The Art of Learning

Josh Waitzkin's book The Art of Learning is obviously mis-titled.  It should have been called The Art of Learning ... To Win!  Because ultimately that's what Waitzkin is really into.  Of course, as you would expect given its subtitle: "An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance", it pays homage to the classic hero's journey, an epic spiritual quest for manhood.  Turns out that by winning, you can discover all kinds of deep things about yourself.  You can even discover things by losing.  So long as after that you start winning again, you maggots!

Not that Waitzkin isn't pretty good at both winning and learning.  He was the child chess prodigy star of Searching for Bobby Fischer, who apparently just cleaned up on the junior circuit before he melted down under the pressure of being ... the child chess prodigy star of ... And then he reinvented himself as a competitive martial artist and went on to nearly win the Tai Chi Push Hands world championship just a few year later.  In fact, you can even watch his finals match, the one against "The Buffalo", that he narrates at a length worthy of the screenplay for Searching for Rocky.  Truly, he is an impressive competitor.

What he's not, however, is a prize winning writer.  The book is mostly a long-winded and repetitive autobiography detailing Watizkin's Odyssean journey to being so great.  Every match, whether chess or Tai Chi, is a breathless epic.  Every new technique learned is mind blowing.  It's exhausting just listening to how exhausted he is after every manic training session in preparation for the next big match.  

But let's give the guy some credit where it's due.  He tries to avoid David Foster Wallace's Tracy Austin trap.  He tries to tell us how he learned to stay cool under pressure and become such a good competitor.   He doesn't want us to just believe that he's innately great because he was winning chess tournaments at age 6.  Unlike Tracy Austin, he really does try to explain to us what was going on in his mind in those big competitive moments.

To this end, he deploys didactic little mnemonic phrases like losing to win, and the soft zone, and making smaller circles, culminating in illusion of the mystical.  These are all fine as far as they go.  Unfortunately they mostly just dress up common sense thoughts that every sentient competitor has already had.  For example, losing to win, just means that if you can get over your emotions and review what happened to accurately assess why you lost, you can often learn more from that experience than if you had won.  Likewise, the soft zone means that it's important to be able to concentrate even when conditions are imperfect and you are in danger of getting distracted, and making smaller circles means that to be really great, you have to practice the basics till they become unconscious.  He repeats and refers back to these little phrases as pearls of wisdom throughout the book.  Consider your mind blown.

So if, like me, you're looking for a book about how to learn better or faster in general, The Art of Learning is probably not for you.  If you are looking for a book about sports psychology and learning how to be a better competitor, you can get something out of the book, but even then, it's a pretty thin gruel in my opinion.  But if you want to study the art of learning to be Josh Waitzkin, you've come to exactly the right place.