The Art of Learning - Josh Waitzkin
One-Sentence Summary:
Learning bottom-up tactics/strategies for optimal performance from a chess grandmaster turned world champion martial artist
Rating On Time Of Review:
Enjoyable but not seminal. A part of me thinks a lot of this is applicable in fixed areas of competition but I do see some application on wicked environments (i.e. career and investing). Overall, it’s a decent book that worked to shred conventional ideas of training and practice.
Book notes below. My thoughts are in italics. Opinions are mine during the time of review.
Date Reviewed: June 1, 2020
Background information that is helpful: Josh Waitzkin was a child chess prodigy and became a grandmaster early in his career and his career became the inspiration for the movie “Chasing Bobby Fischer”. After chess, Josh went onto become a world champion in Taichi Push Hands and then moved over to Brazilian Ju Jitsu. This book is part autobiographical and part a look into his learning process that started with a foundation in chess but seeing how it can transcend into various genres.
Josh coaches a number of high performers with many in the world of finance. I picked out the book not only to learn how to learn but also because Josh leads the life I aspire for.
Chapter 4
Make losing part of the regular training process. Josh would dominate chess matches with peers but continued to seek out slightly stronger opponents so losing would be part of the process to maintain a ‘healthy perspective’ on the game.
“Loss is an opportunity for growth.”
Chapter 6
“Problems set in if the performer has a brittle dependence on the safety of absolute perfection or duplication. Then an error triggers fear, detachment, uncertainty, or confusion that muddies the decision-making process.” / When the negative spiral is triggered from a shift in environment… take a breadth. Stop and purposely distance from the current situation with deep breathes, splashing water on the face or what not. But a negative spiral can be a slippery slope that messes with your brain.
Chapter 7
Staying in tune with your emotions and how you feel to know when to quit/leave something / “While my understanding of the game deepened, I continued to be uneven and, at times, self-defeating in competition. I was consistently unhappy before leaving for tournaments, preferring my lifestyle of introspection and young romance.”
In addition to recording chess moves from prior games, Josh would record his emotional state during the game and while making the moves as well. This reminds me of the activity log I kept to measure flow states. Probably worthwhile to keep a log of emotions in the investing decision journal as well.
Numbers to leave numbers: “I am describing a process in which technical information is integrated into what feels like natural intelligence…A good literal example of this process, one that does in fact involve numbers, is a beginner’s veery first chess lesson. All chess players learn that the pieces have numerical equivalents - bishops and knights are wroth three pawns, a rook is five pawns, a queen is nine.” / Novices count the value of pieces when considering exchanges but over time, it all gets blurred into a fully integrated value system where you aren’t doing mathematical calculations but rather the move is intuitive
Josh started merging chess with life. A rigid and almost too ‘analytical’ of a playing style that was responding to change was reflective of his own life and his struggle with his changing life environment reflected in his game play as he struggled to deal with the struggles of strategy continuously being altered. He managed this by learning to pause and reset his mind during chess games through deep breathing and accepting all change is a natural course in his daily life. This seems to indicate to me the truth behind how a company/business is a reflection of the individual and who they are. There is no work life balance. Only harmony. A desire to compartmentalize life reflects the inner state of the individual.
Chapter 8
“While a child make a beam a playground, high-stress performers often transform the beam into a tightrope….. A key component of high-level learning is cultivating a resilient awareness that is the older, conscious embodiment of a child’s playful obliviousness.” / Striving to not take myself so seriously. But also to embrace the natural curiosity and making ‘Fun’ a key element in the process.
“My chess career ended with me teetering on a string above leaping flames, and in time, through a different medium, 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.”
“Training with Yuri Razuvaev feels much more like a spiritual retreat than an Orwellian nightmare. Razuvaev’s method depends upon a keen appreciation fo each student’s personality and chess if predispositions. Yuri has an amazing psychological acumen, and his instructional style begins with a close study of his student’s chess games. In remarkably short order, he discovers the core of the player’s style and the obstructions that are blocking pure self-expression. Then eh devises an individualized training program that systematically deepens the student’s knowledge of chess while nurturing his or her natural gifts. Mark Dvoretsky, on the other hand, has created a comprehensive training system that he believes all students should fit into. His method when working with a pupil is to break the student down rather brutally and then stuff him or her into a cookie cutter mold of his training system. In my opinion this approach can have profoundly negative consequences for spirited young students.” / Amen. A reflection by Josh on his contrasting chess coaches.. Razuvaev and Dvoretsky. The latter had a one-and-done approach where people who thrived under his coaching system would do fine but many were destroyed by his approach of destroying his students with complex chess moves and only those who thrived on that approach did well. This is the top-down authoritarian approach. Razuvaev’s is bottom-up and to me this indicates how some people are better suited to be coaches that bring out the best in individuals.
“…. the way for someone like myself to study high-level positional chess is to study the way the great players of my nature have integrated this element of the art.” / Razauvaev told Josh that he was a great “attacking” player and that was his nature. Some say that studying ‘like-minded’ people is a trap because it can lead to confirming your bias… but that’s a nice problem to have once you reach that pinnacle of being a ‘great’. Until then, it’s probably a worthwhile proposition to find people like you… who have similar natures as you… that are like-minded… and study the hell out of them. This can be said about investing as well as in strength training. Reminds me of the Braverman test for athletes. Personalize the development/training.
