The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin

The Distillation of Josh Waitzkin

1. Being true to yourself is the only way to become a master of your craft 
2. The love and motivation has to come from within yourself, it can’t be faked
3. It begins with mastering the fundamentals. Full immersion into the principles 
4. Embrace failure, setbacks teach you how to succeed 
5. Growth comes at the point of resistance. Plateaus, masters love the plateaus
6. Depth over Breadth
7. Stress and recovery 
8. Strength is built on strength 

One has to investigate the principle in one thing or one event exhaustively . . . Things and the self are governed by the same principle. If you understand one, you understand the other, for the truth within and the truth without are identical. —Er Cheng Yishu, 11th century

My whole life I had studied techniques, principles, and theory until they were integrated into the unconscious.

From the outside Tai Chi and chess couldn’t be more different, but they began to converge in my mind. I started to translate my chess ideas into Tai Chi language, as if the two arts were linked by an essential connecting ground. Every day I noticed more and more similarities, until I began to feel as if I were studying chess when I was studying Tai Chi. 

• Patterns emerge that can be transferred to different domains. 
• Pure concentration didn’t allow thoughts or false constructions to impede my awareness, and I observed clear connections between different life experiences through the common mode of consciousness by which they were perceived.
• As I cultivated openness to these connections, my life became flooded with intense learning experiences. 
• In order to find the connections you need to be in the arena and open to them.

Interval Training

• Training in the ability to quickly lower my heart rate after intense physical strain helped me recover between periods of exhausting concentration in chess tournaments.
• All living systems in the world operate on stress and recovery 

Whenever I had an idea, I would test it against some brilliant professor who usually disagreed with my conclusions.

• Find the smartest people with the deepest domain expertise when you want to learn or develop a skill. 

The need for precision forced me to think about these ideas more concretely. I had to come to a deeper sense of concepts like essence, quality, principle, intuition, and wisdom in order to understand my own experience, let alone have any chance of communicating it.

• An essential of expertise/greatness/mastery is to dive to the deepest depths of your thinking. Tease out your ideas and codify them to a concise clear version 
• As I struggled for a more precise grasp of my own learning process, I was forced to retrace my steps and remember what had been internalized and forgotten.
  • Often we must go back and relearn. Puzzle pieces we couldn’t find a place for at an earlier time often click into place with new knowledge.

“I sometimes refer to it as the study of numbers to leave numbers, or form to leave form. A basic example of this process, which applies to any discipline, can easily be illustrated through chess: A chess student must initially become immersed in the fundamentals in order to have any potential to reach a high level of skill. He or she will learn the principles of endgame, middlegame, and opening play. Initially one or two critical themes will be considered at once, but over time the intuition learns to integrate more and more principles into a sense of flow. Eventually the foundation is so deeply internalized that it is no longer consciously considered, but is lived. This process continuously cycles along as deeper layers of the art are soaked in.”

• Full immersion in fundamentals 
• Learn the principles of all the elements 
• Over time you will be able to integrate theme with an intuitive understanding
• Once the foundation it is so deep you operate at an unconscious level

“Very strong chess players will rarely speak of the fundamentals, but these beacons are the building blocks of their mastery.”

The same pattern can be seen when the art of learning is analyzed: themes can be internalized, lived by, and forgotten. I figured out how to learn efficiently in the brutally competitive world of chess.

• Once you learn how to “learn” in one domain you can transfer it to others 

Whenever there was a concept or learning technique that I related to in a manner too abstract to convey, I forced myself to break it down into the incremental steps with which I got there. Over time I began to see the principles that have been silently guiding me, and a systematic methodology of learning emerged.

• Can only uncover the principles if you break down the steps. This takes deep deep work and must be done consistently over long periods of time.

After so many years of big games, performing under pressure has become a way of life. Presence under fire hardly feels different from the presence I feel sitting at my computer, typing these sentences. What I have realized is that what I am best at is not Tai Chi, and it is not chess—what I am best at is the art of learning.

• This is at the core of who Josh Waitzkin is. Deeply resonates 
• The narrative in your head can change about presence in the moment. Dr. Gervais said this to me, “Don’t consider it a “big game”, all moments we can perform at our highest level.”

Bruce gave me a foundation of critical chess principles and a systematic understanding of analysis and calculation. While the new knowledge was valuable, the most important factor in these first months of study was that Bruce nurtured my love for chess, and he never let technical material smother my innate feeling for the game

• Most overlooked piece by many coaches. YOUR STRATEGY has to ALIGN with WHO YOU ARE 

Many very talented kids expected to win without much resistance. When the game was a struggle, they were emotionally unprepared. I thrived under adversity. My style was to make the game complex and then work my way through the chaos.

• Discover your style through practice- study- repetition and mold it to be your own 
• Too many people are “playing someone else’s game”, play yours and make it yours

Bruce and I also spent a lot of time studying endgames, where the board is nearly empty and high-level principles combine with deep calculations to create fascinating battles. While my opponents wanted to win in the openings, right off the bat, I guided positions into complicated middlegames and abstract endings.

