In this post, I’ll talk about the Art Of Learning by Josh Waitzkin and give you a summary. I’ll only summarize the points that I feel are most important.

About the author: The author is a chess grandmaster. This means he’s about an order of magnitude better than chess experts. And chess experts have deep knowledge about the game and can beat most of anyone in chess. The author is also a world champion in Push Hands, a combative sport based on Tai Chi principles. And he became a world champion despite a corrupt judging panel, and last-minute rule changes that gave the home team (the Taiwanese) immense advantage. That’s how good he is – he won by such a large margin that despite corrupt rules, he still won against home-team competitors that’s trained their whole lives for this stuff.

His lived experience is quite interesting and is a fun read, but my hope for this summary of The Art Of Learning is to distill down his techniques for learning so that you can apply it on your own.

As such, I’ll skip the portions of the book where he talks about his life/competition.

If after reading this post, you’re interested in grabbing the book, go here.

Summary Of Presence And Focus In The Art Of Learning

• Book talks a lot about meditation, focus, and presence.
• The book treats focus as a panacea for staging comebacks and handling setbacks.
• Book will provide some techniques for increasing focus / re-gaining focus.
• Focus is crucially important because setbacks that throw you off in the middle of competition can be the end of you.

Losing And Winning

• Losing is necessary for winning. This is obvious. Nobody wins 100% of the time.
• Losing hurts. A lot. Don’t shunt out the emotions. But don’t dwell, either. Be present with the unpleasant feelings of losing, learn the lessons, and move on. Losing must feel bad so you incentivize yourself to stop losing. And winning must feel good so you can incentivize yourself to win.
• Know that almost all setbacks can be handled and comebacks can be made as long as you have a presence of mind.
• When you lose – ask yourself questions and ‘rewind’ the situation in your head. Root cause where you failed so you can isolate your bad habits and fix them.
• Face opponents / solve problems that are optimally difficult for you. This isn’t ‘pleasant’ because things will always be painful. But you’ll always be growing, and it’s the fastest way to learn. Other words: be willing to lose and take a step back. Be willing to slow down, so you can come out the other side faster and better.
• Competing is extremely intense. As is losing. He finds that taking breaks from intensity helps with his learning process and success. So take breaks when you need in order to recover!
• Final words on the emotional pain of losing, in Josh’s words: “I responded to heartbreak with hard work”

Summary Of The 2 Models In The Art Of Learning

The book talks about 2 models of learning, backed by Carol Dweck’s research:

1. Entity, or the belief that you’re “smart” or “dumb”.
2. Increment, or the belief that you just learn and grow better over time.

The latter is an effective learning strategy; the former not. If you think you’re “smart” or “dumb” or have a certain level of intelligence, you automatically stop yourself from outperforming your former self. You’re either this “smart” or this “dumb”, so you can’t possibly do any better. Why learn or work hard? Learning and growing is just not a part of the “entity” model of learning – if it could be called ‘learning’ at all.

“Incremental” learning gives you the mental model of saying “it’s OK to fail – I just want to learn.” And if results aren’t going your way – they’re just not going your way for now. Keep challenging yourself. Keep growing. And you’ll get there. This model is conducive to rapid learning and growth.

As such, you should encourage yourself and your peers on incremental growth. Focus on the stuff that matters: hard work, analysis of failures, and how to overcome setbacks.

And never focus on garbage that’s unproductive, like “God-given talents” or “intelligence”. You’re dealt a certain set of cards. This is true. Just do the best with it. Dwelling on your cards does nothing for you.

Handling Distractions / Setbacks

In chess, the competition will do things to annoy you. Everything from humming annoying music, to kicking your shin. It’s a dirty sport.

In the book, Josh argues that one shouldn’t be like a brittle twig that requires the world to cooperate for you to be focused and “in the zone”. You ought to be strong enough to stay focused, even if the world doesn’t cooperate.

He’d train his mental resilience by making things difficult for himself. On purpose. Some examples:

• Blast music (annoying or otherwise) while solving chess problems.
• Wouldn’t organize cards when he plays card games. This is so that he’s forced to memorize and reorganize the cards in his head.