“In most everyday life exerpiences, there seems to be a tangible connection between opposites….. heartbreak can give the greatest insight into the value of love….. sickness is the most potent ambassador for healthy living….. who knows water like a man dying of thirst.” / as Munger says: “INVERT, ALWAYS INVERT.” This also explains why near death experiences lead to people deciding how they want to live. The stoic view of frugality and essentialism may also help lead to figuring out what one really values and cherishes in life. Losing a chunk of money in investing will also be instrumental in cementing lessons of what not to do.
“Jackson Pollock could draw like a camera, but instead he chose to splatter paint in a wild manner that pulsed with emotion. He studied form to leave form.” / Learn the rules like a pro to break them like an artist. Examine people with your nature and try to gain insights on the ‘opposites’.
Chapter 12
“… three critical steps in a resilient performer’s evolving relationship to chaotic situations. First, we have to learn to be at peace with imperfection…. image of a blade of grass bending to hurricane-force winds in contrast to a brittle twig snapping under pressure. Next… we learn to use that imperfection to our advantage… using a shaking world as a catalyst for insight. The third step of this process… is to learn to create ripples in our consciousness, little jolts to spur us along, so we are constantly inspired whether or not external conditions are inspiring……a deep mastery of performance psychology involves the internal creation of inspiring conditions.” / the process of becoming anti-fragile. Accept the error and imperfection. Use that as a new baseline to work up from. Implement small wins for momentum.
“In my martial arts life, every time I tweak my body, well-intentioned people like my mother suggest I take a few weeks off training. What they don’t realize is that if I were to stop training whenever something hurt, I would spend my whole year on the couch. Almost without exception, I am back on the mats the next day, figuring out how to use my new situation to heighten elements of my game.” / never take yourself out of the game. Each ‘appeared’ setback is an opportunity to change up your game and evolve your training. Just like how COVID + knee surgery is an opportunity to get into calisthenics training for me.
Josh refers to using the ‘internal solution’.. a method of forcibly creating adverse conditions as a source of creative inspiration and constantly handicapping oneself to develop and further growth.
Chapter 13
“.. Intuition is our most valuable compass in this world. It is the bridge between the unconscious and the conscious mind.”
Relational value. Study the individual objects to understand their value relative to others. Josh applies this to chess pieces.. but this can be said of companies and investing as well. “Each piece’s power is purely relational, depending upon such variables as pawn structure and surrounding forces… Over time each chess principle loses rigidity, and you get better and better at reading the subtle signs of qualitative relativity.. The stronger chess player is often the one who is less attached to a dogmatic interpretation of the principles. This leads to a whole new layer of principles.. those that consist of the exceptions to the initial principles.”
Chapter 15
“In every discipline, the ability to be clearheaded, present, cool under fire is much of what separates the best from the mediocre.”
“… if deep, fluid presence becomes second nature, then life, art, and learning take on the richness that will continually surprise and delight.” / cultivate flow.
“Those who excel are those who maximize each moment’s creative potential - for these masters of living, presence to the day-to-tday learning process is akin to that purity of focus others dream of achieving in rare climactic moments when everything is on the line.”
Focus on always being present in practice. “Presence must be like breathing.”
Chapter 16
“…’long think’ often led to an inaccuracy…. If I had a number of long thinks in a row, the quality of my decisions tended to deteriorate.” / intuition… which gets hardened by countless practice… it also reminds me of Occam’s Razor. The goal is to get to the point in training where the foundations are so deep that intuition becomes the most powerful form of decision making. I wonder how this compass in a wicked vs. Fixed environment.
“…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.” / A similar model to strength training where you want plenty of rest in between sets to be able to pump out near perfect repetition with each set for proper strength development. This is a reflection of Tsatsouline’s Grease the Groove technique as well. Long breaks and sprints… a similar approach to work could be useful… a bout of deep work followed by a bout of emptiness of the mind. A complete disconnect is required.
This chapter continues to provide examples of what auto regulation training is. The idea of stopping a set while you still have energy left in the tank and not pushing oneself to exhaustion. It’s about consistent application of training through more and more volume. Training till exhaustion limits this because the body needs much more time to recover from such a training system. This is also the idea of “slack” implemented in ecosystems.
Chapter 17
“Not only do we have to be good at waiting, we have to love it. Because waiting is not waiting, it is life. Too many of us live without fully engaging our minds, waiting for that moment when our real lives begin…. Of course the sad truth is that if we are not present to the moment, our true love could come and go and we wouldn’t even notice. And we will have become someone other than the you or I who would be able to embrace it. I believe an appreciation for simplicity, the everyday - the ability to dive deeply into the banal and discover life’s hidden richness - is where success, let alone happiness, emerges.”
Thoughts on creating ‘triggers’ for focus… playing video games results in intense focus for me. If that is the case, then structuring a set of triggers like reading, journaling and meditation before playing a game and implementing those same triggers before a meeting or hitting a deep work zone may create a zone of flow and focus during the work at hand. Worth experimenting with.
Disclaimer - I’m writing this for myself. For my past, present and future self. Much of what I write is my opinion. If it somehow ignites agreement in you then great, I’d love to hear about it. If it sparks disagreement in you, don’t reach out because I don’t care for it. There always are obvious exceptions and the flawed person in me hasn’t considered them all.