The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance - By Josh Waitzkin
Date read: 2017-03-29How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)
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Insight into the mind of a chess prodigy and Tai Chi Chuan Push Hands World Champion on how he learns and masters games such as chess and martial arts. Great read on how to optimize your performance in any field.
Contents:
My Notes
Entity vs. incremental theories of intelligence - entity theorists are prone to use language like "I am smart at this" and to attribute their suceess or failure to an ingrained and unalterable level of ability. They have a fixed entity, a thing that cannot evolve. Incremental theorists (aka learning theorists) describe their results with sentences like "I got it because I worked very hard at it" or "I should have tried harder." Hard work, difficult material can be grasped-step by step, incrementally, the novice can become the master.
Very smart kids with entity theories tend to be far more brittle when challenged than kids with learning theories who would be considered not quite sharp.
Successful people shoot for the stars, put their hearts on the line in every battle, and ultimately discover that the lessons learned from the pursuit of excellence mean much more than the immediate trophies and glory. Painful losses may prove much more valuable than wins.
In performance training, first we learn to flow with whatever comes. Then we learn to use whatener comes to our advantage. Finally, we learn to be completely self-sufficient and create our own earthquakes, so our mental process feeds itself explosive inspirations without the need for outside stimulus.
The Soft Zone - to be quietly, intensely focused, apparently relaxed with a serene look on your face, but inside all the mental juices are churning. You flow with whatever comes, intergrating every ripple of life into your creative moment. Analogy: A man wants to walk across the land, but the earth is covered with thorns. He has two options-one is to pave his road, to tame all of nature into compliance. The other is to make sandals.
Mental resilience is arguably the most critical trait of a world-class performer, and it should be nurtured continuosly.
The first mistake rarely proves disastrous, but the downward spiral of the second, third, and fourth error creates a devastating chain reaction.
The most critical factors in the transition to becoming a conscious high performer is the degree to which your relationship to your pursuit stays in harmony with your unique disposition. To integrate this new information in a manner that does not violate who we are.
"Breathe into the fingertips technique": hold your palms in front of you, forefingers a few inches apart, shoulders relaxed. Now breathe in while gently expanding your fingers, putting your mind on your middle fingers, forefingers, and thumbs. Your breath and mind should both softly shoot to the very tips of your fingers. This inhaltation is slow, gently pulling oxygen into your dan tien (a spot believed to be the energetic center-located two and a half inches below the navel) and then moving that energy from your dan tien to your fingers. Once your inhalation is complete, gently exhale. Release your fingers, let your mind fall asleep, relax your hip joints, let everything sag into soft, quiet awareness. Once exhalation is complete, you reenergize. Try that exercise for a few minutes and see how you feel.
Investment in loss is giving yourself to the learning process. In Push Hands, training yourself to be soft and receptive when your body doesn't have any idea how to do it and wants to tighten up.
To avoid errors, minimize repetition as much as possible, by having an eye for consistent psychological and technical themes of error.
It is not difficult to have a beginner's mind and to be willing to invest in loss when you are truly a beginner, but it is much harder to maintain that humility and openness to learning when people are watching and expecting you to perform. To combat this you should have a liberating incremental approach that allows for times when you are not in peak performance state.
Depth over breadth - plunge into the detailed mystery of the micro in order to understand what makes the macro tick.
Making Smaller Circles - to touch the essence of a technique, and then to incrementally condense the external manifestation of the technique while keeping true to its essence. Over time expansiveness decreases while potency increases.
Subtle internalization and refinement is much more important than quantity of what is learned.
When there is intense competition, those who succeed have slightly more honed skills than the rest. It is rarely a mysterious technique that drives us to the top, but rather a profound mastery of what may well be a basic skill set. Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential.
There are critical steps in a resilient performer's evolving relationship to chaotic situations: 1) learn to be at peace with imperfection, 2) learn to use that imperfection to our advantage, and 3) learn to create ripples in our consciousness so we are constantly inspired whether or not external conditions are inspiring.
If you want the be the best, you have to take risks others would avoid, always optimizing the learning potential of the moment and turning adversity to your advantage. When the body needs to heal, those are ripe opportunities to deepen the mental, technical, internal side of your game.
When aiming for the top, your path requires an engaged, searching mind. You have to make obstacles spur you to creative new angles in the learning process. Let setbacks deepen your resolve. You should always come off an injury or a loss better than when you went down.
Chunking relates to the mind's ability to assimilate large amounts of information into a cluster that is bound together by certain patterns or principles particular to a given discipline. Putting it all together into one mental file that can be accessed as if it were a single piece of information. "Carved neural pathways" is the process of creating chunks and the navigation system between chunks.
The conscious mind can only take in and work with a certain limited amount of information in a unit of time. Envision that capacity as one page on your computer screen. If it is presented with a large amount of information, then the font will have to be very small in order to fit it all on the page. You will not be able to see the details of the letters. But if that same tool (the conscious mind) is used for a much smaller amount of information in the same amount of time, then we can see every detail of each letter. Now time feels slowed down.
In every discipline, the ability to be clearheaded, present, cool under fire is much of what separates the best from the mediocre.
The more present we are at practice, the more present we will be in competition, in the bathroom, at the exam, the operating table, the big stage. Presence must be like breathing.
Stress Recovery: the concept that in virtually every discipline, one of the most telling features of a dominant performer is the routine use of recovery periods. Players who are able to relax in brief moments of inactivity are almost always the ones who end up coming through when the game is on the line.
There is a clear physiological connection when it comes to recovery-cardiovascular interval training can have a profound effect on your ability to quickly release tension and recover from mental exhaustion. Physical flushing and mental clarity are very much intertwined.
To practice the ebb and flow of stress and recovery you should involve interval training. For example, instead of just swimming until you are exhausted and then quitting, push yourself to your healthy limit, then recover for a minute or two, and then push yourself again. Create a rhythm of intervals like the one I described with my biking.
You should try to incorporate the rhythm of stress and recovery into all aspects of your life. If you are at work and find yourself running out of mental stamina, take a break, wash your face, and come back renewed.
Not only do we have to be good at waiting, we have to love it. Because waiting is not waiting, it is life. Too many of us live without fully engaging our minds, waititng for that moment when our real lives begin. Years pass in boredom, but that is okay because when our true love comes around, or we discover our real calling, we will begin. Of course the sad truth is that if we are not present to the moment, our true love could come and go and we wouldn't even notice. And we will have become someone other than the you or I who would be able to embrace it. I believe an appreciation for simplicity, the everyday-the ablility to dive deeply into the banal and discover life's hidden richness-is where success, let alone happiness, emerges.
Develop a four or five step routine. For example:
After you have fully internalized your routine, do it the morning before a big meeting or when you need to be "on."
Then work on condensing by gradually altering the routine so that it is similar enough so as to have the same physiological effect, but slightly different so as to make the "trigger" both lower-maintenance and more flexible. And make these changes incrementally.
The ideal for any performer is flexiblity. If you have optimal conditions, then it is always great to take your time and go through an extended routine. If things are less organized, then be prepared with a flexible state of mind and a condensed routine.
Three steps as being critical to resilient, self-sufficient performance:
"I had to develop the habit of taking on my technical weaknesses whenever someone pushed my limits instead of falling back into a self-protective indignant pose. Once that adjustment was made, I was free to learn. If someone got into my head, they were doing me a favor, exposing a weakness. They were giving me a valuable opportinity to expand my threshold for turbulence. Dirty players were my best teachers."