• Continual theme is the amount of study/practice of all levels of his game 

Often in chess, you feel something is there before you find it. The skin suddenly perks up, senses heighten like an animal feeling danger or prey. The unconscious alerts the conscious player that there is something to be found, and then the search begins. I started calculating, putting things together. Slowly the plan crystallized in my mind.

• When this process begins for me it’s almost euphoric. One step closer to mastery and unlocking the patterns. When you’re operating at this level it’s only from putting in the work and distilling it down. A deeply liberating and enthralling experience 

Why Pursue Excellence?

 First, what is the difference that allows some to fit into that narrow window to the top? And second, what is the point? If ambition spells probable disappointment, why pursue excellence? In my opinion, the answer to both questions lies in a well-thought-out approach that inspires resilience, the ability to make connections between diverse pursuits, and day-to-day enjoyment of the process. The vast majority of motivated people, young and old, make terrible mistakes in their approach to learning. They fall frustrated by the wayside while those on the road to success keep steady on their paths.

• Dr. Carol Dweck, a leading researcher in the field of developmental psychology, makes the distinction between entity and incremental theories of intelligence. Children who are “entity theorists”—that is, kids who have been influenced by their parents and teachers to think in this manner—are prone to use language like “I am smart at this” and to attribute their success or failure to an ingrained and unalterable level of ability. They see their overall intelligence or skill level at a certain discipline to be a fixed entity, a thing that cannot evolve. Incremental theorists, who have picked up a different modality of learning—let’s call them learning theorists—are more prone to describe their results with sentences like “I got it because I worked very hard at it” or “I should have tried harder.”
  • A child with a learning theory of intelligence tends to sense that with hard work, difficult material can be grasped—step by step, incrementally, the novice can become the master. Dweck’s research has shown that when challenged by difficult material, learning theorists are far more likely to rise to the level of the game, while entity theorists are more brittle and prone to quit. 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.”
  • What is compelling about this is that the results have nothing to do with intelligence level. 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 as sharp. In fact, some of the brightest kids prove to be the most vulnerable to becoming helpless, because they feel the need to live up to and maintain a perfectionist image that is easily and inevitably shattered.
  • Entity theorists tend to have been told that they did well when they have succeeded, and that they weren’t any good at something when they have failed.
  • Learning theorists, on the other hand, are given feedback that is more process-oriented. Julie learns to associate effort with success and feels that she can become good at anything with some hard work. She also feels as though she is on a journey of learning, and her teacher is a friendly assistant in her growth.
  • Studies have shown that in just minutes, kids can be conditioned into having a healthy learning theory for a given situation.

“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.”

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. In the long run, painful losses may prove much more valuable than wins—those who are armed with a healthy attitude and are able to draw wisdom from every experience, “good” or “bad,” are the ones who make it down the road. They are also the ones who are happier along the way.

• The real challenge is to stay in range of this long-term perspective when you are under fire and hurting in the middle of the war. This, maybe our biggest hurdle, is at the core of the art of learning.
• Layer by layer we built up my knowledge and my understanding of how to transform axioms into fuel for creative insight. It is a long iterative process. 

Operating principles behind positions that I might never see again. This method of study gave me a feeling for the beautiful subtleties of each chess piece, because in relatively clear-cut positions I could focus on what was essential. I was also gradually internalizing a marvelous methodology of learning—the play between knowledge, intuition, and creativity. From both educational and technical perspectives, I learned from the foundation up.

• ALL LEARNING STARTS FROM THE FUNDAMENTALS 

Learning must be a process to be loved, not a result to be had. You may pass the test, but you learn absolutely nothing—and most critically, you don’t gain an appreciation for the value or beauty of learning itself. For children who focus early on openings, chess becomes about results. Period.

Embracing failure & pain

•  These moments in my life were wracked with pain, but they were also defining gut-checks packed with potential. The setbacks taught me how to succeed. And what kept me on my path was a love for learning.

Dictate the tone of the battle

• One of the most critical strengths of a superior competitor in any discipline—is the ability to dictate the tone of the battle. Can only be built from strengths 

Build on Strength 

• As I cultivated my strengths, I also had to take on the more abstract elements of high-level chess so I could compete effectively with more seasoned opponents. Just as muscles get stronger when they are pushed, good competitors tend to rise to the level of the opposition. The adult chess world toughened me up, made me introspective and always on the lookout for flaws to be improved on.
• You may never know what great talent looks like until you face it. This has been an essential component of my growth both in sports and business. Step into the arena with an elite competitor and you immediately are aware of how little you know/skilled you are

Intense Passion for the Game

• While there was a lot of pressure on my shoulders, fear of failure didn’t move me so much as an intense passion for the game. I think the arc of losing a heartbreaker before winning my first big title gave me license to compete on the edge. This is not to say that losing didn’t hurt. It did. There is something particularly painful about being beaten in a chess game. In the course

