# The Art of Learning *by [[Josh Waitzkin]]* "The key to pursuing excellence is to ***embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not to live in a shell of static, safe mediocrity. Usually, growth comes at the expense of previous comfort or safety**." "***Growth comes at the point of resistance**. We learn by pushing ourselves and finding what really lies at the outer reaches of our abilities." "In performance training, first we learn to flow with whatever comes. Then we learn to use whatever 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**." "Mental resilience is arguably the most critical trait of a world-class performer, and it should be nurtured continuously. Left to my own devices, I am always looking for ways to become more and more psychologically impregnable. When uncomfortable, my instinct is not to avoid the discomfort but to become at peace with it. When injured, which happens frequently in the life of a martial artist, I try to avoid painkillers and to change the sensation of pain into a feeling that is not necessarily negative. ***My instinct is always to seek out challenges as opposed to avoiding them**." "I have long believed that ***if a student of virtually any discipline could avoid ever repeating the same mistake twice—both technical and psychological—he or she would skyrocket to the top of their field**." "When nothing exciting is going on, we might get bored, distracted, separated from the moment. So we look for new entertainment, surf channels, flip through magazines. If caught in these rhythms, we are like tiny current-bound surface fish, floating along a two-dimensional world without any sense for the gorgeous abyss below. When these societally induced tendencies translate into the learning process, they have devastating effect." "This concept of Making Smaller Circles has been a critical component of my learning process in chess and the martial arts. In both fields, players tend to get attached to fancy techniques and fail to recognize that subtle internalization and refinement is much more important than the quantity of what is learned." "The secret is that everything is always on the line. ***The more present we are at practice, the more present we will be in competition, in the boardroom, at the exam, the operating table, the big stage**. If we have any hope of attaining excellence, let alone of showing what we've got under pressure, we have to be prepared by a lifestyle of reinforcement. Presence must be like breathing." "If you are interested in really improving as a performer, ***I would suggest incorporating the rhythm of stress and recovery into all aspects of your life**. Truth be told, this is what my entire approach to learning is based on—breaking down the artificial barriers between our diverse life experiences so all moments become enriched by a sense of interconnectedness. So, ***if you are reading a book and lose focus, put the book down, take some deep breaths, and pick it up again with a fresh eye**." "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, waiting for that moment when our real lives begin." "Bruce didn't patronize me—some teachers rebel so far away from being authoritarian that they praise all their little player's decisions, good or bad. Their intention is to build confidence, but instead they discourage objectivity, encourage self-indulgence, and perhaps most destructively, they create a dishonest relationship between instructor and pupil that any bright child can sense." "Children who associate success with hard work tend to have a 'mastery-oriented response' to challenging situations, while children who see themselves as just plain 'smart' or 'dumb,' or 'good' or 'bad' at something, have a 'learned helplessness orientation.'" In my experience, 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. One of the most critical strengths of a superior competitor in any discipline—whether we are speaking about sports, business negotiations, or even presidential debates—is the ability to dictate the tone of the battle. My whole career, my father and I searched out opponents who were a little stronger than me, so even as I dominated the scholastic circuit, losing was part of my regular experience. ## 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. Making sandals is the internal solution. Like the Soft Zone, it does not base success on a submissive world or overpowering force, but on intelligent preparation and cultivated resilience. There I stood, within the maelstrom of the midtown rush, waiting for the light and thinking about the ideas that I would soon be discussing with my students. A pretty young woman stood a few feet away from me, wearing headphones and moving to the music. I noticed her because I could hear the drumbeat. She wore a grey knee-length skirt, a black sweater, and the typical Manhattan office worker's white sneakers for the trek home. Suddenly she stepped right into the oncoming traffic. I guess she was confused by the chaotic one-way street, because I remember her looking the wrong way down Broadway. Immediately, as she stepped forward, looking right, a bicycle bore down on her from the left. The biker lurched away at the last second and gave her a solid but harmless bump. In my memory, time stops right here. ***This was the critical moment in the woman's life. She could have walked away unscathed if she had just stepped back onto the pavement, but instead she turned and cursed the fast-pedaling bicyclist.