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Art Carden is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Business organization at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Read total profile

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Josh Waitzkin has led a full life as a chess master and international martial arts champion, and as of this writing he isn't yet 35. The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance chronicles his journeying from chess prodigy (and the subject area of the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer) to world championship Tai Chi Chuan with important lessons identified and explained along the way.

Marketing expert Seth Godin has written and said that one should resolve to change iii things equally a upshot of reading a business organization book; the reader will observe many lessons in Waitzkin'due south volume.  Waitzkin has a list of principles that announced throughout the volume, but it isn't always articulate exactly what the principles are and how they necktie together.  This doesn't really hurt the volume's readability, though, and it is at best a minor inconvenience.  There are many lessons for the educator or leader, and as ane who teaches higher, was president of the chess guild in middle school, and who started studying martial arts about two years ago, I found the volume engaging, edifying, and instructive.

Waitzkin'south chess career began amid the hustlers of New York's Washington Foursquare, and he learned how to concentrate amidst the noise and distractions this brings. This experience taught him the ins and outs of aggressive chess-playing as well as the importance of endurance from the cagey players with whom he interacted.  He was discovered in Washington Square by chess teacher Bruce Pandolfini, who became his commencement coach and adult him from a prodigious talent into one of the best immature players in the globe.

The book presents Waitzkin's life as a study in contrasts; perhaps this is intentional given Waitzkin'due south admitted fascination with eastern philosophy.  Among the nigh useful lessons business organisation the assailment of the park chess players and immature prodigies who brought their queens into the action early or who gear up elaborate traps and so pounced on opponents' mistakes.  These are fantabulous ways to rapidly dispatch weaker players, simply it does non build endurance or skill.  He contrasts these approaches with the attention to detail that leads to genuine mastery over the long run.

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According to Waitzkin, an unfortunate reality in chess and martial arts—and possibly by extension in education—is that people acquire many superficial and sometimes impressive tricks and techniques without developing a subtle, nuanced command of the fundamental principles.  Tricks and traps can impress (or vanquish) the credulous, but they are of limited usefulness confronting someone who really knows what he or she is doing. Strategies that rely on quick checkmates are likely to falter against players who can deflect attacks and get one into a long middle-game.  Smashing inferior players with four-move checkmates is superficially satisfying, but it does petty to better one'south game.

He offers one child as an anecdote who won many games against inferior opposition but who refused to encompass real challenges, settling for a long string of victories over conspicuously inferior players (pp. 36-37).  This reminds me of advice I got from a friend recently: always effort to make certain you're the dumbest person in the room so that you're always learning.  Many of the states, though, draw our self-worth from being big fish in small ponds.

Waitzkin's discussions cast chess as an intellectual battle match, and they are particularly apt given his give-and-take of martial arts afterward in the book.  Those familiar with battle will remember Muhammad Ali's strategy against George Foreman in the 1970s: Foreman was a heavy hitter, simply he had never been in a long bout before.  Ali won with his "rope-a-dope" strategy, patiently absorbing Foreman'southward blows and waiting for Foreman to exhaust himself.  His lesson from chess is apt (p. 34-36) as he discusses promising young players who focused more intensely on winning fast rather than developing their games.

Waitzkin builds on these stories and contributes to our agreement of learning in chapter 2 by discussing the "entity" and "incremental" approaches to learning. Entity theorists believe things are innate; thus, one can play chess or do karate or exist an economist because he or she was born to do so.  Therefore, failure is deeply personal.  By contrast, "incremental theorists" view losses equally opportunities: "step by step, incrementally, the novice can become the master" (p. thirty).  They rise to the occasion when presented with hard material because their approach is oriented toward mastering something over time.  Entity theorists collapse nether pressure.  Waitzkin contrasts his approach, in which he spent a lot of fourth dimension dealing with end-game strategies
where both players had very few pieces.  By dissimilarity, he said that many young students begin by learning a broad array of opening variations.  This damaged their games over the long run: "(m)any very talented kids expected to win without much resistance.  When the game was a struggle, they were emotionally unprepared."  For some of us, pressure becomes a source of paralysis and mistakes are the start of a down spiral (pp. sixty, 62).  As Waitzkin argues, however, a dissimilar approach is necessary if we are to reach our full potential.

A fatal flaw of the shock-and-awe, blitzkrieg approach to chess, martial arts, and ultimately anything that has to be learned is that everything can be learned by rote.  Waitzkin derides martial arts practitioners who become "course collectors with fancy kicks and twirls that accept absolutely no martial value" (p. 117).  Ane might say the same matter about problem sets.  This is non to gainsay fundamentals—Waitzkin's focus in Tai Chi was "to refine certain fundamental principles" (p. 117)—but there is a profound departure between technical proficiency and true understanding. Knowing the moves is one thing, merely knowing how to determine what to do next is quite another. Waitzkin's intense focus on refined fundamentals and processes meant that he remained strong in later round while his opponents withered.  His arroyo to martial arts is summarized in this passage (p. 123):

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"I had condensed my torso mechanics into a potent state, while virtually of my opponents had large, elegant, and relatively impractical repertoires.  The fact is that when there is intense competition, those who succeed have slightly more honed skills than the residual.  It is rarely a mysterious technique that drives us to the peak, but rather a profound mastery of what may well be a bones skill set.  Depth beats breadth whatsoever day of the calendar week, because it opens a aqueduct for the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential."