Building mental resilience means that no matter how the exterior world behaves, you can reign yourself back into the zone. With 100% focus, and optimal performance.

This is crucially important if:

1. You have opponents or some exterior thing that’s trying to distract you.
2. You have a setback in the middle of a high-pressure situation. You can use that distraction and double-down on your focus.

Josh goes on to talk about the “downward spiral”. This is a phenomenon where you have a minor setback, but then you get nervous and your game completely crumbles.

Everyone has setbacks, and the delta between winning and losing can be remarkably minor. Losers let minor setbacks turn into major setbacks and lose the game. Winners take those same setbacks, improvise with the reality, and double-down on their focus. In other words, improvising with setbacks is just something that winners ingrain. And it’s something that you must do, because there will always be setbacks.

Making one mistake is a wake-up call for you to come back to presence and focus. Ignoring the wakeup call means you’ll die in a downward spiral.

One way Josh comes back to presence when he’s stuck in a chess game is to go outside and sprint for 50 yards. This seems to clean-slate his brain and he’s back in with 100% focus.

Reigning in your focus sounds like meditation. And being able to double-down on your focus in the middle of setbacks/distraction is Antifragile. Train your mental resilience and nothing can screw with your performance.

Soft vs. Hard Learning Summary In The Art Of Learning

A lot of times, you might find it more educational to learn “that from this”. As an example, he’d gain a great appreciation for defensive chess when studying one of the greatest offensive chess games ever played. Likewise, Tim Ferriss has mentioned that dancing women’s role in tango has helped accelerate learning the men’s role exponentially.

Thus, it’s important to study different perspectives when learning.

Josh chats about the “soft” way vs. the “hard” way of learning.

• The “hard” way of learning is forceful. You learn how other people play, and you force yourself to play in their style. This is stifling and ineffective.
• The “soft” way of learning is keeping your own creative voice. Yet, you study others’ perspectives for logical understanding. Know how the other roles work in competition so you can exploit weaknesses in your own, creative way.

Studying others’ perspectives is unnatural. And as such, a remarkably intense process. Josh warns us to work “hard” – but not so “hard” as to stifle your own growth:

There is the careful balance of pushing yourself relentlessly, but not so hard that you melt down. Muscles and minds need to stretch to grow, but if stretched too thin, they will snap. A competitor needs to be process-oriented, always looking for stronger opponents to spur growth, but it is also important to keep on winning enough to maintain confidence. We have to release our current ideas to soak in new material, but not so much that we lose touch with our unique natural talents. Vibrant, creative idealism needs to be tempered by a practical, technical awareness.

Training The Basics (Most Important Takeaway For Me)

In learning, focus on the smallest, simplest things. They oftentimes inform much more complicated situations.

Chess endgames is when there are only a few pieces left on the board. Chess opening is when both players start out with all their pieces. Most chess players memorize openings so that they can have an advantage going into the mid-and-endgame.

Josh and his coach takes a different approach. He’d study the endgame first. Endgames are much simpler and only has a few chess pieces. And he’d study endgames extremely deeply, iterating through each piece / combination of pieces in chess. These simplified situations allowed Josh to:

1. Learn the nuance of each piece. Deeply.
2. Once all nuances of single chess pieces are ingrained, he’d study endgames with 2 pieces. This is more complicated than a single piece, but still much easier to internalize than a complete chess board (i.e. chess openings).
3. Doing this allowed him to internalize how small groupings of chess pieces coordinate. And as such, these smaller, simpler endgames helped him internalize and understand a much larger board.

Other words, he internalized small subsets of chess pieces. And this in turn allowed him to understand the ecosystem of a complex chess board as a whole much easier. He started with the basics and the basics allowed him to “see” a complicated situation extreme clarity. His competitors would start out trying to study the most complicated situations (openings) first, which inevitably just led them to memorize instead of internalize how the board works.

Internalizing is better than memorization, because it’s more robust. Internalization allows for improvisation in unseen situations. Memorization screws you if you run into a position you’ve never seen before.

As mentioned above, winners know how to improvise – and studying from the basics allows one to improvise much easier.

