In The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin argues that a passionate commitment to learning leads to both competitive success and a fulfilling life. He explains what he learned in becoming the U.S. Junior Chess Champion as well as World Champion in Tai Chi Chuan Push Hands, arguing that excellence comes from unwavering focus, tenacious training, and creative self-actualization.
Waitzkin is an International Master in chess and World Champion in Tai Chi Push Hands, the combative variant of tai chi. A chess prodigy, he began playing at the age of 6, drawn to the streetside boards set up by New York City park hustlers. Soon after, Bruce Pandolfini (a prominent chess coach) took Waitzkin on as a student, and he went on to win several national championships in his early teens. Waitzkin became a National Master at age 13 and an International Master at 16.
Waitzkin shifted away from chess in his late teens, as fame and coaching methods conflicted with his well-being. Soon after, he began to study tai chi under master William C. C. Chen, who later invited Waitzkin to study Push Hands. Through his twenties, he rose through the US tournament rankings and went on to win the World Championship in Taiwan in 2004.
In this book, Waitzkin explains how he was able to rise to the top of two seemingly unrelated disciplines. In our guide, we’ll explain Waitzkin’s basic method and mindset, cover his intermediate techniques, and finish with his advanced strategies. In addition, we’ve consolidated Waitzkin’s repeated emphasis on “presence” into one section and compared his learning approach to perspectives from The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed, and others.
Waitzkin says that presence—which he defines as deep, focused calm—is essential for the mastery of any skill. In competition, your awareness becomes sharper, yet must remain calm and focused—like a samurai standing relaxed, yet intensely ready, when facing his opponent.
(Shortform note: Waitzkin’s emphasis on presence evokes Eckhart Tolle’s perspective in The Power of Now, where Tolle argues that living intensely “in the here and now” is the only path to true fulfillment. While the two approach life differently—Waitzkin with an intense, single-minded focus on learning and growth and Tolle with an emphasis on spiritual enlightenment—presence is key to both. In other words, that Waitzkin’s life is so different from Tolle’s, yet both center on presence, suggests that presence is a flexible tool for each individual to find and explore their own path toward fulfillment.)
Waitzkin gives two key reasons presence is important in life and competition:
Reason #1: Presence equips you to navigate the turbulence of life. In our unpredictable world, we need to navigate many obstacles to success, whether they’re external (like a noisy arena) or internal (like emotional turbulence).
Waitzkin says that a calm, present mind helps you handle physical, mental, and emotional turbulence by empowering you to embrace distraction and process your emotions.
(Shortform note: It’s helpful to think of Waitzkin’s notion of presence as mindfulness. Recent research supports his claim that presence is a key tool for emotional regulation. Practicing mindful presence develops your capacity for emotional nonreactivity—the capacity to experience your emotions without allowing them to dictate your behavior.)
Reason #2: Presence is the key to competitive success. Being present helps you focus on growing and allows you to regain perspective when you lose. Waitzkin recounts an early loss in his chess career that knocked him off balance. By separating himself from the game and focusing on presence, he was able to return refreshed and reinspired.
Waitzkin points out that when you compete at a high level, the margins are so slim that being a tiny bit more present than your opponent is a significant advantage. Presence helps you reach flow, or “the zone,” which can give you a leg up on your opponents.
(Shortform note: Mindfulness plays a huge role in modern athletic training. Athletes like Derek Jeter, Kobe Bryant, and tennis champ Bianca Andreescu (who defeated Serena Williams), all cite presence as key to their success. Amy Saltzmann, a mindfulness coach, suggests that mindfulness training could help amateur athletes to climb the ranks faster: Since mindfulness hasn’t fully permeated professional athletics, those who start practicing it while young can gain a mental and emotional advantage over their competition.)
Waitzkin explains that learning happens through trial and error. When you make mistakes, you have the opportunity to grow. One step at a time, you can reflect on errors to grow your skills.
For example, you can learn a guitar chord by trying to play it, adjusting your fingers based on what sounds wrong, and repeating until you reach the correct form.
(Shortform note: In Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed argues that error is inherent in learning. Mistakes reveal the flaws in our skills and show us where to grow. As Syed shows, incremental growth is profoundly powerful: It’s the mechanism that drives evolution. Organisms and ecosystems evolve by undergoing continuous stress tests (storms, drought, predation, and so on) that select for the fittest creatures. So while “learn from your mistakes” might sound like a platitude, it’s profoundly useful.)
Each time you act, err, adjust, and repeat, you make an incremental improvement. Waitzkin says that to learn is to build increment on increment on increment. Each addition builds your knowledge, demonstrating that success comes from mistakes.
How to Learn From Your Mistakes
In Black Box Thinking, Syed gives a step-by-step process for how to learn from errors. The key is to set up a tight feedback loop between the steps you take and the lessons you learn:
Take action using your current knowledge. Start practicing that habit you’ve been thinking about (for example, beginning a daily 30-minute morning cardio session).
Observe how things go and gather data. You might keep a simple log in which to reflect daily on how you feel after your workout.
Note any mistakes and analyze what went wrong. Maybe you missed a day, and you notice it was because you were tired from staying up too late.
Use your data to make a simple, actionable change. Incorporate the feedback into your next action. In the above situation, you might adjust by turning your phone off at 9 p.m. to avoid late-night use.
To improve through trial and error, you need to have a growth mindset. Waitzkin explores Carol Dweck’s research on “incremental” versus “entity” theories of intelligence. In Mindset (Dweck’s book on the topic) she refers to these as “growth” and “fixed” mindsets. Here, we’ll examine Waitzkin’s interpretation of the two mindsets as they relate to skill-building and competition.
With a growth mindset, you believe that you can develop your abilities through patient practice, building increment upon increment, and you see challenges as opportunities to stretch your current capacities.
(Shortform note: Angela Duckworth's notion of Grit is closely related to the growth mindset. Duckworth argues that grit—a personality trait combining hard work, resilience, and perseverance—predicts success better than talent or luck, because those who drop out when the going gets tough won't make it to the top even if they’re naturally talented. It’s worth noting that in addition to advocating for a growth mindset, Waitzkin himself possessed natural talent as a 6-year-old chess prodigy and skilled meta-learner.)
In contrast, those with a fixed mindset believe that ability is inherent and set in stone. Waitzkin warns that a fixed mindset is dangerous because it doesn’t prepare you for obstacles. Instead, people with fixed mindsets tend to give up when confronted with challenges that surpass their current abilities.
A fixed mindset focuses on outcomes over process, Waitzkin says. So competitors with a fixed mindset worry about whether they’ll succeed, rather than focusing on what they can learn. When you inevitably experience adversity, a fixed mindset will fall short—if you fixate on outcomes, you’re more likely to fall apart when you lose.
(Shortform note: Fixed mindsets aren’t necessarily fixed. In fact, one argument suggests that you can choose your mindset based on the given situation. Furthermore, in some instances, a fixed mindset is preferable. For example, assuming a fixed mindset is effective when you need to quickly complete a task, especially if it’s for the benefit of a group in a collaborative situation. In other cases, such as when you’re working on a solo project, you can switch to a growth mindset and focus on developing and improving your own skills.)
Rather than focusing on a desired outcome, Waitzkin recommends committing to the process of growth—to daily practice, focused patience, and adaptation in the face of obstacles. According to Waitzkin, this approach keeps you resilient, since you embrace failure as part of the journey and learn from it instead of fearing it.
(Shortform note: It’s worth noting that you don’t need to immediately learn from your failure, and it’s okay to feel strong emotions after a heartbreaking loss. Waitzkin acknowledges this by detailing how after losing an important youth tournament, he needed a few weeks away from the game to clear his mind and reset. You also don’t need to be an implacable growth robot: Leaning on family and friends can help you process your emotions and get back on your feet. In this way, close community is a valuable extension of your own mindset.)
Waitzkin recommends starting with the fundamentals of your skill. Begin by studying the basic elements of your skill, one by one. Any skill is composed of simple, elemental chunks of know-how. For example, when learning to play basketball, you’d learn how to dribble, pass, shoot, and so on.
(Shortform note: In Fluent Forever, Gabriel Wyner explains that we should learn languages from the bottom up—starting with the sounds, moving to single words, then to grammatical patterns, and interspersing conversation practice to tie it all together. This is much like Waitzkin’s recommended approach: Practice one element at a time to build up your skill.)
Patiently practice each element until it becomes intuitive. Waitzkin calls this form to leave form: Through practice, a conscious effort becomes unconscious, or automatic. For example, if you drill 10,000 free throws, your form will eventually become second nature.
(Shortform note: Though Waitzkin doesn’t say it explicitly, this approach is much like deep practice. Deep practice is a way of learning that emphasizes patient, step-by-step refinement of one technique at a time.)
Once each element is intuitive, start combining them. Continue to practice until you can unconsciously coordinate multiple basic elements of your skill. For example, you might train in basketball techniques until you can stop on a dime, catch a bounce pass, dribble to the three-point line, and execute a free-throw.
(Shortform note: In The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle discusses how deep practice develops myelin more efficiently than unfocused practice. Myelin is a neural tissue that wraps around neurons or nerve cells, speeding and smoothing the signals that travel along those cells. The more myelin you’ve grown, the more automatically you can perform a practiced behavior. In other words, myelin makes your skills habit, or intuitive. This is the neuroscience of Waitzkin’s “form to leave form”: Dedicated practice of individual skills develops myelin, and well-myelinated skills feel like natural instinct.)
In addition to achieving mastery, incremental skill-building also enables your unique style to emerge. When you intuitively understand the elements of a skill and their interrelationships, you can combine them in creative ways.
Waitzkin argues that we’re naturally drawn to particular skills. He doesn’t directly explain this, but we can infer that it’s a deep feeling, not conscious thought, that draws you in. For example, Waitzkin felt an intense resonance with chess from the first time he saw it played.
(Shortform note: While Waitzkin doesn’t explain how to find your personal style, you may already have a sense for it. Consider that you know what kind of music, food, clothing, and friends you like. Your taste suggests what you’re most drawn to, and it’s a good starting point for finding your style in a particular skill. Taste develops over time as we discover what we’re good at: As we get better at something, we tend to like it more, because we feel good about being able to process it fluently.)
Your personal style is how you instinctively approach the skill. For example, Waitzkin describes himself as having been a chaotic, rough-and-tumble kid—and his aggressive, attacking chess style reflected those traits.
According to Waitzkin, you must honor your personal style if you want to become truly great. That means developing your skill according to what most inspires you, so that you come to embody that skill as only you can.
Many famous athletes and musicians demonstrate this point—jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong; Brazilian footballer Pelé; Olympians like Simone Biles and Serena Williams—each is known for their characteristic style.
(Shortform note: Personal style is on full display in Olympic ice skating, where athletes compete in customized outfits, with personally selected music, using choreography tailored to their strengths and creative inclinations. Judges score ice skaters on two metrics that parallel Waitzkin’s technique-creativity dichotomy: their technical execution, and their artistry.)
Waitzkin advises balancing your creativity with a strong technical foundation. Once you’ve built that foundation, identify what you’re most drawn to. For example, a snowboarder could specialize in the halfpipe after learning the basics of riding. As you move toward what attracts you, your creative style will naturally develop.
(Shortform note: In Fluent Forever, Gabriel Wyner applies this process to learning a new language. In his view, the best way to learn a language is by first training in pronunciation, then establishing a basic vocabulary. With those fundamentals built, he recommends studying what interests you, because it’ll naturally hold your attention and encourage you onward. In contrast, studying subjects or techniques you aren’t attracted to leads only to boredom and disinterest.)
As you develop your skill, you'll face challenges that surpass your current abilities. When you fall short, Waitzkin suggests that you pay attention to both the technical and the psychological aspects of your mistakes. Technical errors are mistakes with form, like trying to hit a baseball with the wrong end of the bat. Psychological errors concern your mindset and emotions, like when frustration causes you to miss the ball entirely, despite having good form.
(Shortform note: In the 2020 Olympics, gymnast Simon Biles experienced “the twisties,” a phenomenon wherein the gymnast’s mind and body go out of sync. Since gymnasts perform life-endangering maneuvers, the twisties make competing dangerous. Biles stepped out of the competition, citing this psychological blockage and demonstrating how intimately technique and mindset are intertwined.)
Technical errors entangle with psychological errors, Waitzkin argues. With this in mind, Waitzkin suggests identifying weaknesses by finding connections between your emotional life and your technical mistakes. For example, when he was struggling with the major changes that fame brought to his life, he also struggled to keep up with major positional changes on the chess board.
To find where you're slipping up, look at what's presently meaningful in your life. What does your mind keep returning to? Find the emotional theme and take note—for example, you might recognize a theme of anxiety about decision making. After you identify the emotional theme, look at the technical mistake you are struggling with and see if there is a connection.
(Shortform note: The emotional side of your skills aren’t always “mistakes'' to fix. While Waitzkin was a competitor, plenty of skills emphasize self-expression over winning. Developing as a musician, for example, doesn’t necessitate constant effort to eliminate your emotional “weaknesses.” If it were, music would be less diverse.)
Finally, analyze the weakness you’ve identified. Patient analysis reveals your technical error. For example, that anxiety might cause you to create weaker outlines for writing projects. Waitzkin recommends periodically examining your skill set for weaknesses to keep your technique effective and your psychology robust.
