples in your consciousness, ‘little jolts that spur us along, so we are constantly inspired whether or not external conditions are inspiring'.

The importance of undulating between external and internal (or concrete and abstract; technical and intuitive) training applies to all disciplines, and unfortunately the internal tends to be neglected.  loc. 1582

In all athletic disciplines, it is the internal work that makes the physical mat time click,  loc. 1587

On a deeper level, this principle can be applied psychologically whenever opposing forces clash. Whether speaking of a corporate negotiation, a legal battle, or even war itself, if the opponent is temporarily tied down qualitatively or energetically more than you are expending to tie it down, you have a large advantage.  loc. 1604

The following refers to when Josh significantly damaged his shoulder, and had his arm in a cast. 

There was also an intriguing physical component of my recovery. I wanted to compete in the Nationals, so bizarre though it may sound I resolved not to atrophy. At this point in my life I was very involved in the subtle internal dynamics of the body through Tai Chi meditation. I had an idea that I might be able to keep my right side strong by intense visualization practice. My method was as follows: I did a daily resistance workout routine on my left side, and after every set I visualized the workout passing to the muscles on the right. My arm was in a cast, so there was no actual motion possible—but I could feel the energy flowing into the unused muscles. I admit it was a shot in the dark, but it worked. My whole body felt strong, and when the doctor finally took off my cast he was stunned.  loc. 1611

13: Slowing Down Time

As a child I had a fear that I could never be a chess master because I wouldn’t be able to fit all the information into my mind.  loc. 1644

Once my hand healed and the Nationals were over, the question on my mind was: how can I make time slow down without breaking a limb? Everyone has heard stories of women lifting cars off their children or of time seeming to slow down during a car accident or a fall down the stairs. Clearly, there is a survival mechanism that allows human beings to channel their physical and mental capacities to an astonishing degree of intensity in life-or-death moments. But can we do this at will?  loc. 1655

Chunking relates to the mind’s ability to assimilate large amounts of information into a cluster that is bound together by certain patterns or principles particular to a given discipline. The initial studies on this topic were, conveniently, performed on chess players who were considered to be the clearest example of sophisticated unconscious pattern integration. The Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot (1965) and years later the team of William Simon and Herbert Chase (1973) put chess players of varying skill levels in front of chess positions and then asked them to re-create those positions on an adjacent empty board. The psychologists taped and studied the eye patterns and timing of the players while they performed the tasks.  loc. 1681

This is where things get interesting.  loc. 1733

This next paragraph really highlights what the book is trying to help readers achieve.

We are at the moment when psychology begins to transcend technique. Everyone at a high level has a huge amount of chess understanding, and much of what separates the great from the very good is deep presence, relaxation of the conscious mind, which allows the unconscious to flow unhindered.  loc. 1733

The brilliant neurologist Oliver Sacks has explored the imagery of shutter speed in an article for The New Yorker and in other writings about the different perceptual patterns of his patients with neurological diseases.  loc. 1816

14: The Illusion of the Mystical

A Chinese saying…

If the opponent does not move, then I do not move. At the opponent’s slightest move, I move first.  loc. 1825

Great players are all, by definition, very clever about what they show over the chessboard, but, in life’s more mundane moments, even the most cunning chess psychologists can reveal certain essential nuances of character. If, over dinner, a Grandmaster tastes something bitter and faintly wrinkles his nose, there might be an inkling of a tell lurking. Impatience while standing on line at the buffet might betray a problem sitting with tension. It’s amazing how much you can learn about someone when they get caught in the rain! Some will run with their hands over their heads, others will smile and take a deep breath while enjoying the wind. What does this say about one’s relationship to discomfort? The reaction to surprise? The need for control?  loc. 1867

Quarterbacks flick their eyes and send safeties flying all over the football field. Real estate moguls furrow their brows, act impatient, check their watches to lull buyers into nervous offers. A chess player observes a rhythm, then sits, lets his clock tick even though a decision has already been reached, then finally makes his move just as the opponent predictably gets up to go to the bathroom. What now? Take a minute, go to the bathroom, come back. Control the pace of the game. Awareness of these dynamics can make you hard to manipulate, and can allow you to turn the tables on even the savviest of conditioners.  loc. 1999

Part III: Bringing it All Together

15: The Power of Presence

16: Searching for the Zone

Jim Loehr, who ran a performance training center called LGE in Orlando, Florida. LGE (recently renamed the Human Performance Institute)  loc. 2123

Jim told me that he was also an avid chess player and had followed my career for a long time. We fell into a conversation about the psychological parallels of top-notch chess competition and quarterbacking in the NFL. I was amazed by how many of the same issues we wrestled with. I think that this conversation in the LGE gym was my first real inkling of how universal the arts of learning and performance really are.  loc. 2136