Growth Mindset

• It would be easy to read about the studies on entity vs. incremental theories of intelligence and come to the conclusion that a child should never win or lose. I don’t believe this is the case. If that child discovers any ambition to pursue excellence in a given field later in life, he or she may lack the toughness to handle inevitable obstacles. While a fixation on results is certainly unhealthy, short-term goals can be useful developmental tools if they are balanced within a nurturing long-term philosophy. Too much sheltering from results can be stunting. The road to success is not easy or else everyone would be the greatest at what they do—we need to be psychologically prepared to face the unavoidable challenges along our way, and when it comes down to it, the only way to learn how to swim is by getting in the water.
• On the other hand, it is okay for a child (or an adult for that matter) to enjoy a win. A parent shouldn’t be an automaton, denying the obvious emotional moment to spout platitudes about the long-term learning process when her child is jumping up and down with excitement. When we have worked hard and succeeded at something, we should be allowed to smell the roses. The key, in my opinion, is to recognize that the beauty of those roses lies in their transience. It is drifting away even as we inhale. We enjoy the win fully while taking a deep breath, then we exhale, note the lesson learned, and move on to the next adventure.
• We need to put ourselves out there, give it our all, and reap the lesson, win or lose. The fact of the matter is that there will be nothing learned from any challenge in which we don’t try our hardest. Growth comes at the point of resistance. We learn by pushing ourselves and finding what really lies at the outer reaches of our abilities.
  • The greats are always looking for ways to challenge themselves. Find better competition at every stage of the game.

Learning Curve/ Plateaus 

• As I matured as a chess player, there were constantly leaps into the unknown. Because of my growth curve, my life was like that hermit crab who never fits into the same shell for more than a few days.
  • Constantly evolving, adapting, becoming. 

Plateaus 

• Periods when my results leveled off while I internalized the information necessary for my next growth spurt, but I didn’t mind. I had a burning love for chess and so I pushed through the rocky periods with a can-do attitude.
  • Plateaus are where most people drop off. They’re long and arduous and the mental resilience to push through when little to no progress is being seen is essential. Learn to LOVE THE PLATEAUS. 
  • Embrace failure/willingness to fail – these challenges are the only way to break through 
  • Honest feedback is essential  

Skill Acquisition ( Brett McKay not Josh’s formula)

Phase 1: Cognitive Phase

• Concentrate intently on what we’re doing as we figure out strategies on how to accomplish the skill more efficiently and effectively. The cognitive phase is riddled with mistakes as we learn the ins and outs of our new pursuit.

Phase 2: Associative Phase 

• This stage we make fewer mistakes and feel more comfortable with the skill and begin to concentrate less on what we’re doing. Becomes more intuitive. 

Phase 3: Autonomous Phase 

• Reach a capability of not having to think very much. Example is driving after a few years you have an intuitive sense you didn’t have when you first got your license.

From one perspective the opponent is the enemy. On the other hand there is no one who knows you more intimately, no one who challenges you so profoundly or pushes you to excellence and growth so relentlessly.

• Find opponents to push you- + – =, someone above to challenge you, someone equal to directly compete and someone you can mentor 

Focus

• The first obstacle I had to overcome as a young chess player was to avoid being distracted by random, unexpected events—by the mini earthquakes that afflict all of our days. 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. 
  • Be like water 

The Soft Zone

• The initial step along this path is to attain what sports psychologists call The Soft Zone. Envision the Zone as your performance state. You are concentrating on the task at hand, whether it be a piece of music, a legal brief, a financial document, driving a car, anything. Then something happens. Maybe your spouse comes home, your baby wakes up and starts screaming, your boss calls you with an unreasonable demand, a truck has a blowout in front of you. The nature of your state of concentration will determine the first phase of your reaction—if you are tense, with your fingers jammed in your ears and your whole body straining to fight off distraction, then you are in a Hard Zone that demands a cooperative world for you to function. Like a dry twig, you are brittle, ready to snap under pressure.
• The alternative is for you 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, integrating every ripple of life into your creative moment. This Soft Zone is resilient, like a flexible blade of grass that can move with and survive hurricane-force winds.
  • A beautiful moment in my lacrosse career is when I realized the hard zone was negatively affecting me. I had to calm my state and be more cerebral 
• Another way of envisioning the importance of the Soft Zone is through an ancient Indian parable that has been quite instructive in my life for many years: 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. The more I tried to block out the distraction, the louder it would get in my head. As a young boy I felt alone with this problem, but in recent years while lecturing on performance psychology, I have found that many high-stress performers have similar symptoms.

I realized that in top-rank competition I couldn’t count on the world being silent, so my only option was to become at peace with the noise.

Mental resilience is arguably the most critical trait of a world-class performer, and it should be nurtured continuously.