This is virtually much more than smelling blood in the h2o.  In chapter 14, he discusses "the illusion of the mystical," whereby something is so conspicuously internalized that most imperceptibly small movements are incredibly powerful as embodied in this quote from Wu Yu-hsiang, writing in the nineteenth century: "If the opponent does not motility, and so I practise non motion.  At the opponent's slightest motility, I move first."  A learning-centered view of intelligence means associating effort with success through a procedure of didactics and encouragement (p. 32).  In other words, genetics and raw talent tin can only become y'all so far before difficult piece of work has to pick up the slack (p. 37).

Another useful lesson concerns the employ of adversity (cf. pp. 132-33).  Waitzkin suggests using a trouble in ane surface area to arrange and strengthen other areas.  I have a personal example to back this up.  I will always regret quitting basketball in loftier school.  I remember my sophomore yr—my last year playing—I broke my thumb and, instead of focusing on cardiovascular conditioning and other aspects of my game (such equally working with my left hand), I waited to recover before I got back to work.

Waitzkin offers another useful affiliate entitled "slowing downwards time" in which he discusses ways to sharpen and harness intuition.  He discusses the process of "chunking," which is compartmentalizing bug into progressively larger bug until one does a complex set of calculations tacitly, without having to think about information technology.  His technical example from chess is particularly instructive in the footnote on page 143.  A chess grandmaster has internalized much about pieces and scenarios; the grandmaster can process a much greater amount of information with less effort than an good.  Mastery is the process of turning the articulated into the intuitive.

At that place is much that volition be familiar to people who read books like this, such as the need to pace oneself, to ready clearly divers goals, the need to relax, techniques for "getting in the zone," then forth.  The anecdotes illustrate his points beautifully.  Over the grade of the book, he lays out his methodology for "getting in the zone," some other concept that people in performance-based occupations will find useful.  He calls information technology "the soft zone" (chapter iii), and it consists of being flexible, malleable, and able to adapt to circumstances.  Martial artists and devotees of David Allen'south Getting Things Done might recognize this as having a "mind like h2o."  He contrasts this to "the difficult zone," which "demands a cooperative earth for you to function.  Like a dry twig, y'all are brittle, ready to snap under pressure" (p. 54).  "The Soft Zone is resilient, like a flexible bract of grass that can move with and survive hurricane-forcefulness winds" (p. 54).

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Some other illustration refers to "making sandals" if one is confronted with a journeyacross a field of thorns (p. 55).  Neither bases "success on a submissive world or overpowering force, but on intelligent preparation and cultivated resilience" (p. 55). Much here will be familiar to creative people:  you're trying to retrieve, but that one song by that one band keeps diggings away in your caput.  Waitzkin'southward "only option was to go at peace with the noise" (p. 56).  In the language of economics, the constraints are given; we don't get to cull them.

This is explored in greater detail in chapter 16.  He discusses the summit performers, Michael Jordan, Tiger Wood, and others who do not obsess over the terminal failure and who know how to relax when they need to (p. 179).  The feel of NFL quarterback Jim Harbaugh is likewise useful equally "the more he could allow things go" while the defense was on the field, "the sharper he was in the side by side drive" (p. 179).  Waitzkin discusses further things he learned while experimenting in human functioning, particularly with respect to "cardiovascular interval training," which "tin can have a profound effect on your ability to chop-chop release tension and recover from mental exhaustion" (p. 181).  It is that terminal concept—to "recover from mental exhaustion"—that is likely what most academics need help with.

There is much here well-nigh pushing boundaries; withal, one must earn the right to do so: as Waitzkin writes, "Jackson Pollock could draw like a camera, but instead he chose to splatter paint in a wild mode that pulsed with emotion"  (p. 85).  This is another good lesson for academics, managers, and educators.  Waitzken emphasizes shut attention to detail when receiving instruction, particularly from his Tai Chi teacher William C.C. Chen.  Tai Chi is not about offering resistance or strength, just about the ability "to blend with (an opponent's) energy, yield to it, and overcome with softness" (p. 103).

The volume is littered with stories of people who didn't attain their potential because they didn't seize opportunities to improve or because they refused to adapt to weather.  This lesson is emphasized in chapter 17, where he discusses "making sandals" when confronted with a thorny path, such equally an underhanded competitor.  The volume offers several principles by which we can become better educators, scholars, and managers.

Celebrating outcomes should be secondary to jubilant the processes that produced those outcomes (pp. 45-47).  There is besides a report in contrasts beginning on page 185, and it is something I have struggled to learn.  Waitzkin points to himself at tournaments existence able to relax between matches while some of his opponents were pressured to analyze their games in between.  This leads to extreme mental fatigue: "this tendency of competitors to exhaust themselves between rounds of tournaments is surprisingly widespread and very self-destructive" (p. 186).

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The Art of Learning has much to teach usa regardless of our field.  I establish it particularly relevant given my called profession and my decision to kickoff studying martial arts when I started pedagogy.  The insights are numerous and applicable, and the fact that Waitzkin has used the principles he now teaches to become a earth-class competitor in two very demanding competitive enterprises makes it that much easier to read.

I recommend this volume to anyone in a position of leadership or in a position that requires extensive learning and adaptation.  That is to say, I recommend this book to everyone.

More About Learning

• 13 Means to Develop Self-Directed Learning and Learn Faster
• How to Learn Fast and Recollect More: 5 Effective Techniques
• How to Create an Constructive Learning Process And Larn Smart

Featured photo credit: Jazmin Quaynor via unsplash.com

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