To accelerate your learning, take on challenges that push your limits. For example, you might run a 5K race that you aren’t quite prepared for, and try to keep up with a runner whom you know is faster than you. Actively seeking to fail, Waitzkin argues, forces you to unlearn many of your assumptions and habits.
To do this, you need to set aside your ego. Remaining attached to old habits only slows down the learning process, while embracing failure shows you exactly where you need to improve. (Shortform note: Sports psychologist Carrie Jackson explains that excessive ego, or arrogance, can prevent you from achieving high-level athletic success. At the same time, you need some ego, since believing in yourself gives you the confidence to succeed. The key is to balance it: No ego, as Waitzkin advocates, is good for training. A healthy, self-assured confidence is better for competition, since it’s no use to focus on open-mindedness in the middle of a crucial match.)
Waitzkin also argues that the faster you notice your mistakes, the faster you’ll grow. It’s not realistic to notice every mistake the first time you make it, so look for the theme of your mistakes (as we explained in the previous section) and learn from them. If you do this, Waitzkin says, you’ll be able to push past any challenge.
(Shortform note: This approach uses the principle that “necessity is the mother of invention.” In other words, throwing yourself into deep water forces you to sink or swim. Research has found that people in resource-scarce environments demonstrate a strong ability to innovate. The study discusses jugaad, a Hindi concept that refers to finding cheap, intelligent solutions through trial and error, especially when resources are scarce. While jugaad deals with the external world, Waitzkin’s all-in approach is a bit like internal jugaad: Put yourself in a situation that you can’t handle with your current internal resources, and you’ll find a way to succeed through trial and error.)
Waitzkin explains that everyone near the top has technical mastery—so at the highest level, competition takes place on the psychological battlefield. To win, you have to learn how to read your opponent, condition their behavior, and exploit the chinks in their mental armor.
(Shortform note: Snowboarding culture seems to contradict Waitzkin’s perspective. While chess and martial arts are cutthroat arenas, snowboarding culture is more laid-back and encourages riders to enjoy themselves. In the 2022 Winter Olympics, both male and female competitors showed camaraderie in cheering each other on, celebrating great runs, and supporting the medal winners, even when they didn’t win. Waitzkin, in contrast, has an intensity characteristic of the ruthless scholastic chess scene, which fueled his strategic, pragmatic approach to excellence.)
First, Waitzkin says, learn to read your opponents. We all have “tells,”—unconscious habits that give away how we’re feeling, or indicate what we’re going to do.
You can study tells by paying attention to your competitors in and out of competition. Look for things such as breathing patterns, blinks that precede movements, and whether they get emotional mid-competition.
(Shortform note: For a familiar example of reading, think of poker—the “poker face” is the characteristic anti-reading technique. It’s crucial for concealing your emotions, psyching out your opponents, projecting an illusion of confidence, and so on. Unlike Waitzkin in chess, it’s unusual to express personality in a live poker game.)
Outside of competition, Waitzkin suggests that many competitors obliviously reveal aspects of their psychology—for example, you might notice that a rival gets impatient over lunch between matches, or frustrated with hotel accommodations.
Waitzkin doesn’t say explicitly how to train this ability, but we can infer that it takes repeated practice. Also, a dedicated practice partner can help familiarize you with common tells that may give away your opponent’s state of mind.
(Shortform note: In poker, you can study your opponent both at the table and elsewhere. At a live table, pay attention to opponents’ eyes, how they handle their chips and react to their cards, and whether they sound nervous in casual table talk. Outside of the game, Waitzkin’s tips hold true—paying attention to how they eat, how they converse, and how they conduct themselves can reveal psychological traits that you can exploit in the game. For example, you might find that they’re often overconfident at social events, and that translates to recklessness at the poker table.)
On the flip side, it’s crucial to mask your state of mind. If you’re easy to read, your opponents will exploit your weaknesses. Waitzkin suggests mixing false emotion with genuine emotion, so that your opponents can’t be certain of how you actually feel.
(Shortform note: Here Waitzkin’s ideas may fall short for some. Because his two skills involve face-to-face, one-on-one battles, these psychological fakeouts may not be transferable. For example, if your skill involves numerous participants, conditioning your opponents isn’t so simple or effective. In football, dozens of players crash into one another, and there’s little room for precision and subtlety. Or in professional orchestras, the players simply don’t have an opponent to read or to conceal themselves from.)
Get Inside Your Opponent’s Head
Once you can read and not be read, the next step is to get inside your opponent’s head. According to Waitzkin, this means controlling their intentions by conditioning them to react in certain ways.
The basic idea is to repeat a certain move until your opponent expects it, and then exploit their reaction to that expectation. In soccer, for example, you could shoot towards the lower-left corner until the goalie expects that, then shoot high and right while they dive in the opposite direction.
(Shortform note: Conditioning plays a role in many other martial arts, from MMA to BJJ; even in fighting video games. Just as Waitzkin describes, competitors condition their opponents by performing the same move a few times in sequence. Done well, this trains the opponent to react in a predictable way—allowing the superior player to exploit their behavior. This is a form of Pavlovian conditioning: You offer a stimulus, leading the opponent to respond in a particular way, and then take advantage after they perform as you’ve “trained” them to.)
Waitzkin cautions that many high-level competitors are aware of this strategy. If opponents are evenly matched in the psychological arena, the game becomes a test of minds and wills. You can read all their tells and habits, but they're self-aware and can defend them; they read your attempts at conditioning and deny them, so you have to become even more subtle. The battle goes on like this, opponents probing each other, until one finally catches the other off guard.
(Shortform note: This upward spiral of competency, where each opponent provokes the other to learn and grow, demonstrates a virtuous cycle: A feedback loop where each agent positively benefits the others. So while having a ferocious rival may feel like an obstacle to your success on the surface, they’re in fact a huge part of what drives your growth. The heights of any discipline grow through competition; without that back-and-forth, the skill would stagnate.)
In The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin argues that a passionate commitment to learning leads to competitive success and a fulfilling life. He explains what he learned in becoming the U.S. Junior Chess Champion as well as World Champion in Tai Chi Chuan Push Hands, arguing that excellence comes from unwavering focus, tenacious training, and creative self-actualization. He builds from simple to complex strategies for both the psychological and technical sides of skill-building, showing that your growth as a competitor parallels your growth as an individual.
Joshua Waitzkin is an International Master in chess and World Champion in Tai Chi Push Hands, the combative variant of tai chi. A chess prodigy, he began playing at the age of 6, drawn to the streetside boards set up by New York City park hustlers. Soon after, Bruce Pandolfini, a prominent chess coach, took Waitzkin on as a student. Waitzkin went on to win several national championships in his early teens, becoming a National Master at 13 years old and an International Master at 16.
Waitzkin shifted away from chess in his late teens, as fame and coaching methods conflicted with his well-being. Soon after, he began to study tai chi under master William C. C. Chen, who later invited Waitzkin to study Push Hands. Through his twenties, he rose through the US tournament rankings and went on to win the World Championship in Taiwan in 2004.
Today, Waitzkin runs the JW Foundation, a nonprofit that fosters a love of learning in children. He also trains in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and acts as an ambassador for the Chessmaster video game series.
Connect with Waitzkin:
The Art of Learning, originally published by Simon & Schuster in 2008, is Waitzkin’s second book. His first, Josh Waitzkin’s Attacking Chess, explains his approach to chess in detail, while The Art of Learning explores his approach to all learning in a memoir-esque format.
Waitzkin published this book in 2008, around nine years after he stopped playing chess and three years after he became Push Hands World Champion. The height of his fame came around 15 years earlier, when “Searching for Bobby Fischer” hit theaters in 1993.
Based on a book written by Waitzkin’s father, “Searching for Bobby Fischer” contrasted Waitzkin’s chess trajectory with that of Bobby Fischer—America’s earlier chess darling, who defeated Boris Spassky in the 1972 World Championship against the former Soviet Union. The film explores how the Waitzkins find a healthy relationship with chess given Josh’s precociousness, in contrast to the monomaniacal focus characteristic of chess geniuses like Fischer.
Fischer disappeared following his victory, taking the chess world’s zeitgeist with him. Two decades later, some thought that Waitzkin would be his successor—a young genius who could rekindle America’s passion for chess. He didn’t reach the same heights as Fischer, but Waitzkin became a household name in the chess world, and he remains known for his uniquely aggressive, chaotic style.
The Art of Learning’s publication in 2008 dovetailed with rising interest in life optimization, a trend also fueled by Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek (2007). Waitzkin’s methods fit within this subculture’s focus on self-optimization, biohacking, the “quantified self” and “meta skills” (like learning how to learn).
Waitzkin has been a guest on Tim Ferriss’s podcast five times, and regularly speaks on topics such as how to learn more efficiently, how to achieve excellence, and how to train your mind for optimal performance in life and competition. Today, Waitzkin trains performance-focused individuals in the finance, investment, and environmental impact sectors, working with psychologist Dr. Leah Lagos to provide personalized guidance based on biometrics and Waitzkin’s unique expertise.
Waitzkin also cites Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, as a major influence. Waitzkin follows Pirsig’s style of blending memoir, philosophy, and inquiry into how to live well. Drawing from the Tao Te Ching, Waitzkin also continues the modern tradition of synthesizing Eastern and Western ideas into a more holistic perspective—in his case, on the topic of learning and growth.
Many readers praise The Art of Learning for presenting an actionable approach to learning, from the basics to high-level tactics. In particular, online reviewers appreciate that Waitzkin is that rare top performer who’s also able to explain how he did it. Readers cite his clear explanations of high-level principles, and they enjoy the detailed examples of his techniques. Many also appreciate the opportunity to get inside the head of a world-class competitor.
Online reviewers who find fault with the book complain that it’s too autobiographical and doesn’t explain Waitzkin’s method thoroughly enough. Some argue that he gives too few examples beyond chess and tai chi, so it’s not clear how you’d apply his methods to learning other skills. Others find his explanations too abstract and his ideas “fuzzy” and “mystical” rather than concrete and empirical.
The Art of Learning draws from psychologist Carol Dweck’s growth mindset research, reiterating the “trial and error” approach to improvement. Through the early and middling principles of his approach, Waitzkin offers familiar perspectives on pushing through adversity, studying the basics, and leveraging automaticity—the brain’s ability to integrate and navigate complex networks of skills—to learn faster, many of which feature in similar books in the “how to learn” subgenre of self-help.
On the other hand, Waitzkin speaks from hard-earned experience and measurable success, so his words resonate more than a theoretical explanation of the same concepts. His ideas about the role of artistry and self-expression in learning feel fresh, and he discusses high-end competitive tactics that are unique to his approach.
The Art of Learning follows Waitzkin’s life, unfolding through three parts:
The order of the principles generally follows the chronological flow of the book, from basic to advanced techniques. Waitzkin often loops back to earlier ideas, sometimes building on them or simply reiterating them.
We’ve frontloaded the principles and illustrated them with Waitzkin’s anecdotes and grouped repeating ideas (for example, we discuss the role of presence in one section, while Waitzkin reiterates it throughout the book). We’ve also rearranged the ideas to more closely follow his implied order of operations for learning a new skill, grouping them into three parts. Part 1 explains Waitzkin’s basic method and mindset; Part 2 covers his intermediate methods; and Part 3 finishes with his advanced strategies.
Our commentary draws from similar books to provide empirical support for Waitzkin’s arguments. In particular, we refer to Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code, for a neuroscience perspective, and Barbara Oakley’s Learning How to Learn, for a cognitive science perspective. Additionally, we explain “tacit knowledge”—what you know through doing rather than thinking—to clarify when Waitzkin’s ideas become fuzzy.
We also discuss the growing role of mindfulness in athletics to contextualize Waitzkin’s ideas about performance psychology and presence, and draw from emerging research in cognitive science to extend his advice. Where applicable, we offer a counterbalance when Waitzkin doesn’t acknowledge the fortunate circumstances that enabled him to become such an “outlier,” drawing from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.
Here’s how our guide organizes The Art of Learning’s chapters:
The Art of Learning is about chess prodigy and tai chi champion Josh Waitzkin’s approach to learning and growth. He explores the fundamentals of method and mindset, building incrementally through intermediate to advanced strategies.
A prolific learner and competitor from a young age, Waitzkin has a lifetime of practical knowledge in skill-building. At 6 years old, he took on streetside chess hustlers in New York City’s Washington Square Park, and soon drew the attention of legendary chess coach Pandolfini, who became his first mentor.
At 11, Waitzkin drew a match with World Champion Garry Kasparov in a simultaneous exhibition (where a Master plays against several weaker players all at once). Through his childhood and teenage years, Waitzkin dominated the US Junior chess scene, winning multiple national championships and becoming an International Master by age 16.
(Shortform note: Hungarian chess teacher Laszlo Polgar holds that chess prodigies are raised, not born. While natural talent is key to becoming a young Grandmaster, Polgar argued that the keys to genius are fortunate circumstances and hard work. Research confirms this, showing that on average, young Masters practiced chess for around 20 hours a week for eight years before becoming Masters. Regarding favorable circumstances, the same study found that chess parents spend about $5,000 to $10,000 annually on lessons, travel, tournaments, and other resources.)
After a later coach disrupted his passion for chess, Waitzkin stepped away from chess and into tai chi. Under Grandmaster William Chi-Cheng Chen, he trained in Tai Chi Push Hands, the competitive variant of tai chi. Waitzkin brought to bear his talent for learning, became the US National Champion, and in 2004, won the World Championship in Taiwan.