Likewise, he took the same approach for martial arts. He’d obsess and study for many hours the simplest moves, without ever moving on. He’d be present and internalize every single muscle for the simplest of movements. And he’d start out those movements slowly. Once internalized, he’d do those movements faster, gradually.

By the time he knows a very simple move remarkably well, he can adopt / learn more complex moves much easier than his competitors that just wants to learn a bunch of moves.

Why?

Because the basics exists in all complex moves, and internalizing the basics means you don’t have to consciously think about them when learning complex moves – you just need to do the small, additive thing that the complex moves add. In other words: complex moves are 80% fundamentals and 20% new stuff. His competitors that haven’t internalized the basics needs to learn the whole 100% each time, and the author would only need to learn an additional 20% for each new move.

Ergo, internalizing the basics makes learning new stuff easier. And breath doesn’t matter compared to depth:

The fact is that 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

So when tackling a hard, big, messy project/problem. Ask yourself: what tiny problem/learnings can you internalize that’ll make it so that it’s much easier for you to tackle the problem/project as a whole?

Summary Of Presence Training In The Art Of Learning

Presence isn’t fugazi. Presence is focus. It’s logical to think that focus = better performance, and distracted = lower performance.

This section covers his techniques of training focus. The argument for having presence goes like this:

• High-pressure situations are distracting. If you’re distracted, your performance will lower.
• Training your presence to be robust means you’ll always be focused. This gives you an edge over competitors that haven’t trained their focus/presence in high-pressure situations.
• Make your focus/presence as natural as breathing and you’ll be able to be very comfortable, even in uncomfortable situations.

But how do you train your presence so you can get in the zone? Let’s build this out.

First, understand that long, intense thinks are much less effective than short-bursts of intense thinking.

I saw that when I had been playing well, I had two- to ten-minute, crisp thinks. When I was off my game, I would sometimes fall into a deep calculation that lasted over twenty minutes and this “long think” often led to an inaccuracy. What is more, if I had a number of long thinks in a row, the quality of my decisions tended to deteriorate.

So if you’re stuck, instead of forcing yourself to think, just clean slate your brain and start over. That is, take small rests in between a long think, internally. The more you can let go, the sharper your focus can be.

Jim Harbaugh told me about the first time he noticed this pattern in himself. He’s a passionate guy, and liked to root on his defense when they were on the field. But after his first sessions at LGE he noticed a clear improvement in his play if he sat on the bench, relaxed, and didn’t even watch the other team’s offensive series. The more he could let things go, the sharper he was in the next drive.

“OK that sounds cool and all, but how do I get better at taking internal breaks and refocusing?”

Studies suggest that doing HIIT will help your mental recovery / focus speed.

At LGE they had discovered that 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. What is more, physical flushing and mental clarity are very much intertwined.

Other words, a physical routine like the below can help you refocus/recover your mental when you hit a setback:

When I began this form of interval training, if I was doing 3 sets of 15 repetitions of a bench press, I would leave exactly 45 seconds between sets. If I was doing 3 sets of 12 repetitions with heavier weights, I would need 50 seconds between sets, if my sets were 10 reps I would take 55 seconds, and if I was lifting heavy weights, at 3 sets of 8 reps, I would take one minute between reps. This is a good baseline for an average athlete to work with. In time, with consistent work, rest periods can be incrementally shortened even as muscles grow and are stressed to their larger healthy limits.

This also explains why when Josh is stuck thinking about a hard move, he’d go outside the chess hall and sprint for 50 yards like he’s Naruto or something.

When you train your presence / focus recovery, you’ll eventually get so good that your recovery is imperceptible. It might take you a few minutes to regain focus when you’re new at this, but long-term training could mean that it only takes you a split second to regain focus. This is huge obviously in applications of timed competition like chess, combat sports, or even technical interviews.

Don’t want to sprint all the time? You can cultivate your recovery times by incorporating the habit of giving yourself small breaks in your lifestyle:

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. If you are at work and find yourself running out of mental stamina, take a break, wash your face, and come back renewed. It would be an excellent idea to spend a few minutes a day doing some simple meditation practice in which your mind gathers and releases with the ebb and flow of your breath. This will help connect your physical interval training to the mental arenas. If you enjoy the experience, gradually build up your mental stamina and spend more time at it.

