The Open Curriculum

The Self · Level 2

The Art of Learning

Josh Waitzkin · 2007

Thesis

Excellence in any competitive discipline comes less from talent than from a learnable process: treating ability as something built through effort, mastering a few fundamentals in great depth until they become intuition, accepting losses as investment, and training the capacity to perform calmly under pressure.

The main ideas

Two approaches to learning

Josh Waitzkin was a chess prodigy, the subject of his father's book Searching for Bobby Fischer and its 1993 film, and a U.S. Junior Chess Champion. He later left chess for the martial art Tai Chi Chuan and won world titles in its competitive form, Push Hands. The book draws a single theory of learning from both careers.

Its foundation is a distinction he takes from the psychologist Carol Dweck. Entity theorists believe ability is fixed: they succeed because they are smart at something. Incremental theorists believe ability grows with effort: they succeed because they worked hard at it. When material becomes difficult, incremental learners rise to the challenge, while entity learners lose confidence and give up, because failure seems to reveal a fixed limit.

Waitzkin traces this to how children are praised and taught. A child praised for being a natural learns to avoid situations where that label could be disproved; a child who learns that skill comes from effort welcomes difficult problems. In his words, believing that success depends on ingrained ability rather than resilience and hard work leaves a person "brittle in the face of adversity."

Implication: praise effort and process rather than talent, in yourself and in anyone you teach, and treat difficulty as the sign of learning rather than the limit of ability.

Numbers to leave numbers

Waitzkin describes expertise as the conversion of explicit knowledge into intuition. A chess beginner learns the point values of the pieces, a knight or bishop worth three pawns, a rook five and a queen nine, and counts them before every exchange. A strong player no longer counts: the values have been absorbed into a feel for the position, which also accounts for factors the numbers ignore.

He calls the process numbers to leave numbers, or form to leave form. Technical information is studied and practised consciously until it becomes what he calls natural intelligence, operating without deliberate thought. Only then is the mind free to attend to what the rules do not cover.

The mechanism is that conscious attention is limited. A player still calculating basic values has no attention left for the deeper features of the position; once the basics run unconsciously, attention moves up a level.

Implication: in learning any skill, drill the fundamentals until they no longer require thought. Do not try to work by feel before the explicit knowledge has been absorbed.

The soft zone

Waitzkin distinguishes two kinds of concentration. The hard zone depends on the world cooperating: it requires silence and calm, and it snaps when something disrupts it. The soft zone is a resilient, flexible focus that absorbs disruptions without breaking, like a blade of grass that bends in a storm while a dry twig snaps.

His example is a tournament in his youth in which a song stuck in his head ruined his concentration. Rather than seeking perfect silence, he trained with loud music playing until he could think to the rhythm of the song. He describes playing on, absorbed, through an earthquake that shook a tournament hall.

He describes a progression in three steps: learning to flow with whatever happens, then learning to use whatever happens to one's advantage, and finally becoming self-sufficient enough to create one's own challenges rather than depend on outside ones. He applied it when he broke his hand before a national Push Hands championship: instead of withdrawing, he trained his other side intensively, and when the injured hand healed, his weaker side had become far stronger.

Implication: train under the conditions you will compete in, including noise and disruption, and look for the use in each setback instead of waiting for ideal conditions.

The downward spiral

Waitzkin observes that in chess, a first mistake is rarely fatal. Games are lost through the chain of errors that follows it: the second, third and fourth mistakes.

The mechanism is emotional. A player who has just made an error often clings to the sense that he still holds an advantage. He rejects lines that are now merely equal and pushes, with hollow confidence, for more than the position offers, compounding the damage.

The remedy is to recognize the moment the situation has changed and to reassess it from scratch, accepting the new reality instead of playing for the position one used to have.

Implication: after any mistake, stop and reassess the situation as it now is. The second error, made while reacting to the first, is the one that does the most harm.

Investment in loss

After the success of Searching for Bobby Fischer, Waitzkin found that fame had turned chess into a performance for others, and he lost his love of the game. He turned to Tai Chi, studying under the teacher William C.C. Chen in New York and starting again as a beginner.

Chen's term for the attitude Waitzkin needed was investment in loss: giving oneself up to the learning process, accepting being thrown and beaten repeatedly in Push Hands while retraining the instinct to meet force with force. The aim of the Tai Chi classics is to yield and redirect, so that a small force deflects a large one; learning it requires losing to stronger opponents for a long time.

Waitzkin describes months of being slammed by a much larger training partner. He stopped flinching, began to sense attacks earlier and eventually dominated the partner.

The mechanism is that protecting the ego, by avoiding stronger opponents or relying on strengths one already has, prevents the losses through which new skills are learned.

Implication: seek out training partners and problems that will beat you, and judge progress by what you learn from each loss, not by your record.

Making smaller circles

Waitzkin's method for mastering a technique is to make smaller circles. A movement is practised large and slow until its essential principle is felt, then compressed step by step, keeping its power while making it smaller and faster, until it is nearly invisible to an opponent.

The principle is depth over breadth. In his phrase, depth beats breadth any day of the week: it is better to plunge into the detailed mystery of the micro in order to understand what makes the macro tick. One technique learned deeply teaches the principles behind many; many learned superficially teach none.

The same idea governs his account of how expertise speeds up perception, which he calls slowing down time. Through chunking, the mind's ability to assimilate many pieces of information into a single file accessed as one, an expert perceives more in a moment with less conscious effort. What looks to observers like mystical intuition, such as a Tai Chi master seeming to read an opponent's mind, is refined perception of small cues built through this kind of layered practice.

Implication: spend your practice time on fewer things, in greater depth, until the principles behind them are internalized.

Building your trigger

Waitzkin's final technique is a method for reaching a state of calm focus on demand. His example is Dennis, a business executive who froze in high-pressure meetings but was entirely at ease when playing catch with his son.

Dennis built a routine to precede the game of catch: a light snack, a period of meditation, stretching and a few minutes of music by Bob Dylan, each step lasting about ten to fifteen minutes. After he practised it daily for about a month, the routine itself began to induce the calm he felt during catch. He then ran it before important meetings, and the state transferred.

Waitzkin then compresses the routine in the manner of smaller circles, shortening each step until a brief trigger, eventually little more than a thought, produces the same state.

The mechanism is conditioning: a routine reliably paired with a mental state comes to produce that state, and once established, the routine can be shortened.

Implication: identify the activity in which you are most focused and calm, build a fixed routine around it, then shorten the routine until it can be used before any high-pressure event.

Limits

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