Since then, he’s co-founded a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu school with BJJ legend Marcelo Garcia (under whom he earned his BJJ black belt), and now offers personalized training for individuals in the finance, investment, and environmental impact sectors.
(Shortform note: Despite having written a book called The Art of Learning, Waitzkin doesn’t prescribe a set approach. Instead, he offers a reflection on what he learned while encouraging readers to experiment and develop their own methods. In interviews, Waitzkin says personalized training is superior to any set method, since everyone has unique needs, strengths, and preferences.)
Waitzkin argues that effective learning comes from a resilient commitment to your growth process. One step at a time, you can build your skills and your mindset, striving toward excellence—which ultimately means developing your personal approach to the skill you’re building.
He explains how to build a strong foundation, how to develop your personal style, why depth beats breadth, and much more, drawing from his long experience as a world-class competitor.
(Shortform note: Waitzkin’s approach shares qualities with a number of contemporary perspectives on growth and learning. We’ll refer to incremental development as explained by Matthew Syed in Black Box Thinking; we’ll bring in the neuroscience of skill-building as explained by Daniel Coyle in The Talent Code; and we’ll compare Waitzkin’s ideas to those of Barbara Oakley, author of Learning How to Learn and co-founder of the eponymous online course.)
Our guide presents Waitzkin’s approach from the bottom up: We’ll cover the fundamentals of learning; then his intermediate learning techniques; and finish with his advanced competitive strategies.
Part 1 begins with three key themes of effective learning:
Note: These themes aren’t “steps” to take. Rather, they’re features of the growth process to continually return to.
For example, presence helps whether you’re a high school high jumper or an Olympian; you can use trial and error to improve whether you’re a beginner or a master; and you’ll always need to balance tensions, like proper exertion and recovery. After laying out these themes, we’ll explore the fundamentals of Waitzkin’s method, which revolves around patient, incremental learning.
In Part 2, we’ll discuss his intermediate learning techniques for developing your methods and mindset in tandem, so you can both improve your technical skills and develop your creative side.
Part 3 finishes with Waitzkin’s strategies for high-level competition, including explanations of how to trigger peak performance states, win the mental game, and develop a personalized repertoire of techniques. We’ll finish with his views on how parents and coaches can raise children to love learning.
Waitzkin says that presence—which he defines as a deep, focused calm—is essential for the mastery of any skill. In competition, presence takes on a sharp, knife’s-edge quality—like the swordsman standing relaxed, yet intensely focused, when facing his opponent.
Presence, Waitzkin argues, underpins everything. The more present you are every day in every circumstance, the richer your life will become. Since presence features throughout The Art of Learning, we’ll first explore what presence means to Waitzkin.
(Shortform note: Waitzkin’s emphasis on presence evokes Eckhart Tolle’s perspective in The Power of Now, where Tolle argues that living intensely “in the here and now” is the only path to true fulfillment. While the two approach life differently—Waitzkin with an intense, single-minded focus on learning and growth and Tolle with an emphasis on healing, joy, and spiritual enlightenment—presence seems to uplift and aid both of them. This suggests that presence is a flexible tool for each individual to find and explore their own path toward fulfillment.)
Waitzkin gives two key reasons presence is important in life and competition:
The world is unpredictable. Distractions and discomfort, Waitzkin says, often crop up without warning. If you want to be great at anything, you have to learn to navigate these obstacles.
Presence—a calm, focused mind—helps you handle tension, whether it’s physical, mental, or emotional. Though Waitzkin doesn’t explain specifically how, he suggests that presence is a key tool for focusing in distracting environments and overcoming emotional discomfort.
For example, in soccer, a dishonest competitor might illegally trip you. It’s reasonable to get angry at such behavior, but that doesn’t help you perform. Instead, use presence to recenter and get back on track.
(Shortform note: It’s helpful to think of Waitzkin’s notion of “presence” as mindfulness. Recent research supports his claim that presence is a key tool for emotional regulation. In short, practicing mindful presence develops your capacity for emotional nonreactivity—the capacity to experience your emotions without allowing them to dictate your behavior—by teaching you to find space between a stimulus and your reaction to it. This greater “cognitive flexibility” is useful in competition, as Waitzkin says, and throughout life.)
Being present helps you remain focused on the growth process and regain perspective when you lose. For example, Waitzkin recounts an early loss in his chess career that knocked him off balance. By separating himself from the game and being present within his life, he was able to return refreshed and reinspired.
At a high level, a competitor’s level of presence greatly affects their success. The margins are so slim at the top that deeper presence is a significant advantage—namely, because it helps you reach a flow state, or “the zone.” If you can reach the zone under competitive pressure and your opponent can’t, Waitzkin says, you’re going to win.
Competitive success at any level requires that you regulate your emotions and show up fully. Both of these depend on presence, which helps you calm emotional turbulence as well as reach and maintain focus. Waitzkin says when he lost presence in competition, opponents took advantage of his turbulent emotions and lack of focus.
(Shortform note: Mindfulness plays a huge role in modern athletic training. Athletes like Derek Jeter, Kobe Bryant, and tennis champ Bianca Andreescu (who defeated Serena Williams) all cite presence as key to their success. Amy Saltzmann, a mindfulness coach who works with athletes, suggests that mindfulness training could even help amateur athletes to climb the ranks faster: Since mindfulness hasn’t fully permeated professional athletics, those who start practicing it while young can gain a mental and emotional advantage over their competition.)
Having discussed presence, we’ll now look at Waitzkin’s second key theme. Learning, he explains, happens through trial and error. You take one step at a time, sometimes succeeding, but often slipping up. When you make a mistake, you have an opportunity to grow.
For example, imagine you try to play a chord on a guitar. It doesn’t sound quite right, so you adjust your fingers and try again. Each time you do it incorrectly, the feedback tells you how to correct your form. Eventually, you’ll find the correct finger placement.
(Shortform note: In Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed argues that error is inherent in learning. Mistakes reveal the flaws in our skills and show us where to grow. As Syed shows, incremental growth is profoundly powerful: It’s the mechanism that drives both evolution and the scientific method. He argues that organisms and ecosystems evolve by undergoing continuous stress tests (storms, drought, predation, and so on) that select for the fittest creatures. Scientists also follow this method, positing theories, testing them, and adjusting them based on feedback. So while “learn from your mistakes” might sound like a platitude, it’s profoundly useful.)
Each time you perform this trial and error cycle—act, err, adjust, repeat—you make an incremental improvement. In Waitzkin's view, to learn is to build increment on increment on increment. Each addition builds your knowledge—in other words, the peak of success lies atop a mountain of mistakes.
This approach requires presence, which helps you grow through failure with patience, focus, and resilience. Presence helps you accept and act from the here and now. When you meet obstacles, a calm, focused state of being helps you face them head-on, accept internal and external turbulence, recover from falls, and stay oriented to your growth process.
How to Learn From Your Mistakes
In Black Box Thinking, Syed gives a step-by-step process for how to learn from errors. The key is to set up a tight feedback loop between the steps you take and the lessons you learn:
Take action using your current knowledge. Start practicing that habit you’ve been thinking about (for example, beginning a 30-minute morning cardio session).
Observe how things go and gather data. You might keep a simple log in which to reflect daily on how you feel after your workout.
Note any mistakes and analyze what went wrong. Maybe you missed a day, and you notice it was because you were tired from staying up too late.
Use that data to make a simple, actionable change. Incorporate the feedback into your next action. In the above situation, you might adjust by turning your phone off at 9 p.m. to avoid late-night use.
Each time you perform this cycle, you learn about what works and what doesn't, and can adjust your efforts accordingly. The following are examples of this method applied to various skills:
Language learning: Practice pronouncing a foreign word until you’ve got it just right, adjusting your pronunciation according to each mistake.
Snowboarding: Practice balancing on flat ground, adjusting your stance until you can stay steady and calm.
Writing: Practice articulating ideas one phrase at a time, adjusting your phrasing and word usage until you’ve got it just right. Or, get feedback by sharing your writing and adjust according to what works and what doesn’t.
To improve through trial and error, you need to have a growth mindset. Waitzkin explores Carol Dweck’s research on “incremental” versus “entity” theories of intelligence. In Mindset (Dweck’s book on the topic) she refers to these as “growth” and “fixed” mindsets. Here, we’ll examine Waitzkin’s interpretation of the two mindsets as they relate to skill building and competition.
With a growth mindset, you believe that you can develop your abilities through patient practice, building increment upon increment, and you see challenges as opportunities to stretch your current capacities.
(Shortform note: Angela Duckworth's notion of Grit is closely related to a growth mindset. Duckworth argues that grit—a personality trait combining hard work, resilience, and perseverance—predicts success better than talent or luck, because those who drop out when the going gets tough won't make it to the top even if they’re naturally talented. It’s worth noting that in addition to advocating for a growth mindset, Waitzkin himself possessed natural talent as a 6-year-old chess prodigy and skilled meta-learner. So while effort matters, innate ability still plays a role in success.)
Waitzkin argues that a growth mindset corresponds to focusing on the process. It's about the overarching experience of learning, not any single point throughout it. Short-term goals test your progress, but they aren’t the ultimate point.
(Shortform note: In Grit, Angela Duckworth offers six steps for navigating the growth process that are similar to Matthew Syed’s steps. In short, Duckworth instructs us to: 1) Set a stretch goal—something just beyond your current abilities. 2) Work toward that goal with deep focus, practicing daily. 3) Gather feedback, focusing on what you did wrong rather than what you did right. 4) Reflect on the feedback and adjust your efforts accordingly. 5) Continue to work toward your stretch goal. Once you reach that goal, step 6) is to set a new one, continuing the process of growth. The fact that Duckworth’s and Syed’s methods overlap so closely speaks to the efficacy of a trial-and-error growth process, which Waitzkin also recommends.)
In contrast, people with a fixed mindset believe that ability is inherent and set in stone. Waitzkin warns that a fixed mindset is dangerous because it doesn’t prepare you for obstacles. Instead, people with fixed mindsets tend to give up when confronted with challenges that surpass their current abilities.
For example, a teenage football player with a fixed mindset will start to crack when he reaches the limits of his natural talent. When he can no longer win by talent alone, he’ll fall behind those who learn from their weaknesses.
A fixed mindset focuses on outcomes over process, Waitzkin says. So competitors with a fixed mindset worry about whether or not they’ll succeed, rather than focusing on what they can learn. When you inevitably face adversity, a fixed mindset gives you nothing to fall back on—your whole identity is built around winning, so you’ll collapse emotionally when you lose. This hampers growth, because growth comes from struggling at your limits.
(Shortform note: Fixed mindsets aren’t necessarily fixed. In fact, one argument suggests that you can choose your mindset based on the given situation. Furthermore, in some instances, a fixed mindset is preferable. For example, assuming a fixed mindset is effective when you need to quickly complete a task, especially if it’s for the benefit of a group in a collaborative situation. In other cases, such as when you’re working on a solo project, you can switch to a growth mindset and focus on developing and improving your own skills.)
Because fixating on results makes you fragile, Waitzkin argues, winning is ultimately a weak incentive. It isn’t a reliable motivation, because you’ll inevitably lose at some point—becoming excellent requires it.
Waitzkin gives the example of a young chess player who was the best at his school. But at a chess conference, this boy refused to play against Waitzkin or anyone that he knew was better than him. According to Dweck’s mindset theory, this preserves the identity he’d built around being the local best by avoiding failure—and it exemplifies the fragility of fixating on results.
(Shortform note: A 2017 study of elite golfers on the PGA tour found that nonmonetary incentives—namely, glory—correlate with poorer performance. The study followed top US golfers as they competed to earn a spot on the US Ryder Cup team, and it found that this high-stakes environment placed substantial pressure on the golfers, causing them to choke in critical moments. Though this research is still young, it supports Waitzkin’s assertion that worrying too much about results is a fragile motivation.)
Rather than focusing on a desired outcome, Waitzkin recommends committing to the process of growth—to daily practice, focused patience, and adaptation in the face of obstacles. According to Waitzkin, this approach keeps you resilient, because you embrace failure as part of the journey instead of fearing it.
For example, he details how he lost repeatedly against the chess hustlers who set up in NYC parks, but took every loss as a learning experience. As the losses, thus lessons, accumulated, he improved his skills.
(Shortform note: It’s worth noting that you don’t need to immediately learn from your failure, and it’s okay to feel strong emotions after a heartbreaking loss. Waitzkin acknowledges this by detailing how after losing an important youth tournament, he needed a few weeks away from the game to clear his mind and reset. You also don’t need to be a growth robot: Leaning on family and friends can help you process your emotions and get back on your feet. In this way, close community is a valuable extension of your own mindset.)
Results aren’t everything, but Waitzkin argues that they’re useful if you subordinate them to your growth process. In other words, set short-term goals, like medaling in an important competition, but think of them as tests—not the ultimate measure of your worth.
Testing yourself with short-term goals keeps you aware of your progress. Waitzkin explains that when you fail, that tells you that you need to work harder; and when you succeed, you can feel good about how far you’ve come.
For example, say you’re learning to speak Cantonese, and your goal is to chat with the cart pushers at your favorite dim sum spot. If you fall short the first time, that tells you to train harder. If you succeed, celebrate that win—then reorient to your process, and keep on training.
(Shortform note: Researchers have found that feeling like you’re making progress is one key to developing a positive, productive relationship with difficult creative work. Managers can help workers recognize improvement by setting small, achievable goals, and celebrating successful steps toward the larger goal. In taking these actions, management can help workers create healthy inner work lives—staying motivated, focused, and feeling good about the work they’re doing.)