** I can see her now, standing with her back to the traffic on 33rd and Broadway, screaming at the now-distant biker who had just performed a miracle to avoid smashing into her. The image is frozen in my mind. A taxicab was the next to speed around the corner. The woman was struck from behind and sent reeling ten feet into the air. She smashed into a lamppost and was knocked out and bleeding badly. The ambulance and police came and eventually I moved on to P.S. 116, hoping that she would survive. A key component of high-level learning is cultivating a resilient awareness that is the older, conscious embodiment of a child's playful obliviousness. ## Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential. Regardless of the discipline, ***the better we are at recovering, the greater potential we have to endure and perform under stress.** ## Interval Training The physical conditioners at LGE taught me to do cardiovascular interval training on a stationary bike that had a heart monitor. I would ride a bike keeping my RPMs over 100, at ***a resistance level that made my heart rate go to 170 beats per minute after ten minutes of exertion**. Then I would lower the resistance level of the bike and ***go easy for a minute—my heart rate would return to 144 or so**. Then I would sprint again, at a very high level of resistance, and my heart rate would reach 170 again after a minute. Next I would go easy for another minute before sprinting again, and so on. My body and mind were undulating between hard work and release. The recovery time of my heart got progressively shorter as I continued to train this way. ***As I got into better condition, it took more work to raise my heart rate, and less time to lower my heart rate during rest: soon my rest intervals were only forty-five seconds and my sprint times longer.** In your performance training, the first step to mastering the zone is to practice the ebb and flow of stress and recovery. This should involve interval training as I have described above, at whatever level of difficulty is appropriate for the age and physical conditioning of the individual. 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, waiting for that moment when our real lives begin.** I have observed that virtually all people have one or two activities that move them in this manner, but they usually dismiss them as "just taking a break." If only they knew how valuable their breaks could be! Let me emphasize that it doesn't matter what your serene activity is. ***Whether you feel most relaxed and focused while taking a bath, jogging, swimming, listening to classical music, or singing in the shower, any such activity can take the place of Dennis's catch with his son.** The point to this system of creating your own trigger is that a physiological connection is formed between the routine and the activity it precedes. ***Dennis was always present when playing ball with his son, so all we had to do was set up a routine that became linked to that state of mind** (clearly it would have been impractical for Dennis to tow Jack around everywhere he went). ## Core Principles 1. Start by looking at principles in basic situations then move to increasingly complex ones 2. Look for the essence, what's the underlying principle, like formulas in mathematics, what's the context, why is it important 3. Numbers to lead numbers, form to lead form, realize what's been internalized and forgotten, make sure you understand fundamentals, learn the one punch really really well, do drills, if you can drill without getting bored you'll make insane progress, it makes the most important parts of the process effortless 4. Smaller circles, focus in on small areas to increase creativity, understand the micro to grasp the macro 5. Invest in loss, see it as a learning experience, put yourself in challenging situations 6. Soft zones, distractions can give you greater concentration, create your own earthquakes to shake your mind up, give space for the ideas to jump out, learn to work with any distractions 7. Create a trigger for focus, a short specific routine you can follow to get into flow, include something that always gets you there at the end to train the association between the routine and the flow, then change the activity at the end. It should be portable and easy. 8. Tension and release, high intensity interval training, learn to calm yourself down, switch between mental and physical and stress both sides of an art. Train when you train, rest when you rest. 9. Make sandals, don't pave nature. 10. The second mistake, don't let one lead to more, only make each mistake once, make each move fresh 11. Play to your strengths, dictate the tone of battle 12. Being true to your tastes is important to performance 13. Slow down time, go into details and smaller circles, practice in slow motion, get in the zone, full internalization looks like magic 14. Use obstacles to spur creativity instead of letting them mess you up === *Last Updated December 2025*