TL;DR: Focus is important for high-performance. And focus is best when there are breaks in between. These breaks can be long and waste a bunch of time. But you can minimize these breaks over time via HIIT training and/or doing a conscious practice of clean-slating your brain.

This section covers how to recover / regain focus. But how do you put yourself in the zone so you’re focused in the first place?

After all, there’s nothing to recover from if you’re distracted. In the next section, we’ll talk about how to build triggers so you automatically get ‘in the zone’.

Building Your Trigger Summary In The Art Of Learning

Getting “in the zone” is optimal for performance. We know that much.

But how do you actually get “in the zone”? That razor-sharp focus state that some of our blessed with from time to time seems elusive and intangible.

This section talks about designing a routine so you can routinely get in the zone. Namely, we want to make ourselves so robust that high-pressure situations feel like the norm so we’re never thrown off.

If you get into a frenzy anticipating the moment that will decide your destiny, then when it arrives you will be overwrought with excitement and tension. To have success in crunch time, you need to integrate certain healthy patterns into your day-to-day life so that they are completely natural to you when the pressure is on.

Here’s how an example of how to design a routine for yourself so you’ll have consistent performance. First, think about an activity that gives you ‘serene focus’. Then, create a 4-5 step routine around it. The example in the book is as follows. Josh has a client named Dennis who derives serene focus from playing ball with his kid.

“I told Dennis to treat the catch like any other catch, just to have fun.

So we created the following routine:

1. Eat a light consistent snack for 10 minutes

2. 15 minutes of meditation

3. 10 minutes of stretching

4. 10 minutes of listening to Bob Dylan

5. Play ball

After a month of doing these relaxing activities, the ‘serene focus’ of step 5 is linked to the first 4 steps. Josh explains:

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…Once the routine is internalized, it can be used before any activity and a similar state of mind will emerge.

In other words, after a month of doing these activities, one could just transplant the first 4 steps to any other activity to “trigger” a serenely focused state of mind for step 5. For example, if Dennis wanted clear focus for work, he’d just do:

1. Eat a light consistent snack for 10 minutes

2. 15 minutes of meditation

3. 10 minutes of stretching

4. 10 minutes of listening to Bob Dylan

5. Go to work (and a similar, serene focus will be there when he is at work).

Once this is done and internalized, one could shorten the times for steps 1-4 as long as focus doesn’t suffer. The example in the book gives is slowly and incrementally shrinking the 4 steps. Dennis:

• First reduced meditation from 15 mins to 12 mins. Then,
• Stretching went from 10 mins to 8 mins. Then,
• Meditation + stretching shrank to only a few minutes total.
• He’d also skip the snack if he wasn’t hungry.
• He’d also listen to Bob Dylan during his drive to work, as opposed to at home.

After all this, he’s basically been able to shrink what was previously an hour of dedicated time to ‘prime his brain’ to only a few minutes.

In this way, Dennis (and perhaps you) can create a routine to prime the brain to have serene, clear focus in just a few minutes.

Josh also argues that life is full of surprises. And thus you should have trigger routines that last a few minutes, to a few seconds. If it comes time for you to have to get focused in only a few seconds, you could have a (perhaps a slightly more suboptimal) routine to get into focus. Having various routines of different lengths allows you to be robust and flexible.

Thoughts, Summary, And Review Of The Art Of Learning

I think this book is a crucial book for anyone who is interesting in learning anything, and becoming world-class at it.

If you’re someone who is competitive and likes to win – this book’s for you.

The book talks about subjects of:

• The prerequisite of investing in losses, so you can win.
• 2 approaches of learning (entity vs. incremental), and why the latter is superior.
• Various ways to chunk big, messy problems, into smaller basics for more effective learning.
• The importance of focus/presence for performance.
• How to trigger yourself to be in the zone of focus, and how to recover your focus should you end up distracted.

All these ingredients combined allows you to be robust/flexible enough so you can be a world-class performer, no matter what the external circumstances are.

Because learning is such an incredibly essential part of the human experience, and because the ideas in this book is quite novel, this book gets an easy 5/5 from me.