You need to win often enough to develop competitive confidence and lose often enough to avoid becoming overconfident. Overconfidence, Waitzkin says, causes arrogance, and arrogance makes you prone to mistakes. You forget that you’re fallible, and eventually someone will exploit that weakness and knock you down.
Waitzkin recommends that you regularly put yourself on the line in order to understand the stakes of competition and develop balanced confidence. At the same time, seek to learn whether you win or lose, treating each goal as a leg of your overarching journey.
(Shortform note: In Skin in the Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains that “skin in the game” means having a personal stake in the outcome of some effort or enterprise, so that if it fails, you lose something tangible. Waitzkin had skin in the game when he went to the 2002 Push Hands championship—countless hours of training, plus his own physical well-being. Skin in the game matters because we learn better from painful experiences than easy ones. If there’s an easy way out, the lesson doesn’t sink in as deeply. Waitzkin lost that 2002 championship, but took home a visceral understanding of what it would take to become the best in the form of a shoulder injury. Just two years later, he came out on top.)
Waitzkin holds that learning is a process of balancing tensions. There are no clean, sharp lines that indicate what to do, where to stop, and so on. Rather, growth is a gray area that requires you to navigate fuzzy, nebulous experiences. For example, your body gives no obvious indication of when you’ve reached your mental limits, so you have to learn to sense when that edge is near.
Properly managing how you stretch your limits, and how you recover, is one key to sustainable growth. Stretch far enough that you’ll expand your limit, but not so far that you hurt yourself mentally or physically.
For example, you have to learn your muscular limits when exercising. You can easily push too far, or not far enough—the key is to find an “optimal tension” somewhere in the middle, and maintain it as best as you can.
(Shortform note: In yoga, the balance of tension and relaxation centers around your “edge”—a point in the posture that offers just the right balance of challenge and ease. We can extend this notion of a “growth edge” to many areas of life. For example, you might find that in the workplace, you have an emotional edge around speaking up in big meetings, and can stretch into it just a bit at a time in order to grow. Or in language learning, your edge might be conversation that’s just a bit more complex than you can yet understand—an opportunity to stretch your mind toward new linguistic capacities.)
On the micro-level, effective cycling of effort and rest is key to building muscles and minds. Think of burnout—if you work nonstop, you’ll eventually crash, so it’s essential to rest at intervals in your workflow.
On the macro-level, Waitzkin argues that all competitors go through periods of toughness and periods of softness. Being present to those periods helps you maintain self-compassion and grow at a healthy pace. For example, athletes need both the off-season and a regular competitive schedule to stay fit and healthy.
(Shortform note: Modern athletic programs consider rest and recovery essential to effective training. Michigan State University notes that both short-term recovery (like cooling down after practice) and long-term recovery (like the off-season) play a role in maintaining athletic well-being. Related to this, Waitzkin draws on the Tao Te Ching to suggest that exertion and relaxation are yin and yang: mutually essential, each implied in the other.)
As we explained in Theme #2: Growth Comes From Trial and Error, you need a long-term, process-oriented mindset to grow effectively. At the same time, Waitzkin says to use results to understand how you measure up, while remembering that where you stand isn’t the whole point. Finding enjoyment in the process itself is a more sustainable focus.
For example, applying for your dream job will tell you whether you’re competitive. But what you do with the result—whether you get it or not—determines whether you’ll grow or regress.
(Shortform note: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs suggests that the opportunity to build your life around a personal growth journey, like Waitzkin did, means that you have your basic needs covered. From his anecdotes, Waitzkin appears relatively privileged, with his material needs taken care of, a loving and supportive family, plenty of friends, tropical vacations for relaxation, and so on. This enabled him to focus on self-actualization, the highest level of Maslow’s hierarchy. So while hard work did play a role in his success, Waitzkin also fits Malcolm Gladwell’s definition of an “outlier”: Multiple favorable circumstances, like the above, enabled his efforts to work out as they did.)
Skills have two aspects, according to Waitzkin: the practical, technique-focused side, and the creative, emotional side. Becoming excellent requires that you develop both of these, attaining a solid technical foundation without letting technique override your passion for the skill.
For example, many independent filmmakers commit to expensive projects fueled by their passion for the medium. But you can’t just point a camera and yell “action;” you need to actually know what you’re doing. At the same time, don’t let prescriptive training methods—which tend to mold everyone to a single style—dampen your unique artistic spirit.
(Shortform note: The history of jazz education provides an interesting counterpoint to Waitzkin’s argument. Many jazz musicians learned simply by listening to recordings and trying to figure out how to play what they heard, without formal technical instruction. Considering that Waitzkin wrote The Art of Learning as a reflection on his life, it might be that he didn’t consciously develop his personal style when he was only 6 years old. Maybe he learned more like a jazz musician—picking things up through observation and intuition, as opposed to a systematic effort to develop his creative side.)
Now that we’ve grounded ourselves in the key themes of Waitzkin’s approach, we’ll explore the fundamentals of how to build a skill. This chapter covers how to create your foundation and how to develop in the direction of what inspires you, according to Waitzkin.
Specifically, we’ll discuss how to study the individual elements of your skill. Then, we’ll explain how to build elements into memory “chunks”—combinations of multiple elements, like how to shuffle, deal, and count cards—and networks of chunks.
Finally, we’ll discuss how to develop in harmony with your intuition and why Waitzkin believes it’s important to do so.
Waitzkin says to start with the fundamentals of your skill. With any skill, there are better and worse ways to begin learning. Waitzkin recommends a patient, step-by-step approach to the fundamentals.
First, avoid beginning with rigid, quick-fix strategies that only work in specific scenarios. For example, Waitzkin explains that many young chess players learn aggressive sequences of moves that aim to overwhelm an unskilled opponent. However, these players don’t understand the inner workings of their strategies. So when they face situations that surpass their knowledge, and their strategies fall apart, they aren't equipped to adapt. This sort of player has a brittle, one-dimensional game plan.
(Shortform note: Many language learning programs, like Duolingo and Rosetta Stone, make the mistake Waitzkin cautions against: They teach you set phrases and sentences that apply only if people speak precisely what you’ve learned. Since people don’t speak so rigidly, this knowledge can quickly fall apart, just as Waitzkin argues. In contrast, Gabriel Wyner explains in Fluent Forever that we should learn languages from the bottom up, starting from the sounds, moving to single words, to grammatical patterns, and interspersing conversation practice to tie it all together.)
The better approach, according to Waitzkin, is to start by studying the basic elements of your skill. Any skill is composed of simple, elemental chunks of know-how. For example, you’d learn how to dribble a basketball, how to pass it, how to catch it, and so on.
Study each element in isolation, one by one, taking the time to thoroughly understand each one. In chess, Waitzkin first studied king-pawn versus king, a basic situation that teaches the simplest principles. Afterward, he moved on to rook-pawn versus king, and so on, through each basic chess position. In basketball, you might first learn to dribble, then to pass, to set up a shot, to pivot, and so on—giving each your undivided attention.
(Shortform note: Though Waitzkin doesn’t say it explicitly, this approach is much like deep practice, a method of refining one technique at a time through focused practice. In The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle gives a similar explanation, saying that deep practice combines single-element focus with a tight feedback loop, enabling you to adjust and refine one skill at a time. For example, you would learn a piece of music one bar at a time, practicing each repeatedly and correcting your mistakes until you can perform it properly. Focus on refining that element until you’ve got it down—otherwise, you risk sloppy, unrefined execution.)
Patiently practice each element until it becomes intuitive. Waitzkin calls this form to leave form, referring to the process whereby a conscious effort gradually becomes unconscious, or automatic. For example, if you drill 10,000 free throws, your form will eventually become second nature.
Once each element is intuitive, start combining them. Continue to practice until you can unconsciously coordinate multiple basic elements of your skill. For example, you might train basketball techniques until you can stop on a dime, catch a bounce pass, dribble to the three-point line, and shoot a jump shot. Practice these one at a time, and you’ll build smooth, coordinated skillfulness.
(Shortform note: In The Talent Code, Coyle also discusses how deep practice develops myelin more efficiently than unfocused practice. Myelin is a tissue that wraps around neurons or nerve cells, speeding and smoothing the signals that travel along those cells. The more myelin you’ve grown, the more automatically you can perform a practiced behavior. In other words, myelin makes your skills habit, or intuitive. This is the neuroscience of Waitzkin’s “form to leave form”: Dedicated practice of individual skills develops myelin, and well-myelinated skills feel like natural instinct.)
This method has two major benefits:
Benefit #1: It builds resilient skillfulness. Because you’ve trained the basic elements of your skill in isolation, you’ve set yourself up to combine them in new ways when you encounter new situations. So when the obstacles get tougher, you’ll be able to adapt.
Benefit #2: It emphasizes the process. Learning the basic elements one at a time encourages you to find meaning in the labor of committed practice. So in addition to a solid technical foundation, you foster appreciation for the journey of growth.
Applying Waitzkin’s Method
A common critique of The Art of Learning is that Waitzkin doesn’t provide examples from outside of chess or tai chi. While he does explain most of the above principles from his experience with those two disciplines, considering how they’d apply to other skills shows that the principles do make sense—let’s see how:
In language learning, you would study a language from the bottom up:
The basic elements: Start by learning to pronounce each individual sound.
Practice until intuitive: In practicing each individual sound, you’ll need to wrap your tongue around unfamiliar consonants and vowels, repeating until they feel natural.
Put the elements together: Now you can combine sounds into words, which are many sounds in tandem. If you try to say “Freundschaftsbeziehungen” before learning each sound, you’re in for a rough ride.
Continue on to grammar rules, phrases, sentences, and more.
On piano, you could learn one note, chord, and scale at a time:
The basic elements: Start by learning the 12 notes of the chromatic scale (which contains all 12 notes in Western music).
Practice until intuitive: Press one key at a time, refining your form until you can smoothly play each note without thinking.
Put the elements together: Pick a basic chord, like a C major, to combine three notes into one technique. Again, practice until it’s natural; and so on with further chords and scales.
After discussing how to train the basics, Waitzkin uses "chunking" to explain how to further develop your skill. In short, chunks are the basic elements (as discussed above) combined into compound skills. Learning via chunking enables you to perform more complex skills with intuitive ease, executing multiple elements in tandem.
This, Waitzkin says, is how you build skills: Increment by increment you forge understanding, integrating the smallest elements into larger chunks, chunks into clusters of chunks, and so on. For example, a skilled quarterback has numerous chunks that enable him to read the field, judge where to send the football, and perform the right throw to deliver it to his receiver.
(Shortform note: It’s not clear whether we need an explicit understanding of chunks to learn well. Chunking was introduced relatively recently, in 1956, yet humans have been mastering skills for thousands of years. As a child, Waitzkin was likely developing chunks without knowing about the inner workings of his cognition, as do most young chess players. In this sense, knowing about chunks can be interesting, but may not be essential to developing skillfulness. So long as your method effectively builds chunks, you may not need to know that you’re doing so.)
When you chunk, the mind takes multiple basic elements, finds how they relate according to the principles of your skill, and integrates them into one unit. Then, you intuitively access and employ that chunk of skills.
For example, the chunk for an A minor 7th piano chord encodes how each note relates to the others, and the player can access it as one intuitive piece of information.
(Shortform note: In A Mind for Numbers, Barbara Oakley explains that chunking is a key feature of human memory. As we take in information, our brains work to assemble it into coherent clusters of memory. Three or four pieces of information—like the three notes of a piano chord—becomes one chunk. And like Waitzkin, Oakley argues that deeply chunked or integrated information becomes intuitive, allowing you to access it with little or no conscious effort.)
As you learn how the elements of your skill relate, each additional chunk yields instinctual know-how that builds into a powerful network of intuitive skillfulness. For example, you've got chunks for the English language—words, grammatical patterns, sentence constructions, and so on—that you are using right now to understand this guide.
Chess is harder to parse than language. But Grandmasters, Waitzkin explains, can look at the board and see all the patterns: How this pawn relates to that bishop, how the bishop relates to that rook, how a cluster of pawns relates to both bishop and rook, and so on. Like you effortlessly read English, the Grandmaster reads a chess board.
(Shortform note: In chess, players use chunking to parse the board. In writing, writers use chunks to write readable pieces. Since working memory can hold two or three chunks at a time, complex sentences are harder to read. They require more cognitive resources to properly process, and by the time the writer gets to their point, we’ve forgotten how all the clauses built up. On the other hand, writing that’s direct and concise helps readers to absorb and retain the information, since brief, succinct sentences are much easier to parse.)
Until you make a connection between two bits of information, Waitzkin says, it takes more effort to understand how they relate. He compares this to hacking through dense forest to create a new path between two clearings. The first pass is the hardest, but once you've made the connection it becomes easier. Travel that path frequently enough and you'll clear the way, making passage effortless. This is how you connect two bits of information, creating a small chunk.
(Shortform note: In the brain, thousands of new neurons arise in the adult hippocampus each day. These neurons are initially at risk, but you can retain them by engaging in “effortful learning.” In other words, by concentrating intensely on learning some skill, such as chess or poker. This integrates the new neurons with existing neurons, helping to keep your brain fit and, eventually, creating smooth paths that correspond to skillful grasp of your discipline—similar to the forest-clearing metaphor that Waitzkin uses.)