• 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
• This type of internal work can take place in the little moments of our lives.
• This was a muscle I built up by training myself to be at peace with the unclear and tumultuous—and most of the training was in everyday life.
• One idea I taught was the importance of regaining presence and clarity of mind after making a serious error. This is a hard lesson for all competitors and performers. The first mistake rarely proves disastrous, but the downward spiral of the second, third, and fourth error creates a devastating chain reaction.

Momentum can be found in the smallest moments

• People speak about momentum as if it were an entity of its own, an unpredictable player on the field, and from my own competitive experience, I can vouch for it seeming that way.
• As a competitor I’ve come to understand that the distance between winning and losing is minute, and, moreover, that there are ways to steal wins from the maw of defeat. All great performers have learned this lesson. Top-rate actors often miss a line but improvise their way back on track. The audience rarely notices because of the perfect ease with which the performer glides from troubled waters into the tranquility of the script. Even more impressively, the truly great ones can make the moment work for them, heightening performance with improvisations that shine.
• Musicians, actors, athletes, philosophers, scientists, writers understand that brilliant creations are often born of small errors.

Momentum can be pushed to the negative 

• Problems set in if the performer has a brittle dependence on the safety of absolute perfection or duplication. Then an error triggers fear, detachment, uncertainty, or confusion that muddies the decision-making process.
• Beware of the downward spiral. I taught them that being present at critical moments of competitions can turn losses into wins
• Sometimes all the kids needed was to take two or three deep breaths or splash cold water on their faces to snap out of bad states of mind. Other times, more dramatic actions were called for—if I felt dull during a difficult struggle, I would occasionally leave the playing hall and sprint fifty yards outside.
• I understood that avoiding the ripple effect of compounding errors had broad application.

Being Present in the Moment

• I have always visualized two lines moving parallel to one another in space. One line is time, the other is our perception of the moment. I showed my students these lines with my hands, moving through the air. When we are present to what is, we are right up front with the expansion of time, but when we make a mistake and get frozen in what was, a layer of detachment builds. Time goes on and we stop. Suddenly we are living, playing chess, crossing the street with our eyes closed in memory. And then comes the taxicab. 

Discover Your Natural Voice

• the effects of moving away from my natural voice as a competitor were disturbing.
• During these years I discovered a powerful new private relationship to chess. I worked on the game tirelessly, but was now moved less by ambition than by a yearning for self-discovery. While my understanding of the game deepened, I continued to be uneven and, at times, self-defeating in competition. I was consistently unhappy before leaving for tournaments, preferring my lifestyle of introspection and young romance. When I dragged myself off to tournaments, some days I would play brilliant chess and others I would feel disconnected, like a poet without his muse. In order to make my new knowledge manifest over the board, I had to figure out how to release myself from the baggage I had acquired
• Over time my blood started flowing, sweat came, I settled into the rhythm of analysis, soaked in countless patterns of evolving sophistication as I pored over what a computer would consider billions of variations. Like a runner in stride, my thinking became unhindered, free-flowing, faster and faster as I lost myself in the position. Sometimes the study would take six hours in one sitting, sometimes thirty hours over a week. I felt like I was living, breathing, sleeping in that maze, and then, as if from nowhere, all the complications dissolved and I understood.

Intuitive Connections

• When I looked at the critical position from my tournament game, what had stumped me a few days or hours or weeks before now seemed perfectly apparent. I saw the best move, felt the correct plan, understood the evaluation of the position. I couldn’t explain this new knowledge with variations or words. It felt more elemental, like rippling water or a light breeze. My chess intuition had deepened. This was the study of numbers to leave numbers.
• A fascinating offshoot of this method of analysis was that I began to see connections between the leaps of chess understanding and my changing vision of the world.
• Almost invariably, there was a consistent psychological strain to my errors in a given tournament, and what I began to notice is that my problems on the chessboard usually were manifesting themselves in my life outside of chess.

Turn Weakness into Strength

• I would take some deep breaths and clear my mind when the character of the struggle shifted. In life, I worked on embracing change instead of fighting it. With awareness and action, in both life and chess my weakness was transformed into a strength.
• Once I recognized that deeply buried secrets in a competitor tend to surface under intense pressure, my study of chess became a form of psychoanalysis. I unearthed my subtlest foibles through chess, and the link between my personal and artistic sides was undeniable. The psychological theme could range from transitions to resilient concentration, fluidity of mind, control, leaps into the unknown, sitting with tension, the downward spiral, being at peace with discomfort, giving into fatigue, emotional turbulence, and invariably the chess moves paralleled the life moment. Whenever I noticed a weakness, I took it on.
• If someone was a controlling person who liked to calculate everything out before acting, I would make the chess position chaotic, beyond calculation, so he would have to make that uncomfortable leap into the unknown. If an opponent was intuitive, fast, and hungering for abstract creations, I would make the position precise, so the only solution lay in patient, mind-numbing math.

I was traveling through a tunnel that continuously deepened and widened as I progressed. The more I knew about the game, the more I realized how much there was to know.