For a number of years, when notating my games, I had also written down how long I thought on each move. This had the purpose of helping me manage my time usage, but after my first session with Dave, it also led to the discovery of a very interesting pattern. Looking back over my games, I saw that when I had been playing well, I had two- to ten-minute, crisp thinks. When I was off my game, I would sometimes fall into a deep calculation that lasted over twenty minutes and this “long think” often led to an inaccuracy. What is more, if I had a number of long thinks in a row, the quality of my decisions tended to deteriorate.  loc. 2154

Striegel and Loehr told me about their concept of Stress and Recovery. The physiologists at LGE had discovered that in virtually every discipline, one of the most telling features of a dominant performer is the routine use of recovery periods. Players who are able to relax in brief moments of inactivity are almost always the ones who end up coming through when the game is on the line.  loc. 2158

The physical conditioners at LGE taught me to do cardiovascular interval training on a stationary bike that had a heart monitor. I would ride a bike keeping my RPMs over 100, at a resistance level that made my heart rate go to 170 beats per minute after ten minutes of exertion. Then I would lower the resistance level of the bike and go easy for a minute—my heart rate would return to 144 or so. Then I would sprint again, at a very high level of resistance, and my heart rate would reach 170 again after a minute. Next I would go easy for another minute before sprinting again, and so on. My body and mind were undulating between hard work and release. The recovery time of my heart got progressively shorter as I continued to train this way. As I got into better condition, it took more work to raise my heart rate, and less time to lower my heart rate during rest: soon my rest intervals were only forty-five seconds and my sprint times longer.  loc. 2181

Summary of Josh's learning approach

this is what my entire approach to learning is based on—breaking down the artificial barriers between our diverse life experiences so all moments become enriched by a sense of interconnectedness.  loc. 2215

17: Building Your Trigger

This is a problem I have seen in many inconsistent performers. They are frustrated and confused trying to find an inspiring catalyst for peak performance, as if the perfect motivational tool is hovering in the cosmos waiting for discovery. My method is to work backward and create the trigger. I asked Dennis when he felt closest to serene focus in his life. He thought for a moment and told me it was when he played catch with his twelve-year-old son, Jack.  loc. 2270

all people have one or two activities that move them in this manner,  loc. 2274

The next step in the process is the critical one: after he had fully internalized his routine, I suggested that he do it the morning before going to an important meeting.  loc. 2297

Let me emphasize that your personal routine should be determined by your individual tastes. If Dennis had so chosen, he could have done cartwheels, somersaults, screamed into the wind, and then taken a swim before playing catch with his son,  loc. 2303

I had learned from Jack Groppel at LGE to eat five almonds every forty-five minutes during a long chess game, to stay in a steady state of alertness and strength.  loc. 2328

18: Making Sandals

As we enter into this discussion, please keep in mind the three steps I described as being critical to resilient, self-sufficient performance. First, we learn to flow with distraction, like that blade of grass bending to the wind. Then we learn to use distraction, inspiring ourselves with what initially would have thrown us off our games. Finally we learn to re-create the inspiring settings internally. We learn to make sandals.  loc. 2404

The approach of one master chess player

sitting quietly in his room for a period of introspection. His goal was to observe his mood down to the finest nuance. Was he feeling nostalgic, energetic, cautious, dreary, impassioned, inspired, confident, insecure? His next step was to build his game plan around his mood. If he was feeling cautious, quiet, not overwhelmingly confident, he tended to choose an opening that took fewer risks and led to a position that harmonized with his disposition. If feeling energized, aggressive, exceedingly confident, he would pick an opening that allowed him to express himself in a more creative vein. There were countless subtle variations of mood and of opening. Instead of imposing an artificial structure on his match strategy, Petrosian tried to be as true to himself as possible on a moment-to-moment basis. He believed that if his mood and the chess position were in synch, he would be most inclined to play with the greatest inspiration.  loc. 2560

19: Bringing it All Together

it is my hope that you will take these ideas and make them your own. Make them fit with your natural disposition.  loc. 2602

I have talked about style, personal taste, being true to your natural disposition. This theme is critical at all stages of the learning process. If you think about the high-end learning principles that I have discussed in this book, they all spring out of the deep, creative plunge into an initially small pool of information.  loc. 2693

See location 2695 (page 225) for a summary of each of the chapters

20: Taiwan

If you ever hear martial artists talking about a “pummeling war” they don’t mean that two people are clobbering one another, but that they are fighting for underhooks.  loc. 2895

Afterword

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.  loc. 3148