As you train, you create layers and layers of chunks in your brain. For example, when learning English, you first learn the letters of the alphabet and their individual sounds. Then you begin chunking those letters to form new sounds, such as “c” and “h” to make “ch.” You begin forming words, then sentences, paragraphs, and so on. Each time you synthesize elements, you create a new chunk in your mind that eventually becomes intuitive.
(Shortform note: Here Waitzkin isn’t clear about the how of integrating so much information—he simply emphasizes the length and intensity of his own labors. This raises the question of explicit versus implicit strategies: Can you systematize the whole learning experience, or does at least part of it have to happen by “osmosis”? Language learning again exemplifies this dichotomy. Some believe that the right method involves workbooks, formal classes, and at-home study; others insist that learning via immersion is superior. With immersion, you rely on your brain to work out the principles and patterns of your skill without conscious effort, as opposed to learning them explicitly.)
So far, we’ve explained Waitzkin’s advice for mindset, for studying the fundamentals, and for developing your skill as a network of chunks. In Chapter 3, we’ll begin our discussion of his intermediate techniques.
Specifically, we’ll explain how to develop your personal creative style, which stems from your unique relationship to your skill; and we’ll explain how to use themes of error to guide that development.
In addition to achieving mastery, incremental skill building enables your unique style to emerge. When you intuitively understand the elements of a skill and their interrelationships you can combine them in creative ways.
Waitzkin argues that we’re each naturally drawn to particular skills. While he doesn’t directly explain this, we can infer that it’s a deep feeling, not conscious thought, that draws you in. For example, Waitzkin felt an intense resonance with chess from the first time he saw it played.
(Shortform note: While Waitzkin doesn’t explain how to find your personal style, you may already have a sense for it. Consider that you know what kind of music, food, clothing, and friends that you like. Your taste suggests what you’re most drawn to, and it’s a good starting point for finding your style in a particular skill. Taste develops over time as we discover what we’re good at: As we get better at something, we tend to like it more, because we feel good about being able to process it fluently. This could explain why Waitzkin was drawn to chess—from the beginning, he had a natural sense for how the pieces could move.)
Your personal style is how you instinctively approach the skill. For example, Waitzkin describes himself as having been a chaotic, rough and tumble kid—and his aggressive, attacking chess style reflected those traits.
According to Waitzkin, you must honor your personal style if you want to become truly great. Honoring your personal style means developing your skill according to what most inspires you, so that you come to embody that skill as only you can.
Consider nearly any top performer: jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong; Brazilian footballer Pelé; Olympians like Simone Biles and Serena Williams. Each is known for their characteristic style, demonstrating Waitzkin’s point—that imitators don't rise to the top. Be true to yourself and you'll go much further.
(Shortform note: Personal style is on full display in Olympic ice skating, where athletes compete in customized outfits, with personally selected music, using choreography tailored to their strengths and creative inclinations. In fact, judges score ice skaters on two metrics that parallel Waitzkin’s technique-creativity dichotomy: their technical execution, and their artistry.)
If you fail to honor your personal style, you risk losing your balance. You can dampen your passion by learning your skill in a way that contradicts your natural feel for it. Waitzkin explains how one teacher had him study a slow, constrictive chess style that opposed his inclination toward aggressive, free-form play. This threw him off-balance, because the style didn’t come naturally to him, and he lost touch with his passion for chess.
(Shortform note: Waitzkin also says your mind state must be unblocked to express your creativity through the skill. If you feel fear, doubt, or anxiety about finding your personal style, you may need to process that before it emerges. Often, you can't know where life is leading you, and the key is to experiment, try what feels right, and gradually develop your passion. A fire starts as a spark, and only grows into a blaze with patience.)
While developing your personal style is crucial, Waitzkin stresses the importance of balancing your creative impulses with a strong technical foundation. As we explained in Chapter 2, start by studying the basic elements and principles of your skill, then follow what most inspires you.
In other words, allow your intuition to guide what you learn. Say you're learning Mandarin, and you've built a solid foundation of vocabulary and grammar. Now study what you're drawn to, whether it's restaurant conversation, business culture, classic literature, or whatever else.
(Shortform note: In Fluent Forever, Gabriel Wyner applies this process to learning a language. In Wyner’s view, the best way to learn a language is to first train in pronunciation, then establish a basic vocabulary. With those fundamentals built, he recommends studying what interests you, because it’ll naturally hold your attention and encourage you onward. In contrast, studying subjects or techniques you aren’t attracted to leads only to boredom and disinterest.)
Waitzkin says that as you follow what attracts you, your creative style will naturally develop. In terms of chunks, he describes this as a layered, interwoven network of skills that expands outward from a central heartbeat—your passion for the skill.
If you’re an aspiring rock guitarist, for example, you’ll want to study your favorite songs, riffs, and solos. As you explore and learn what you love, you’ll end up with a repertoire of guitar skills that’s all your own.
(Shortform note: While Waitzkin argues that your personal style is beneficial no matter what, research indicates that some personality traits correspond to athletic success better than others. The study followed 300 Polish athletes and measured their personalities in terms of the Big Five psychological model (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism). They found that champion-level competitors had lower levels of neuroticism, with higher extraversion and openness. If this effect holds true, then it could be that some personality types are better suited to competitive success than others.)
To effectively develop your personal style, Waitzkin explains, you need to maintain an emotional state that allows for confident, uninhibited self-expression. If you have any mental or emotional conflicts, you can’t access optimal creative states.
To maintain mental and emotional stability, actively engage with your emotions by “sitting mindfully” with them. In other words, try to feel your emotions as fully and non-judgmentally as you can, avoiding the urge to label them “good” or “bad.”
As you do so, you’ll get to know yourself better, thus developing personally and artistically. Waitzkin describes how when fame overwhelmed him, he went to live in rural Europe, where he developed his techniques and his psychology. The relaxed countryside setting helped him grow into a more open, spiritually-engaged competitor and artist.
(Shortform note: In Emotional Intelligence 2.0, Daniel Goleman argues that understanding your emotions is crucial to success in life and work. Emotion, he says, precedes rational thought: If we’re emotionally riled up, we can’t think straight, and we’ll act irrationally. This supports Waitzkin’s argument that you need to regulate your emotions if you want to succeed. Goleman recommends viewing your emotions objectively, as opposed to labeling them “good” or “bad.” This makes it easier to process and learn from your emotions whether they're uncomfortable or not, leading to increased self-control and reduced reactivity in stressful situations.)
Waitzkin’s main recommendation for maintaining emotional stability is to be present in the turbulence of your life. Though he doesn’t say this directly, we can infer that in this instance, “presence” refers to a state of calm, focused mindfulness.
Mindfulness helps you handle both internal and external turbulence. As we explained in Chapter 1, it equips you to process discomfort and move beyond it. When faced with distraction, tough emotions, or unexpected chaos, you simply bend and flow like a willow in the wind.
Waitzkin doesn’t directly describe how to do this, but we can infer that it involves mindfully embracing the turbulence and choosing not to react to it. Instead, you accept it as part of the experience. For example, many athletes need to focus amidst cheering or jeering crowds, and they can do so by accepting the noise as part of the experience.
(Shortform note: Letting go of what we can’t control is a tenet of Stoicism. As Ryan Holiday explains in The Obstacle is the Way, many aspects of reality are out of our control—the weather, other people’s actions, chance hardships, and so on. Holding an “emotional grudge” against reality is useless, since it tires you out and does nothing to fix the problem. Instead, focus on accepting the unwanted circumstances, regulating your emotions, and moving forward with resilience.)
Waitzkin argues that mistakes are only problematic when they cause you to spiral out of control. In competition, this frequently happens when you make a mistake while winning.
A crucial mistake, he says, can cause you to lose touch with what’s actually going on. Because mistakes feel awful, we’re prone to remaining attached to what we had before the mistake. This can cause you to act desperately, trying to preserve a situation that no longer exists, leading to further mistakes—like a tumbling house of cards.
(Shortform note: In another example from Olympic ice skating, Chinese skater Zhu Yi demonstrates the tragic effects of a downward spiral. After falling in her short program during the team competition, she visibly faltered and finished with a low score. Despite being among the top 25 women’s ice skaters, her mistakes rattled her and led to further mistakes in her next program, where she fell twice. This was momentum accelerating in the wrong direction, with big consequences.)
Waitzkin explains how in chess, the winning player often pressures for a greater lead but can make a mistake that negates his advantage. When this happens, he’ll often lose his cool, which in turn causes him to act incautiously, risking his lead even further. If this spiral continues, the player will lose.
To prevent this collapse, Waitzkin suggests developing a technique that returns you to mindfulness (or “presence”). He offers this rule of thumb: Refresh your mind by moving your body, and refresh your body by mindfully resting. Specifically, he suggests splashing your face with cold water, sprinting a short distance, or taking deep breaths.
(Shortform note: Recovering from errors is hugely important in sports psychology. If an athlete is knocked off-balance, their performance will suffer and they won’t be able to play in the zone. The key is to stop dwelling on the mistake by choosing to ask what you can learn from it, and moving on. So, what Waitzkin says is par for the course in sports psychology—though it’s less recognized in disciplines outside of sports, like writing, chess, teaching, and so on.)
As you develop your skill, you'll face challenges that are beyond your current abilities. When you fall short, Waitzkin suggests that you pay attention to both the technical and the psychological aspects of your mistakes and use that feedback to improve.
There are two aspects of any weakness, and you need to grow through both:
(Shortform note: In the 2020 Olympics, gymnast Simon Biles experienced psychological difficulties that threw off her technique. Despite wide acclaim as the “GOAT,” or “greatest of all time” in women’s gymnastics, she fell prey to “the twisties,” a phenomenon wherein the gymnast’s mind and body go out of sync. Since gymnasts perform complex, life-risking maneuvers, it’s risky to compete if the twisties come over you; Biles indeed stepped out of the competition. This illustrates how intimately technique and mindset intertwine, and how a steady, self-assured mental stance underpins any successful technical execution.)
Technical errors often entangle with psychological errors, Waitzkin argues. With this in mind, Waitzkin suggests identifying weaknesses by finding connections between your emotional life and your technical mistakes.
To find where you're slipping up, look at what's presently meaningful in your life. Ask: “What does my mind keep returning to?” After you identify the emotional theme, look at the technical mistake you are struggling with and see if there is a connection. For example, when Waitzkin was struggling with big life changes in the wake of “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” he also struggled to keep up with positional changes on the chess board.
(Shortform note: The emotional aspects of your skills aren’t always “mistakes'' to fix. While Waitzkin was a competitor, plenty of skills are about self-expression instead of winning. Developing as a musician, for example, doesn’t necessitate a constant effort to eliminate your weaknesses. If it were, the variety of music in the world would likely be less diverse. As Waitzkin later says, there’s more than one way to approach any challenge—and while books like The Art of Learning can help, it’s often up to us to create our own paths.)
By analyzing your mistakes, you’ll learn about principles and patterns that you couldn’t previously see. First you understand these new chunks mentally, or in words. But with enough study, Waitzkin explains, you reach an embodied knowing that goes beyond that propositional (thought-based) understanding. In other words, you can feel the principle or technique intuitively.
Waitzkin recommends periodically examining your skill set for weaknesses, as above, to keep your technique effective and your psychology robust. Each time you do this, you improve your intuition for that skill.
How to Analyze Your Mistakes
Waitzkin doesn’t explain how to find the theme of your errors, instead explaining that he spent dozens of hours laboring to understand new chess positions. To analyze your own mistakes, try asking these questions:
What specific technique fell short, and what did your opponent do that surpassed you?
Is there emotional discomfort entangled with your technical error? If so, reflect on where it may be coming from.
What could you have done differently?
By spending time in reflection, you’ll figure out what you need to do to improve.
Reflect on how you can regain balance the next time you make a painful mistake.
Think back to a recent mistake you made, whether in a relationship, at work, or in a competitive arena. How did you react at that time? Describe what happened.
Having read Waitzkin’s advice for dealing with mistakes, how could you better deal with a similar mistake the next time you make one? (Remember that he suggests returning to presence, which can be as simple as splashing your face with cold water.)
Waitzkin also recommends developing your own methods for returning to presence. With the same area of life in mind, what sorts of techniques might work for you? (Remember his rule of thumb: Physical movement can refresh the mind, and periods of restfulness refresh the body.)
So far in our discussion of Waitzkin’s intermediate techniques, we’ve covered how to find your personal style and how to use patterns of error to develop your skills. Now, we’ll look deeper at how to practice those new skills you uncover.
Chapter 4 describes why depth beats breadth, according to Waitzkin, and how to learn good form by developing an embodied understanding of your skill. This “embodied understanding” underpins more advanced skills, like getting into a flow state.
As Waitzkin says, real skill comes from a deep, singular focus. In terms of skill-building, he argues that you reach excellence by refining a set of fundamental skills, rather than practicing a wide range of techniques. For example, focus on learning a single style of piano, like baroque classical, rather than trying to learn classical, jazz, and ragtime piano all at once.
When you jump from technique to technique, you neglect to understand any of them beyond the surface level. According to Waitzkin, this leads to a wide-ranging but technically deficient skill set. Imagine learning five new piano chords daily—likely as not, you won’t grasp any of them deeply.