A key component of high-level learning is cultivating a resilient awareness that is the older, conscious embodiment of a child’s playful obliviousness.

Your Pursuit must be in harmony with your unique disposition

• I rediscovered a relationship to ambition and art that has allowed me the freedom to create like a child under world championship pressure. This journey, from child back to child again, is at the very core of my understanding of success.
• I believe that one of 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.
• There will inevitably be times when we need to try new ideas, release our current knowledge to take in new information—but it is critical to integrate this new information in a manner that does not violate who we are. By taking away our natural voice, we leave ourselves without a center of gravity to balance us as we navigate the countless obstacles along our way.

Taoist teachers who might say “learn this from that” or “learn the hard from the soft.” In most everyday life experiences, there seems to be a tangible connection between opposites. Consider how you may not realize how much someone’s companionship means to you until they are gone—heartbreak can give the greatest insight into the value of love. Think about how good a healthy leg feels after an extended time on crutches—sickness is the most potent ambassador for healthy living. Who knows water like a man dying of thirst? The human mind defines things in relation to one another—without light the notion of darkness would be unintelligible

Feeding the unconscious

• I have found that if we feed the unconscious, it will discover connections between what may appear to be disparate realities.
• Insight in one direction often involves deep study of another—the intuition makes uncanny connections that lead to a crystallization of fragmented notions.
• When going to bed at night journal the question you’re wrestling with and let you subconscious do the work. When you wake journal what come sot mind 

Ying-Yang

• Studying the greatest attacking chess games ever played, I would inevitably gain a deep appreciation for defensive nuance. Every high-level attacking chess creation emerges from a subtle building of forces that is at the core of positional chess. Just as the yin-yang symbol possesses a kernel of light in the dark, and of dark in the light, creative leaps are grounded in a technical foundation.
• To my mind, the fields of learning and performance are an exploration of greyness—of the in-between. 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.

Tao Te Ching

• Studying the Tao Te Ching, I felt like I was unearthing everything I sensed but could not yet put into words. I yearned to “blunt my sharpness,” to temper my ambitions and make a movement away from the material.
• Tao Te Ching’s wisdom centers on releasing obstructions to our natural insight, seeing false constructs for what they are and leaving them behind. This made sense to me aesthetically, as I was already involved with my study of numbers to leave numbers. My understanding of learning was about searching for the flow that lay at the heart of, and transcended, the technical. The resonance of these ideas was exciting for me, and turned out to be hugely important later in my life. But for an eighteen-year-old boy, more than anything the Tao Te Ching provided a framework to help me sort out my complicated relationship to material ambition. It helped me figure out what was important apart from what we are told is important.
• I had the impression that every fiber of his body was pulsing with some strange electrical connection. His hand pushed through empty space like it was feeling and drawing from the subtlest ripples in the air; profound, precise, nothing extra. His grace was simplicity itself. I sat entranced. I had to learn more. The man explained that my head should float as though it were suspended by a string from the crown point. Now it was as if my insides were being massaged while my mind floated happily through space. As I consciously released the tension from one part of my body at a time, I experienced a surprising sense of physical awareness. A subtle buzzing tickled my fingers. I played with that feeling, and realized that when deeply relaxed, I could focus on any part of my body and become aware of a rich well of sensation that had previously gone unnoticed.
• A huge element of Tai Chi is releasing obstructions so the body and mind can flow smoothly together. If there is tension in one place, the mind stops there, and the fluidity is broken.
• It was amazing how many students would miss such rich moments because they were looking at themselves in the mirror or impatiently checking the time. It took full concentration to pick up each valuable lesson, so on many levels Tai Chi class was an exercise in awareness. While this method worked very well for me, it also weeded out students who were not committed to serious practice. I’ve seen many emerge bored from Chen’s most inspiring classes, because they wanted to be spoon fed and did not open their receptors to his subtleties. (When the student is ready the teacher appears)
• William Chen’s Tai Chi form, expansive (outward or upward) movements occur with an in-breath, so the body and mind wake up, energize into a shape. He gives the example of reaching out to shake the hand of someone you are fond of, waking up after a restful sleep, or agreeing with somebody’s idea. Usually, such positive moments are associated with an in-breath—in the Tai Chi form, we “breathe into the fingertips.” Then, with the out-breath, the body releases, de-energizes, like the last exhalation before falling asleep.
• For a glimmer of this experience, 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 inhalation is slow, gently pulling oxygen into your dantien (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 re energize.
• In my experience, when these principles of breathing merge with the movements of the Tai Chi form, practice becomes like the ebb and flow of water meeting a beach, the waves lapping against the sand (in-breath), then the water trickling back out to sea (gentle, full exhalation).
• It was remarkable how developing the ability to be physically introspective changed my world. Aches and pains dissolved with small postural tweaks. If I was stressed out, I did Tai Chi and was calmed. Suddenly I had an internal mechanism with which to deal with external pressures.
• Tai Chi Classics, is “to defeat a thousand pounds with four ounces.”
• Body needs to learn how to react quickly and naturally slip away from every conceivable strike. The problem is that we are conditioned to tense up and resist incoming or hostile force, so we have to learn an entirely new physiological response to aggression. Before learning the body mechanics of nonresistance, I had to unlearn my current physical paradigm.
• In order to grow, he needs to give up his current mind-set. He needs to lose to win. The bruiser will need to get pushed around by little guys for a while, until he learns how to use more than brawn. William Chen calls this investment in loss. Investment in loss is giving yourself to the learning process.

