The Art of Learning
This past month I read an amazing book about learning and peak performance. It's a book called The Art of Learning written by Josh Waitzkin.
Josh Waitzkin is a remarkable figure who has achieved world-class success in multiple fields. He first rose to fame as an international chess champion and later became a Tai-chi world champion. The book discusses his journey and shares interesting insights into his learning process.
In this post, I want to share all the insights I've learned from reading this book. But first, I want to talk a bit about Josh and his journey to mastery.
Part Autobiographical, Part Meta-Learning
The book is a mix of autobiography and meta-learning. Rather than relying on educational theories or statistics, he shares personal insights gained from his own experiences. His story is about mastering different fields through the principles of learning, making it a compelling read for anyone interested in self-improvement, learning, and peak performance.
Josh started playing chess at the age of 6 and quickly demonstrated exceptional talent. By age 11, he was good enough to draw with Garry Kasparov, one of the greatest chess players, in an event where Kasparov played against 59 young players. At 13, Josh earned the title of National Master, and by 16, he was an International Master. Eventually, he shifted his focus to Tai-chi, and at 28, he became a Tai-chi world champion. Today he's a jiu-jitsu black belt.
In other words, his journey shows he achieving world-class success and the book goes deep into the whole process behind it.
Why Principles Are Important
Rather than simple techniques, the book brings different principles you can apply in any field of interest.
“Why principles?” you'd ask.
Josh talks about the importance of principles over mere techniques. He says, “When you learn a technique, you’re learning one thing. When you’re learning a principle that embodies a technique, you might be learning a thousand things.”
This approach enables parallel thinking, allowing knowledge transfer from one field to another through a well-designed learning process. In other words, by focusing on these meta-learning principles, you can apply and achieve mastery in one field, and then transfer the same knowledge, sometimes with a few adjustments, to another field of interest.
Principles
There are two big ideas here:
- Mastery: the drill and training concept
- Focus and concentration: present and peak performance
All the principles fall into one of these buckets.
Mastery
Start with principles
Here we start with the basics and only then progress to increasingly complex scenarios. The focus should be on mastering the fundamentals.
To master the fundamentals, you need to find and establish them first. You can use the idea of first principles to break down the complexity and have a clear vision of the small components that form the field.
True mastery begins with a deep understanding of the basics. Like Kobe Bryant often stressed the importance of fundamentals and how each basketball fundamental skill compounded and got better over years of practice.
With the focus on each basic fundamental skill, you gradually improve and start tackling more complex challenges. This is when you get incremental growth.
After mastering the fundamentals, you just need to embrace complexity and apply the foundational knowledge in dynamic contexts, fostering deeper learning and adaptability. That way you make progress in your craft.
Number to Leave Numbers, Form to Leave Form
This is a principle referenced from the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and the main idea behind it is that you master a concept so well that you reach a level of understanding where one operates intuitively and seamlessly, without the need for constant calculation or measurement.
After internalizing the fundamentals, with experience, and embracing more challenging situations, you build good intuition and connect dots that weren't related in the first place. In other words, you move beyond rigid structures to embrace creativity and intuition.
Smaller Circles: Depth Over Breadth
Again, here he suggests focusing on the micro to understand the macro. Depth over breadth. In other words, focusing on the fundamentals to understand the whole field.
This approach allows for a profound understanding and mastery, similar to zooming in on specific parts of a broader picture.
Slowing Down Time
Mastery enhances perception, allowing for the noticing of subtle details and more precise responses.
Practicing techniques until they become second nature shifts the focus from mechanics to strategy, effectively "slowing down" time for deeper analysis. When a person has mastered a skill, they can notice subtle details that others might miss: analyze situations more thoroughly and respond with greater precision.
Investment in Loss
The fear of losing or looking incompetent can hinder progress. If you don't want to fail, you'll find and follow problems and situations that are comfortable and aren't that challenging. That won't push you out of your limits of knowledge, and then make you progress slowly or even not making progress at all.
Reframe losing or failing as progress because you'll learn faster. A willingness to lose and analyze the loss expands our minds and develops our skills and knowledge.
Find rich opportunities for learning even if it pushes you out of your comfort zone, even if it's risky and you'll possibly fail. Put yourself in challenging situations that require you to go with your 100%. Sometimes it's not enough but you'll learn a lot throughout this how process: learn about all the mistakes you've made and about what you could've done differently.
Challenging situations allow for the exploration of weaknesses and areas that need improvement. It's also important to understand that short term setbacks are seen as stepping stones toward achieving higher levels of competence and mastery in the long term.
Focus and Concentration: Peak Performance
Soft Zones
Soft zones are your performance state. This is one powerful idea to handle and integrate distractions because this state of intense yet relaxed focus allows for resilience and adaptability in the face of challenges and unexpected events.
You maintain focus and concentration and therefore keep and even improve your performance.
Building Your Trigger
The book questions “What if we could manually create a state of concentration whenever we want?“. In the face of death and danger, our focus and energy go automatically to the limit. What if we could use this idea to build this trigger whenever we want?
This is what Josh calls “building your trigger”. Here's how it works
- Find a key relaxing activity
- Create a routine around this activity or activities
- Practice the routine to build this concentration state before a high-pressure activity
- The more you practice it, the better you form a connection between the routine and the relaxed mind for high-performance
- When the routine is internalized, you can have its benefits by just thinking about it
In summary, you create a routine around a relaxing activity to build a concentrated state for high-pressure situations. With practice, this routine can help you achieve a relaxed, focused state whenever needed.
Tension and Release
Tension is necessary for growth and performance. It can enhance focus and drive, pushing you to perform at your best.
Release is about relaxation and recovery, preventing burnout, maintaining mental clarity, and improving future performance.
The core idea is to alternate between intense focus (tension) and relaxation (release). In the same way you have intense practice, you have to use breaks effectively. He illustrates this idea using his high intensity interval training, where you go to your limit in the training session and then release the tension and relax. Then you start again and again. The more you do it, the more you gain control of the relaxation phase, where you use breaks to the max and don't worry about the tension phase.
This idea reminds me of the concept of diffuse mode in learning, where you use relaxation to give your brain time to build connections and ideas in your head.
Final words
The book brings very abstract concepts and it took me some time to absorb the principles to write this piece and start applying them in my life. I hope with this breakdown, you can start applying them in yours too.
Keep learning!