(Shortform note: In Range, David Epstein offers a counterargument to Waitzkin’s single-minded focus. He says cultivating a variety of skills gives you more flexibility in your career path; that it’s okay to find your path late in life; and that specialists end up siloed, or fixed in a particular way of thinking and acting. Epstein contends the modern world is an “unstable environment.” In other words, we can’t reliably predict what skills will remain useful, since things change so quickly. In contrast, chess and tai chi are stable environments—established games with unchanging rules—so focused practice works fine. But in unstable environments, learning widely can teach you transferable principles of learning that help you adapt to our complex world.)
Waitzkin describes how he learned these fundamental skills from tai chi by slowly practicing one small movement at a time. For example, you might train a simple step forward, going slowly until the form becomes natural, like moving your hand an inch through the air.
He doesn't say explicitly what these “fundamentals” are, but we’ve identified three techniques he uses to learn correct form:
Somatic Awareness
Somatic mindfulness means noticing how your body feels: whether you’re physically tense or relaxed, how individual muscles feel, and whether there’s an emotional response rippling through your body. Developing this awareness equips you to experience your body’s sensations without being controlled by them and enables you to develop new behaviors, since you’re able to let go of habitual reactions and respond instead.
One way of developing somatic awareness is through Focusing, a technique explained by Eugene Gendlin in his 1978 book: Focusing. In short: Find a quiet space and pay attention to your body—often your stomach or chest. Then ask, “What’s most salient to me right now?” and calmly observe the feelings that arise within you. As you do so, you relax inner tension, similarly to what Waitzkin describes.
While Focusing deals with “felt sense,” or bodily emotional awareness, it uses the same mechanism as Waitzkin’s technique: Become aware of an internal tension point, and gradually move through it with calm, present awareness. The technique is not just for inner relaxation—artists, writers, and scientists report that it’s opened them to positive creative experiences. This is a bit like Waitzkin’s third step: After you relax resistance, there’s room for new expression (whether of mind, body, or heart) to come forth.
Waitzkin implies that you need to cycle tension and relaxation to deepen your embodied understanding of a technique. The deeper you take it, the better you’ll be able to wield that technique in competition—it becomes smooth and instinctive.
When you deeply study a single skill, you develop a feeling for proper form. Though he doesn’t say this explicitly, we can infer that this is not mental understanding—it’s physical understanding. Reaching that feeling equips you to take on more advanced techniques.
(Shortform note: Waitzkin’s explanation of this feeling is somewhat fuzzy, but the concept of form is common in physical training. Proper form means placing your body in a strong, well-aligned position, with your bones oriented properly, muscle flexed, and joints supported. You can find form in push-ups, squatting, or even walking—all it takes is patient practice of proper positioning. And as you practice that form, your body will start to find it more naturally, demonstrating again Waitzkin’s idea of form to leave form.)
To get to the feeling of proper form, rest your awareness in your body and gradually move through any resistance. Then, concentrate energy into the technique you’re practicing to build energy into it. For example, you might relax your shoulders to loosen them up, then practice tensing them to perform a pull-up.
This is like stretching: Gently ease through tension, moving toward what feels right. Gradually, you'll develop that feeling of right form.
(Shortform note: Though Waitzkin doesn’t explicitly identify his method as such, it’s much like deep practice, which we explained in Chapter 2. Unlike earlier, here Waitzkin focuses on how it feels to move through the process, rather than giving concrete steps. This hints at what deep practice is really about—navigating the undulations of effort and release, working through resistance toward good form, and gradually reshaping what your mind and body can do.)
Consider “mountain” pose, a basic yoga posture. You stand with your feet together, flat on the floor; knees flexed but not locked, abs tightened slightly to support a straight spine; your shoulders resting back. You could spend hours deepening your embodied understanding of this pose: Feeling out just the right distribution of weight in your feet, just the right tension through your legs, just the right flex in your core. Eventually, you’ll reach a reliable feeling of “yes, this is right form.”
Waitzkin argues that once you've reached that feeling once, you can sense whether you’ve reached it with another technique. For example, a deep understanding of one yoga pose will help you develop any other, or a martial arts stance, push-ups, and so on.
(Shortform note: To grasp this point, you may find it necessary to try it out—thinking about something can only take you so far. Western thought traditionally prefers clear, propositional thinking, but “felt sense” is valid. It has its origins in ancient Greece, where the Greeks had at least four valid ways of knowing. The two relevant here are episteme, or “propositional knowing,” and techne, or “participatory knowing.” The latter corresponds to felt sense, and you can only develop it by experiencing something first hand. For example, you’ll never know what it feels like to fly off a ski jump unless you get out there and do it.)
So far, we’ve looked at how Waitzkin recommends you develop a skill. From Chapter 5 onward, we’ll discuss his techniques for succeeding in competition. First, we’ll discuss how to handle adversity. You’ll meet plenty of adversity on your path to skillfulness, so it’s crucial to learn how to use the negatives as opportunities for growth.
Chapter 5 discusses two intermediate techniques that follow this theme. We’ll learn how to practice even when you’re injured, and why to seek out challenges that push you past your limits.
In most competitive sports, you run the risk of injuring yourself. Waitzkin argues that we should treat major setbacks, such as injuries, as opportunities to train the subtle, psychological aspects of your skill.
(Shortform note: While some would see it as a setback, many athletes took the 2020-21 COVID-19 quarantines as an opportunity to train with greater focus. In these “quarantine camps,” athletes reported receiving more sport-specific training, emotional health support, better recovery facilities, and greater massage and therapy usage. This supports Waitzkin’s view that setbacks, even those as major as a global pandemic, offer opportunities to grow in new ways.)
A broken bone or overtaxed muscle can’t stop you if you want to become the best. To live a life of excellence, there’s no room for slacking off. Waitzkin says that if he gave himself time off every time he experienced pain, he’d never get off the couch.
After breaking his hand in competition, Waitzkin worked on the soft, subtle aspects of tai chi. With one arm in a cast, he persisted at practice, training his ability to read his opponent’s tells, stay present mid-fight, and time his moves. In spite of the cast, he learned to unbalance his opponents with just one arm, demonstrating that even serious injuries can have huge upsides.
(Shortform note: Waitzkin is an extremely dedicated competitor, and it may not be a great idea to push as far as he did. Typically, pain is a signal from your body that something’s wrong, and it’s important to allow your body to properly heal. If you continue to train with a broken bone, as Waitzkin did, you risk developing chronic pain from a poorly healed injury. He says that if he rested whenever he was in pain, he’d never be training—but most of us don’t need to be world champions to gain many of the benefits of fitness and competitive fulfillment.)
Though you can’t directly train the injured part of your body, time spent healing should still be spent training. As we explained in Chapter 3, every skill has a technical side and a psychological side. Instead of doing technical practice, do mental practice. For example, instead of practicing your free throw, you could work on remaining calm under pressure.
You can also use visualization to maintain immobilized muscles while you're injured. Waitzkin details how he would work out the healthy side of his body, then “energize” the muscles stuck in a cast by performing the same workout with visualization. When the cast came off, his muscles had hardly lost mass.
(Shortform note: Using one-sided training to maintain your strength while injured is called “cross-education,” and isn’t as implausible as it sounds. In short, one-sided training can stimulate muscle and nerve growth in the complementary muscle group. So if your left leg is injured, working out the right one may help the injured side to recover, or at least maintain fitness. Further, visualization can help you train while injured: It stimulates the nerve cells that correspond to what you visualize, so you can activate a muscle even while it’s immobilized.)
As we discussed in Chapter 1, success comes from failure, and you have to be willing to err in order to grow. Make an effort to take on challenges that push your limits, since this gives you more opportunities to learn. For example, you might run a 5K race and try to keep up with a runner who you know is faster.
Waitzkin argues that you’ll need to unlearn many of your old habits when starting a new skill. For example, a chess player learning the strategy board game Go needs to let go of all their habits of strategy and tactics, since Go is very different from chess.
(Shortform note: The concept of “beginner’s mind” comes from Zen Buddhism, and refers to the idea that the more you know (or think you know) about something, the more closed-off you become to knowledge. In contrast to the expert’s mind, which is relatively fixed, the beginner’s mind embraces failure. It keeps you open, humble, and willing to set aside your ego. This helps you grow more effectively—but the paradox is that you’ll need to avoid becoming fixed as you learn. Work to continually foster a beginner’s mind by challenging your confirmation bias, conversing with people who hold different beliefs than you, and remembering that intelligence is malleable.)
Waitzkin says you need to set aside your ego because remaining attached to old habits hinders learning. By letting go of the need to be right, you open the gates to real learning. For example, a sprinter who refuses to adjust his form hinders his own learning; if he admits the mistake, he can learn from it.
(Shortform note: Sports psychologist Carrie Jackson explains that excessive ego, or arrogance, can prevent you from achieving high-level athletic success. At the same time, you need some ego, since believing in yourself gives you the confidence to succeed. The key is to balance it: No ego, as Waitzkin advocates, is good for training. But a healthy, self-assured confidence is better for competition, since it’s not helpful to focus on open-mindedness in the middle of a crucial match.)
Waitzkin recommends actively seeking opportunities to fail. His tai chi master, William C. C. Chen, calls this “investing in loss.” If you go out of your way to get pushed past your limits, you’ll grow more quickly out of necessity.
He also argues that the faster you can learn from your mistakes, the faster you’ll grow. It’s not realistic to notice every mistake the first time you make it, so look for patterns of errors (as we explained in the previous section) and learn from them. If you do this, Waitzkin says, you’ll be able to push past any challenge.
(Shortform note: This approach uses the principle that “necessity is the mother of invention.” In other words, throwing yourself into deep water forces you to sink or swim. Research has found that people in resource-scarce environments demonstrate a strong ability to innovate. The study discusses jugaad, a Hindi concept that refers to finding cheap, intelligent solutions through trial and error, especially when resources are scarce. While jugaad deals with the external world, Waitzkin’s all-in approach is a bit like internal jugaad: Put yourself in a situation that you can’t handle with your current internal resources, and you’ll find a way to succeed through trial and error.)
Practice looking for opportunities to stretch your abilities.
Describe an area of your life in which you’re currently trying to grow. For example, you may be learning how to learn more effectively.
Think back to Waitzkin’s advice to “invest in loss,” which means to actively seek opportunities to fail so that you’re incentivized to grow faster. In the area of life that you described above, how could you “invest in loss”?
For example, you might commit to trying a difficult memory technique, like visualizing a memory palace, in order to struggle with a challenging new skill.
When we neglect to invest in loss, it’s often due to an attachment to our current ways of doing things. When you think about failing in this area of your life, do you feel any fear or other self-focused emotion that could be preventing you from growing? For example, you might hesitate to try this very technique because you feel like you already understand it.
With our discussion of Waitzkin’s intermediate techniques complete, we’ll look now at his strategies for high-level competitive success. Chapter 6 builds on our discussion of incremental learning in Chapter 2, detailing how to compress your techniques into compact, powerful forms.
We’ll lay out Waitzkin’s steps for compressing a technique, which is a way of packing all the power of a technique into a smaller, more subtle form. We’ll then detail three applications—how to create “flow state” triggers, how to trigger creative inspiration, and how to develop near-instantaneous recovery time.
An incremental approach enables you to compress the power of a technique into a compact, refined form. With Waitzkin’s method, you can create an arsenal of powerful, subtle techniques that align with your creative disposition. In addition, you can learn to cycle between rest and readiness with agility.
To do this, Waitzkin explains, you’ll take the feeling of “right form” and gradually compress it while maintaining your connection to that feeling.
Done right, this makes a physical move (like a roundhouse kick) more efficient and more powerful. Compression reduces the visibility of your move (compressed form means less obvious movement) and can maintain or even increase its power.
(Shortform note: Waitzkin doesn’t clearly explain what he means in this section. He discusses taking the “essence” of a technique, but doesn’t clearly define what he means by that. The one-inch punch, as popularized by Bruce Lee, may demonstrate what Waitzkin means: The martial artist concentrates an immense amount of force into a tiny physical movement. Since the one-inch punch comes from Chinese martial arts, like tai chi, this might be the inspiration for Waitzkin’s technique.)
Waitzkin first applies compression to create “triggers” that activate peak performance states. Think of this trigger as an on/off switch that instantly activates your competitive spirit.
You must be able to enter “the zone” whenever the moment demands it, which you can do by creating a trigger: A condensed routine that switches you into peak performance mode.
(Shortform note: Using triggers to enter the zone is a common tactic in elite athletics. Sports psychologist Patrick Cohn explains that finding and remaining in the zone requires that you achieve an intense, “pinpoint” focus that fully immerses you in the present experience. Similarly to Waitzkin, he recommends using habitual thoughts and mental images to trigger your peak performance state—for example, many elite athletes visualize their performances to rehearse the experience they desire.)
To access your peak performance state, create a routine that gradually activates it. Waitzkin suggests doing this by finding an area of your life where you feel naturally in “the zone” and building a sequence of habits that leads up to it. Say you feel your best after a walk in the woods. Take that state and add a few habits before it, like calmly filling a water bottle, taking a moment to stretch, and slipping on your shoes.
(Shortform note: To use this technique, you’ll need to have an activity that gets you into the zone. Not all of us have one, but there are plenty of ways to create one. In Flow, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi explains that you can find “flow,” which is often associated with “the zone,” through activities like yoga, dance, shared meals, and spending time in nature. Another method is to push at the edge of your current capacities—for example, a rock climber might challenge herself to scale a more difficult wall than usual.)
Now practice the habits or activities until they're linked and your body will begin to associate the routine with the state the walk puts you in. Once you've linked the routine to your state, you can perform the routine to activate that state whenever you need it.