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. Of course such a feat is impossible—we are bound to repeat thematic errors, if only because many themes are elusive and difficult to pinpoint.

Practice

• So the aim is to minimize repetition as much as possible, by having an eye for consistent psychological and technical themes of error.
• With practice, the stillness is increasingly profound and the transition into motion can be quite explosive—this is where the dynamic pushing or striking power of Tai Chi emerges: the radical change from emptiness into fullness. When delivering force, the feeling inside the body is of the ground connecting to your finger tips, with nothing blocking this communication. Highly skilled Tai Chi practitioners are incredibly fast, fluid, responsive—in a sense, the embodiment of Muhammad Ali’s “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”
• I’d limp home from practice, bruised and wondering what had happened to my peaceful meditative haven. But then a curious thing began to happen. First, as I got used to taking shots from Evan, I stopped fearing the impact. My body built up resistance to getting smashed, learned how to absorb blows, and I knew I could take what he had to offer. Then as I became more relaxed under fire, Evan seemed to slow down in my mind. I noticed myself sensing his attack before it began. I learned how to read his intention, and be out of the way before he pulled the trigger. As I got better and better at neutralizing his attacks, I began to notice and exploit weaknesses in his game, and sometimes I found myself peacefully watching his hands come toward me in slow motion.

Beginner’s Mind

• I realize how defining these themes of Beginner’s Mind and Investment in Loss have been. Periodically, I have had to take apart my game and go through a rough patch. In all disciplines, there are times when a performer is ready for action, and times when he or she is soft, in flux, broken-down or in a period of growth. Learners in this phase are inevitably vulnerable. It is important to have perspective on this and allow yourself protected periods for cultivation.
• Expected to perform brilliantly in his first games within this new system, he will surely disappoint. He needs time to internalize the new skills before he will improve.

Depth over Breadth

• I believe this little anecdote has the potential to distinguish success from failure in the pursuit of excellence. The theme is depth over breadth. The learning principle is to plunge into the detailed mystery of the micro in order to understand what makes the macro tick.
• Everyone races to learn more and more, but nothing is done deeply. Things look pretty but they are superficial, without a sound body mechanic or principled foundation. Nothing is learned at a high level and what results are form collectors with fancy kicks and twirls that have absolutely no martial value.
• The purpose of allowing practitioners to refine certain fundamental principles. Many of them can be explored by standing up, taking a stance, and incrementally refining the simplest of movements— The Tai Chi system can be seen as a comprehensive laboratory for internalizing good fundamentals, releasing tension, and cultivating energetic awareness.
• When through painstaking refinement of a small movement I had the improved feeling, I could translate it onto other parts of the form, and suddenly everything would start flowing at a higher level. The key was to recognize that the principles making one simple technique tick were the same fundamentals that fueled the whole expansive system of Tai Chi Chuan.
• In order to touch high-level principles such as the power of empty space, zugzwang (where any move of the opponent will destroy his position), tempo, or structural planning.
• Once I experienced these principles, I could apply them to complex positions because they were in my mental framework. However, if you study complicated chess openings and middlegames right off the bat, it is difficult to think in an abstract axiomatic language because all your energies are preoccupied with not blundering. It would be absurd to try to teach a new figure skater the principle of relaxation on the ice by launching straight into triple axels. She should begin with the fundamentals of gliding along the ice, turning, and skating backwards with deepening relaxation. Then, step by step, more and more complicated maneuvers can be absorbed, while she maintains the sense of ease that was initially experienced within the simplest skill set. So, in my Tai Chi work I savored the nuance of small morsels.

“Making Small Circles” turning the large into the small 

• The next phase of my martial growth would involve turning the large into the small. My understanding of this process, in the spirit of my numbers to leave numbers method of chess study, is to touch the essence (for example, highly refined and deeply internalized body mechanics or feeling) 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. I call this method “Making Smaller Circles.”
• Making Smaller Circles comes into play. By now the body mechanics of the punch have been condensed in my mind to a feeling. I don’t need to hear or see any effect—my body knows when it is operating correctly by an internal sense of harmony. A parallel would be a trained singer who, through years of practice, knows what the notes feel like vibrating inside.
• So I know what a properly delivered straight right feels like. Now I begin to slowly, incrementally, condense my movements while maintaining that feeling. Instead of a big wind-up in the hips, I coil a little less, and then I release the punch. While initially I may have thrown my straight from next to my ear, now I gradually inch my hand out, starting the punch from closer and closer to the target—and I don’t lose power!
• The key is to take small steps, so the body can barely feel the condensing practice. Each little refinement is monitored by the feeling of the punch, which I gained from months or years of training with the large, traditional motion. Slowly but surely, my body mechanics get more and more potent. My waist needs little movement to generate speed. My hand can barely move and still deliver a powerful blow.

• 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.

Handling Chaos 

Three critical steps in a resilient performer’s evolving relationship to chaotic situations. 

1. First, we have to learn to be at peace with imperfection.
2. Next, in our performance training, we learn to use that imperfection to our advantage—for example thinking to the beat of the music or using a shaking world as a catalyst for insight.
3. The third step of this process, as it pertains to performance psychology, is to learn to create ripples in our consciousness, little jolts to spur us along, so we are constantly inspired whether or not external conditions are inspiring.

For me to gain clarity, I want to use that experience as a new baseline for my everyday capabilities. In other words, now that I have seen what real focus is all about, I want to get there all the time—but I don’t want to have to break a bone whenever I want my mind to kick in to its full potential. So a deep mastery of performance psychology involves the internal creation of inspiring conditions. 

• It is very important for athletes to do this kind of visualization work, in a form appropriate to their discipline. MUST make time for the internal work 
• I’ll spend a week doing soft, quiet work on timing, perception, reading and controlling my opponent’s breath patterns and internal blinks, subtle unbalancing touches that set up the dramatic throws that ultimately steal the spotlight. After these periods of reflection, I’ll almost invariably have a leap in ability because my new physical skills are supercharged by becoming integrated into my mental framework.
• The importance of undulating between external and internal (or concrete and abstract; technical and intuitive) training applies to all disciplines, and unfortunately the internal tends to be neglected.
• Have heard quite a few NFL quarterbacks who had minor injuries and were forced to sit out a game or two, speak of the injury as a valuable opportunity to concentrate on the mental side of their games. When they return, they play at a higher level. In all athletic disciplines, it is the internal work that makes the physical mat time click, but it is easy to lose touch with this reality in the middle of the grind.- Valuable lesson in coaching is to understand the teams mental space and give them time off to refresh 

Any moment that one piece can control, inhibit, or tie down two or more pieces, a potentially critical imbalance is created on the rest of the board. On a deeper level, this principle can be applied psychologically whenever opposing forces clash. Whether speaking of a corporate negotiation, a legal battle, or even war itself, if the opponent is temporarily tied down qualitatively or energetically more than you are expending to tie it down, you have a large advantage. The key is to master the technical skills appropriate for applying this idea to your area of focus.

Recovery through intense visualization

• There was also an intriguing physical component of my recovery. I wanted to compete in the Nationals, so bizarre though it may sound I resolved not to atrophy. At this point in my life I was very involved in the subtle internal dynamics of the body through Tai Chi meditation. I had an idea that I might be able to keep my right side strong by intense visualization practice. My method was as follows: I did a daily resistance workout routine on my left side, and after every set I visualized the workout passing to the muscles on the right. My arm was in a cast, so there was no actual motion possible—but I could feel the energy flowing into the unused muscles. I admit it was a shot in the dark, but it worked. My whole body felt strong, and when the doctor finally took off my cast he was stunned. Four days before the Nationals an X-ray showed that my bone was fully healed, and I had hardly atrophied at all. The doctor cleared me to compete. On Wednesday I did my first weight workout on my right side in seven weeks, on Friday I flew to San Diego, and on Saturday, slightly favoring my newly empowered left arm, I won the Nationals.
  • This has been replicated in other medical studies of athletes and injury. I also did this with my shoulder. Incredible the power of the mind

If I want to be the best, I have to take risks others would avoid, always optimizing the learning potential of the moment and turning adversity to my advantage. That said, there are times when the body needs to heal, but those are ripe opportunities to deepen the mental, technical, internal side of my 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.

Use Adversity to our Advantage 

• Once we learn how to use adversity to our advantage, we can manufacture the helpful growth opportunity without actual danger or injury. I call this tool the internal solution—we can notice external events that trigger helpful growth or performance opportunities, and then internalize the effects of those events without their actually happening. In this way, adversity becomes a tremendous source of creative inspiration.