(Shortform note: Csikszentmihalyi also discusses finding “flow” throughout your everyday life. He gives several criteria for creating flow-state experiences. Typically, such experiences involve deep concentration, a well-defined goal, a tight feedback loop that allows you to adjust your efforts, and a difficulty level that pushes your abilities without causing you to feel out of control. By intentionally setting up conditions like these, you can consciously create flow experiences instead of hoping that they’ll come along naturally.)
Next, maintain the feeling your routine gives you while gradually compressing the actions you take. So if you were stretching for 10 minutes, reduce it to eight, then six, and so on, until you achieve the same state-shift with less activity.
Eventually, you’ll create a swift, reliable way to "switch on" your peak performance mode. According to Waitzkin, you can compress this further until a single breath, in and out, switches on that state of deep, relaxed focus.
(Shortform note: Sports psychologist Jim Taylor notes that nearly all elite athletes use pre-competition routines to prime themselves for optimal performance. He explains that routines matter because athletes have no control over the circumstances of competition; routines give them control over their own mental and emotional preparedness.)
You can also create triggers for creative states. Since your personal style is the biggest asset you bring to high-level competition, Waitzkin argues, it’s crucial that you can access your creativity on demand.
Your emotions will arise in competition no matter what. If you’re prepared to channel them into inspiration, you can achieve creative performances while regulating emotional turbulence, like stress or frustration. For example, you might create a trigger that uses frustration as fuel to intensify your efforts.
(Shortform note: Though sports psychologists do recognize the importance of emotions in athletic success, they often stop at teaching athletes to manage their emotions. Waitzkin takes it a step further, recommending that we systematize them. This is similar to Tony Robbins’s recommendations about state shifting: He claims that we can consciously control our moods with techniques like empowering rituals, fixing your posture (much like “power posing”), and smiling intentionally.)
Each of us, Waitzkin says, will discover that particular emotions inspire us more than others. To find these, sit with all your emotions as they arise, experience them mindfully, and then note them down. Over time, you’ll learn which you draw the most creative energy from.
Once you’ve accessed that creative state through introspection, create a routine as we explained in the previous two sections, and link it to that state. Then, compress the routine until you’ve created an effective trigger.
For example, you might link the tranquility of an early morning walk to some breathing exercises, jumping jacks, and a brief meditation. Then, shorten your walk, breathwork, jumping jacks, and meditation until just a brief walk activates that creative state.
(Shortform note: In The Emotional Body, Laura Bond details a method for consciously feeling, expressing, regulating, and shifting between emotions. She implies that we aren’t in tune with our emotions by default—similar to Waitzkin’s argument that it takes time to understand your emotional life. Bond’s methods involve using posture, facial expressions, and mindfulness-based awareness to activate certain emotional states.)
To excel in the long-term, Waitzkin says to balance effort and rest. If you have an unbalanced relationship with your energy, it's easy to fall prey to inconsistency. Instead, develop a sustainable rhythm of exertion and relaxation. Relaxation is crucial for maintaining your energy, and it leads to better performance when it’s time to focus.
For example, Waitzkin says as a teenager, he would pour ferocious amounts of energy into challenging singular games. Afterward, he'd be too drained to return to that level of performance and would falter throughout the rest of the competition. Later on, he learned how to manage his energy through tai chi and cardiovascular interval training.
(Shortform note: In a 2019 recent interview with Tim Ferriss, Waitzkin said that it’s better to be able to go from a “relaxed zero” to an “intense 10” than to constantly live around a six. In other words, living with constant, moderate tension will keep you drained. On the other hand, learning to oscillate between deep relaxation and intense performance allows you to experience higher highs and more meaningful relaxation. Without one or the other, you can’t consistently access peak performance or real restfulness.)
Waitzkin argues that even short rests increase performance. Specifically, he found that in chess, concentrating in intervals with short breaks more than doubled how long he could think effectively.
Waitzkin advocates cardiovascular interval training, in which you cycle between bouts of sprinting and brief, slower resting periods. For example, you might sprint on a stationary bike at a pace that raises your heart rate to 175 bpm, then lower your intensity to reach a heart rate of 140 bpm or so, and repeat. Over time you aim to lengthen sprints and shorten rests and, one increment at a time, you train your heart to recover more fully in less time. Waitzkin argues that this practice develops the connection between your mind and body.
(Shortform note: The body is full of natural rhythms, and this may explain why interval training works so well. Managing your circadian rhythm, for example, is key to maintaining stable daily energy. The heartbeat is another familiar rhythm, as is our breathing. In the brain, alpha, beta, delta, gamma, and theta brainwaves all play different roles from heightening our awareness to taking us into deep, relaxed sleep. Rhythm may be a fundamental feature of our reality, as it shows up everywhere from the cosmos to our cells.)
Consider how you could create a routine to get into “the zone.”
Identify some activities that activate your peak state. Where, when, or what gets you into “the zone”? For example, you might find that weekend hiking trips put you in a great state of mind.
Having identified an activity that gets you into “the zone,” how could you start to systematize that state? Write out three or four actions you could take prior to the activity that activates your “zone.” For example, you might pack your backpack a certain way, stretch for five minutes, and write a quick journal entry in anticipation of your hike.
Now that you’ve created a routine, how can you put it into action? When, or where, could you practice using the routine to get into your zone? For example, you might commit to two weekend hikes a month, and practice the routine each time.
So far in Waitzkin’s advanced strategies, we’ve looked at how to systematize your states to prepare for competition. In Chapter 7, we’ll explain how to win when the margins are incredibly slim. To do so, you have to operate on a deeper, more subtle level than your opponents.
First, we’ll look at how to achieve enhanced perception through deep refinement of your skill. From there, we’ll discuss how to win the mental game (and why it’s so important), and how to use your personal style to create techniques that elevate you above the competition.
At a high level of mastery, Waitzkin says, you can achieve enhanced perception in high performance states. This comes from refining your skills until they flow seamlessly, intuitively, and effortlessly. Once you’ve reached technical mastery, the brain processes more information with less effort.
He explains that, subjectively, this feels like enhanced perception: You've grown so sensitive to the minutiae of the techniques that time seems to slow down. Punches seem to come in slow motion, because you’re intimately aware of every subtle movement—the shift of weight that telegraphs it, the opponent’s breath in to prepare, the shifting forward of his shoulder, and so on.
(Shortform note: While many of us haven’t experienced high-level perceptual enhancement, we do have an everyday experience that’s something like it: driving. When we first learned to drive, we had to work much harder to process everything. Now it’s automatic, and many of us drive without much conscious effort—what was once a rapid barrage of sensory input becomes a slower, manageable experience.)
How do you consistently "slow down time" and perform at such a high level? There are two ingredients.
The first ingredient is a relaxed, focused presence that allows the unconscious mind to navigate your network of techniques and deploy them without conscious thought. Waitzkin argues that performing from instinct requires balancing conscious presence with unconscious, intuitive action.
When you’re building your network of chunks (as we explained in Chapter 2), you’ll eventually reach a point where the layers of principles and patterns become too complex to consciously navigate. For example, think of spoken language. There are simply too many things to consciously consider—word choice, grammatical patterns, tone of voice, meaning and subtext—and everything changes depending on the context (you’ll speak differently to your grandma than to your friends, or to strangers).
So, Waitzkin says, you have to rely on your unconscious mind to make sense of the information, and to effectively act. With language again, we’d struggle if we had to consciously consider every principle that governed every sentence we spoke. But we don’t—we all speak from deeply instilled linguistic intuition.
(Shortform note: While much of the information about the complex, contextual relationships between the elements of a skill is implicit, Nora Bateson of the International Bateson Institute has attempted to name the conundrum with her concept of warm data. Warm data refers to that messy, ever-changing information that depends on context. In chess, any position involves layers upon layers of context-specific information: how the pieces could and should move given the opponent’s pieces; which principles may apply, and which may not; and how the situation could evolve from its present form. Bateson’s mission is to figure out how to generate and study this fuzzy, intangible data.)
To navigate by intuition in high-pressure situations, Waitzkin says you need to relax your conscious mind and allow the mental chatter to recede. This state allows your conscious and unconscious minds to work in tandem. He describes it as follows:
Say you're writing, and you need to articulate a complex idea. Instead of trying to consciously work it out, you simply relax, wait, and let your intuition surface the right words. Then you consciously handle the practical details, like typing it out, adjusting punctuation and phrasing, and so on.
(Shortform note: In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman casts light on Waitzkin’s ideas about the conscious and unconscious. Roughly, Kahneman’s System 1 mode of thinking corresponds to Waitzkin’s notions of the creative unconscious; System 2 corresponds to conscious deliberation. System 1 operates on heuristics: Making quick, intuitive judgments based on limited information. It can often err—intuition isn’t infallible. But if you’ve developed it through committed practice, intuition is likely better than System 2 in high-stakes competition, because you can’t stop to calculate your next move when a fist is flying toward your face.)
The second ingredient is a deeply refined repertoire of skills, grounded in fundamentals and developed according to your personal style. As we explained in Chapter 2, building up a network of interwoven chunks yields an instinctive grasp of the skill.
(Shortform note: We all have one such repertoire: Our language skills, which comprise a deep, complex network of words, grammatical patterns, semantics and pragmatics, and so on. Each of us has personal language skills, called our idiolect. Your idiolect is the specific set of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation that’s particular to you. In a sense, we could say that you develop an “idiolect” for non-linguistic skills, too, whether it’s piano, gymnastics, skiing, or whatever else. In other words, you could model your skill as a layered, cascading network of patterns that go from simple to complex.)
When you have a deeply refined network of chunks for some skill, your unconscious mind does most of the processing. Those circuits fire automatically, and that frees up your conscious mind for navigating the present situation (like managing unexpected changes, unfamiliar tactics, or acting on your own creative ideas).
Because of this efficient back-end processing, you consciously experience things in more detail with less effort. Think of a video slowed down to one frame per second—that’s a decent approximation of the experience as Waitzkin describes it.
(Shortform note: Jason Haaheim, timpanist of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, argues that deep practice leads to enhanced perception in music. He says that through thousands of hours of practice, musicians develop the ability to perceive more information than laypeople hearing the same music. Due to this ability, he’s able to judge whether an audition tape is up to standard within the first few bars. He perceives a flood of subtle information about the musicians’ skill, ranging from rhythm, timing, intonation, and smoothness. Similar to how Waitzkin sees more with less effort in tai chi, Haaheim hears more with less effort in music.)
So in a wrestling match, for example, you would perceive all your opponent’s subtle motions in great detail. When they start to lunge you’d notice the tiniest initial telegraph: How they shift their weight, the movement of their eyes, an inhalation that telegraphs the attack. To the untrained eye this is indecipherable, but a master reads their opponent as effortlessly as you read this text.
According to Waitzkin, the ability to operate on this level of deep, subtle perception is essential to becoming a strong competitor. If your opponent perceives the fight more efficiently than you, they’ll be able to exploit your lesser awareness and send you packing.
(Shortform note: In The Book of Five Rings, legendary samurai Miyamoto Musashi distinguishes between sight and perception. In short, to see is to merely notice without separating important details from unimportant ones. In contrast, to perceive is to keep your gaze broad yet focused, picking out the most salient details of a situation—telling movements of the opponent’s sword, important details of the landscape, changes in his “spirit” or energy, and so on. This reflects Waitzkin’s descriptions of enhanced perception, where he explains how he’s able to perceive and adjust to microscopic nuances in the heat of competition.)
Aside from developing enhanced perception, another key high-level strategy is to control the mental battle—keen perception is no use if you’re easy to manipulate. Waitzkin explains that everyone near the top has technical mastery, so at the highest level, competition takes place on the psychological battlefield. To win, you have to learn how to read your opponent and exploit the chinks in their mental armor. This is especially true when you’re evenly matched in technique.
(Shortform note: Snowboarding culture provides a counterpoint to Waitzkin’s perspective. While chess and martial arts are cutthroat arenas, snowboarding culture is more laid back and encourages riders to enjoy themselves. In the 2022 Winter Olympics, both male and female competitors showed camaraderie in cheering each other on, celebrating great runs, and supporting the medal winners, even when they didn't win. Waitzkin, in contrast, has an intensity characteristic of the vicious scholastic chess scene, which fueled his strategic, pragmatic approach to excellence.)
We all have “tells,”—unconscious habits that give away how we’re feeling or indicate what we’re going to do. Waitzkin emphasizes the importance of “reading” the tells of your opponents.
You can study tells by paying attention to your competitors in and out of competition:
(Shortform note: In poker, you can study your opponent at the table and elsewhere. At a live table, pay attention to opponents’ eyes, how they handle their chips and react to their cards, and whether they sound nervous in casual table talk. Outside of the game, Waitzkin’s tips hold true—paying attention to how they eat, how they converse, and how they conduct themselves can reveal psychological traits that you can exploit in the game. For example, you might find that they’re often overconfident at social events, and that translates to recklessness at the poker table.)
Waitzkin doesn’t say explicitly how to train this observational ability, but we can infer that it takes repeated practice. Whether you’re studying tai chi, chess, poker, Go, or whatever else, getting a dedicated practice partner helps familiarize you with common tells and twitches that may give away your opponent’s mind state.
Observing your opponents tells is a great way to prepare for competition. Understanding who your opponents are emotionally helps you exploit their specific weaknesses.
(Shortform note: While it may seem like studying your opponent’s psychology outside of the arena is ruthless, such gamesmanship is not typically against the rules. It stretches them, highlighting the fact that you need to push the limits to become the best. This level of intensity prioritizes winning, rather than enjoyment, which might contradict Waitzkin’s earlier recommendation to focus on the process. On the other hand, he might view it as an extension of the process—assuming part of your process is to become the best in the world. It really depends on how far we each want to take our skills.)
While it’s great to read your opponents, it’s crucial to mask your own state of mind. If you’re easy to read, your opponents will exploit your weaknesses. Waitzkin doesn’t prescribe specific steps, but he does describe the strategy he used: He would mix false emotion with genuine emotion.
By oscillating unpredictably between expressiveness and an impenetrable poker face, he’d confuse his opponents about how he actually felt. Then when he expressed sincere emotion, his opponents wouldn’t know whether or not it was genuine.
(Shortform note: For a familiar example of reading, think of the classic “poker face.” It’s the characteristic anti-reading technique. It’s crucial for concealing your emotions, psyching out your opponents, projecting an illusion of confidence, and so on. Unlike Waitzkin in chess, it’s unusual to express too much personality in a live poker game, since savvy opponents can easily catch on to unsophisticated tricks.)
Once you can read and not be read, the next step is to get inside your opponent’s head. According to Waitzkin, this means controlling their intentions by conditioning them to react in certain ways. This combines subtle psychological manipulation with technical virtuosity.
To get inside your opponent’s head, repeat a certain move until your opponent expects it, and then exploit their reaction to that expectation. In soccer, for example, you could shoot toward the lower-left corner until the goalie expects that, then shoot high and right while they dive in the opposite direction.
(Shortform note: Mind games may not apply to all disciplines. Many skills, like musicianship, painting, dance, and rock climbing, aren’t competitive in the same way as martial arts or chess. While mastery of technique matters to any discipline, it would be a stretch to say that musicians or painters should condition their “opponents.” However, a band still might read the mood of their audience, and tailor the performance to the crowd’s needs. In this sense, Waitzkin’s principles may still be of use for skills that are service- or performance-oriented, rather than competition-oriented.)
Let’s look at the steps Waitzkin describes:
(Shortform note: Conditioning plays a role in many other martial arts, from MMA to BJJ; even in fighting video games. Just as Waitzkin describes, competitors condition their opponents by performing the same move a few times in sequence. Done well, this trains the opponent to react in a predictable way—allowing the superior player to exploit their behavior. This is a form of Pavlovian conditioning: You offer a stimulus a few times, and figure out how they’ll respond. Then, you teach the opponent that the stimulus means that they can respond to you in a particular way. Finally, you take advantage after they perform as you’ve “trained” them to.)
Waitzkin cautions that many high-level competitors are aware of this strategy. That’s why it’s crucial to have deeply refined technique: As we discussed in the previous section, technical refinement enables enhanced perception. If you can perceive your opponent more efficiently than they perceive you, you can play mind games beneath their awareness, operating on a fractionally more subtle level that enables you to prevail.
For example, a poker player who’s learned to control his subtlest facial expressions can easily confuse players and bait them into folding, or continuing to play—whichever the superior player wants.
But if opponents are evenly matched in the psychological arena, Waitzkin explains that the game becomes a test of minds and wills. You can read all their tells and habits, and they can read yours. The battle will continue until one finally catches the other off-guard.
(Shortform note: This upward spiral of competency, where each opponent provokes the other to learn and grow, demonstrates a virtuous cycle: a feedback loop where each agent positively benefits the others. So while having a ferocious rival may feel like an obstacle to your success on the surface, they’re in fact a huge part of what drives your growth. The heights of any discipline grow through competition; without that back-and-forth, the skill would stagnate.)
As we explained in the previous section, everyone near the top of a discipline has achieved technical mastery. Because of this, Waitzkin says, true champions triumph by making use of their unique creativity.
Your creativity is a unique asset—just like every musician makes their own music, you’ll express your skill in a way unique to you. Think of great Olympians, like the American skier Lindsey Vonn or the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt—they each compete like nobody else does.
To make optimal use of your personal style, Waitzkin argues that you can systematize it, harnessing one-off creative moments to develop a repertoire of skills that are unique to you. Experimenting in practice can lead to such insights—for example, you might come up with a new basketball dribbling rhythm that better enables you to dodge past defenders.
(Shortform note: Waitzkin’s perspective makes sense of why some musicians succeed and others don’t. In hip-hop, those at the top have distinct, one-of-a-kind styles. Kanye West, for example, composes and produces music that’s in a class of its own; Kendrick Lamar brings an intensity and lyricism that no one can imitate; and so on. Yet hip-hop has no formal training centers. We can wonder, then, if Waitzkin’s personal way of systematizing excellence would be useful in other disciplines, or if it might encroach on individuals’ unique approaches to learning.)
As you develop your personal techniques, you render yourself ever more competitive. Opponents won’t have any experience with your repertoire, giving you an edge in the critical moments.
(Shortform note: In Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed discusses how the Mercedes F1 racing team developed a unique set of tactics and techniques that no other team had. They did so by incrementally developing their process, finding points of weakness, and figuring out how to improve them. For example, they optimized their pit stop routine until they could complete it in less than two seconds. F1 racing is far from Waitzkin’s single player, one-versus-one skills, demonstrating that his principles apply even more broadly than he explains.)
Waitzkin explains that when neither you nor your opponent can win with technique alone, victory depends on flashes of creative action. In other words, you intuitively sense an opportunity and act on it in a new way. You might, for example, intuit a new tennis strike that gives you a fractional advantage, off-balancing your opponent just enough to eke out the point.
To systematize these insights into your unique creative style, Waitzkin suggests building off the top of your “pyramid” of understanding. This is similar to building your chunks, as we explained in Chapter 2. Here’s how his method works:
Now you've converted a creative insight into a concrete technique, rendering it practicable. Repeat this enough, following your creative disposition, and you'll develop a repertoire of one-of-a-kind tactics that align with your personal style.
(Shortform note: In Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed quotes Steve Jobs, who said that “creativity is connecting things.” Though Waitzkin suggests that creative insights come from instinct, we can use Jobs’s interpretation to consciously create new techniques. For example, say you’re a snowboarder. You notice that downhill skiers consistently tuck down to gain speed, and you realize you could use that to better retain speed on the halfpipe. Or, maybe you realize that the bulky clothing typical of snowboarders could be swapped out for tight-fitting skier-style clothing, which is more aerodynamic. In this way you can train your creative muscles by actively connecting disparate ideas, instead of just waiting on your intuition to do it for you.)
Waitzkin describes how he developed a new repertoire of tai chi techniques by refining creative intuitions taken from high-level sparring. He and his partner were so evenly matched that only their creative instincts could secure the win. They recorded their matches, codified those insights, and gradually built up a new layer of unique, novel techniques.
(Shortform note: For an example of another world-class performer with a repertoire all his own, just think of Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix was a legendary guitarist of the ‘60s who was known for his virtuosic guitar playing and on-stage theatrics. He’d play guitar solos with his teeth, sling the guitar around his body while performing, use effects pedals to create wild sounds, and set his guitars on fire. While Hendrix didn’t systematize his performance states like Waitzkin does, he still demonstrates that stand-out artistry comes from fearlessly expressing your own creative style.)
Now that we’ve covered all of Waitzkin’s principles and practices for skill-building, we’ll finish by looking at his perspective on the role of coaches and parents.
Adult role models, he says, shape children’s mindsets. Ideally, a good mentor should teach their students to love learning and guide them as they develop their unique abilities.
In this chapter, we’ll explore how feedback influences a child’s mindset, and how different coaching styles either support or hinder the learning process.
(Shortform note: In The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle argues that masterful coaching is crucial to success. Master coaches provide skillful, personalized guidance to each of their students, motivating and inspiring them to engage with the skill as best they can. Bill Bowerman, co-founder of Nike, exemplifies this: He gave personalized guidance to each of his runners, even inventing and tailoring new running shoes, and he thereby coached several of the first runners to break the four-minute mile mark.)
Waitzkin explains that kids learn how to think and feel from role models such as teachers, parents, and coaches. A child’s mindset—whether it’s a growth mindset or a fixed mindset—depends on how they’re raised. Specifically, it depends on the feedback they receive after attempting a difficult task.
Feedback that emphasizes the process helps children develop a growth mindset. As discussed earlier, having a growth mindset means that you attribute success to effort. Children with this mindset believe that they can develop their abilities, one step at a time.
Feedback such as, “Great job studying for that test, your hard work really paid off!” encourages the child to value effort.
(Shortform note: Critics of the push for growth mindset note that most growth mindset studies use the priming effect—prompting a particular state of mind with a phrase like “wow, you sure worked hard at that!”—and that this defies consistent replication. One study found that college students primed with a mindset message performed no better than the control group; another study found that growth mindset interventions are only effective if they occur in an environment that supports and encourages growth.)
Feedback that emphasizes innate talent reinforces a fixed mindset.t communicates that success depends on your inborn abilities, rather than those that you develop. Children with a fixed mindset don’t believe that they can develop their skills and tend to falter when faced with obstacles.
Feedback such as, “Wow, you’re so smart!” or, “Huh, guess math just isn’t for you,” encourages the child to think of skill in a black-and-white way: You either have it, or you don’t.
(Shortform note: Critics maintain that even if we assume growth mindset theory to be 100% true, it doesn’t disprove the importance of innate talent. In short, they argue that while believing in growth is beneficial, it doesn’t change the fact that we all start from different places. So while Person A might work twice as hard as Person B, B could have so much natural talent to begin with that A will likely never catch up. In other words, the only thing Dweck’s theory proves is that a belief in hard work tends to be helpful relative to your natural talent.)
Waitzkin says that parents and coaches have a responsibility to intentionally shape children’s mindsets. In his view, a growth mindset is far more healthy and enables kids to become resilient lifelong learners.
It’s possible to change mindsets, he claims—if you have a fixed mindset, you aren’t out of luck. Waitzkin cites a study that demonstrated how giving process-oriented versus results-oriented instructions can temporarily influence children’s mindsets. In the study, the kids primed with process-oriented instructions outperformed the results-oriented group.
(Shortform note: Whether growth mindset-based interventions actually work is up for debate. Educational researcher Carl Hendrick argues that many schools have misunderstood growth mindset as feel-good motivational fluff, and attempt to push a shallow, simplistic version of it on their students. Growth mindset has been subject to plenty of criticism over the years, and Dweck welcomes the dialogue, often acknowledging when her theory gets misinterpreted. Further, Waitzkin doesn’t offer evidence to show that these interventions last—they may simply demonstrate the priming effect: Giving students growth-focused feedback prompts them to temporarily change their mindsets.)
Coaches, Waitzkin says, can have a huge impact on a child’s learning process. As guides and teachers, coaches influence not just what a child learns, but how they learn.
Waitzkin discusses two types of coaches: Those who control and mold, and those who guide and nurture. In his view, the controlling type tends to squash a young learner’s natural inclinations. In contrast, the nurturing type brings out a child’s unique creativity.
(Shortform note: A parallel to Waitzkin’s coaching styles is the difference between schools with a prescribed, one-size-fits-all curriculum, and Montessori schools, which facilitate individualized, student-guided learning. Below, we’ll compare these schooling styles to Waitzkin’s perspective on coaching.)
Coaching Style #1: Break down and remold. A coach of this style has a rigid perspective on the skill. They often espouse the conventional wisdom of the skill, claiming to have the “correct” knowledge of dos and don’ts. They put all their students through one mold in an attempt to systematically produce skillful competitors.
On the positive side, these coaches put their students through rigorous training that instills a strong work ethic and a solid understanding of the skill. The downside is that they tend to dismiss a student’s personal style. This coach prefers his established method, which won’t resonate with some students. Everyone has their own style, Waitzkin says, and a coach who doesn’t recognize this risks squashing his student’s greatest assets.
Waitzkin describes how in his teenage years, a new chess coach trained him in a style that didn’t speak to him. Because he was forced to do this, he lost his spark and grew away from chess.
(Shortform note: Waitzkin’s perspective on rigid coaching dovetails with the belief of educator Sir Ken Robinson, who argued that modern schools had overly systematized the learning process. By applying the same curriculum to every student, schools “kill” students’ unique creativity. Both this type of schooling and coaching homogenize their student’s ways of thinking, feeling, and acting, and neglect each individual’s personal style. This hampers intrinsic motivation, which is when you engage in an activity because it’s naturally rewarding to you.)
Coaching Style #2: Understand and nurture. A coach of this style views the skill with an open mind. They act as a guide for their student and, Waitzkin says, nurture the student’s creative inclinations. With this support, the student can develop their own personal style while still gaining solid technical instruction.
Waitzkin describes his first coach, Bruce Pandolfini, who mentored him when he started playing chess at age 6. Pandolfini first got to know him as a human, establishing a healthy relationship that enabled more personalized instruction. Instead of fitting him through a mold, Pandolfini tailored his lessons to Waitzkin’s specific needs.
(Shortform note: Nurturing coaches evoke the approach of Montessori schools, where students direct their own learning trajectory based on what interests them most. Students select their own activities during “free choice” work periods, while teachers act as guides, giving individual and small-group lessons as needed. Montessori holds that this provides space for children to learn at their own pace, and helps them develop their own areas of interest. In contrast to conventional education, this approach fosters intrinsic motivation.)