Instincts/ Intuition

• Most of us have also had the experience of meeting someone and having a powerfully good or bad feeling about them, without knowing why. I have found that, even if a few times it has taken years to pan out, these guiding instincts have been on the money.
• Along the same lines, in my chess days, nearly all of my revelatory moments emerged from the unconscious. My numbers to leave numbers approach to chess study was my way of having a working relationship with the unconscious parts of my mind. I would take in vast amounts of technical information that my brain somehow put together into bursts of insight that felt more like music or wind than mathematical combinations.
• Increasingly, I had the sense that the key to these leaps was interconnectedness—some part of my being was harmonizing all my relevant knowledge, making it gel into one potent eruption… 
• In my opinion, intuition is our most valuable compass in this world. It is the bridge between the unconscious and the conscious mind, and it is hugely important…
• If we get so caught up in narcissistic academic literalism that we dismiss intuition as nonexistent because we don’t fully understand it, or if we blithely consider the unconscious to be a piece of machinery that operates mystically in a realm that we have no connection to, then we lose the rich opportunity to have open communication with the wellspring of our creativity… 
• For much of this book I have described my vision of the road to mastery—you start with the fundamentals, get a solid foundation fueled by understanding the principles of your discipline, then you expand and refine your repertoire, guided by your individual predispositions, while keeping in touch, however abstractly, with what you feel to be the essential core of the art. What results is a network of deeply internalized, interconnected knowledge that expands from a central, personal locus point. The question of intuition relates to how that network is navigated and used as fuel for creative insight. Key to the entire book

Chunking

• The clearest way to approach this discussion is with the imagery of chunking and carved neural pathways. 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 
• The relevant conclusions were that stronger players had better memories when the positions were taken out of the games of other strong players, because they re-created the positions by taking parts of the board (say five or six pieces) and chunking (merging) them in the mind by their interrelationships. The stronger the player, the more sophisticated was his or her ability to quickly discover connecting logical patterns between the pieces (attack, defense, tension, pawn chains, etc.) and thus they had better chess memories. On the other hand, when presented with random chess positions, with no logical cohesiveness, the memories of the players seemed to level off. In some cases the weaker players performed more effectively, because they were accustomed to random situations while the stronger players were a bit lost without “logic to the position.” So, in a nutshell, chunking relates to the mind’s ability to take lots of information, find a harmonizing/logically consistent strain, and put together into one mental file that can be accessed as if it were a single piece of information. 
• By “carved neural pathways” I am referring to the process of creating chunks and the navigation system between chunks. I am not making a literal physical description, so much as illustrating the way the brain operates. Let’s say that I spend fifteen years studying chess. During these thousands of hours, my mind is effectively cutting paths through the dense jungle of chess. The jungle analogy is a good one. Imagine how time-consuming it would be to use a machete to cut your way through thick foliage. A few miles could take days. Once the path is cleared, however, you can quickly move through it.
• During this process, I discover organizing principles and new patterns of movement. This new information gets systematized into a network of chunks that I can access with ease as my navigational function improves. 
  • The first thing I have to do is to internalize how the pieces move. I have to learn their values. I have to learn how to coordinate them with one
  • Chess pieces stop being hunks of wood or plastic, and begin to take on an energetic dimension. Where the piece currently sits on a chessboard pales in comparison to the countless vectors of potential flying off in the mind. I see how each piece affects those around it. Because the basic movements are natural to me, I can take in more information and have a broader perspective of the board. Now when I look at a chess position, I can see all the pieces at once. The network is coming together.
  • These road signs are principles. Just as I initially had to think about each chess piece individually, now I have to plod through the principles in my brain to figure out which apply to the current position and how. Over time, that process becomes increasingly natural to me, until I eventually see the pieces and the appropriate principles in a blink.
  • The pieces gradually lose absolute identity. I learn that rooks and bishops work more efficiently together than rooks and knights, but queens and knights tend to have an edge over queens and bishops. Each piece’s power is purely relational.
  • Over time each chess principle loses rigidity, and you get better and better at reading the subtle signs of qualitative relativity. Soon enough learning becomes unlearning. The stronger chess player is often the one who is less attached to a dogmatic interpretation of the principles. This leads to a whole new layer of principles—those that consist of the exceptions to the initial principles. Of course the next step is for those counterintuitive signs to become internalized just as the initial movements of the pieces were. The network of my chess knowledge now involves principles, patterns, and chunks of information, accessed through a whole new set of navigational principles, patterns, and chunks of information, which are soon followed by another set of principles and chunks designed to assist in the interpretation of the last. Learning chess at this level becomes sitting with paradox, being at peace with and navigating the tension of competing truths, letting go of any notion of solidity. 
  • This is where things get interesting. We are at the moment when psychology begins to transcend technique. Everyone at a high level has a huge amount of chess understanding, and much of what separates the great from the very good is deep presence, relaxation of the conscious mind, which allows the unconscious to flow unhindered. This is a nuanced and largely misunderstood state of mind that when refined involves a subtle reintegration of the conscious mind into a free-flowing unconscious process. The idea is to shift the primary role from the conscious to the unconscious without blissing out and losing the precision the conscious can provide.
  • For a physical analogy, consider your vision. Let’s allow the conscious mind to be represented by your area of visual focus, and your unconscious to be your peripheral vision. Chances are you are sitting down reading this book. What you see is the book. Now if you relax your eyes and allow your peripheral vision to take over, your visual awareness will take in much more, you can see things that are well off to the side. Now, the next step is to refocus on the book, while maintaining a peripheral awareness. This is a skill that some martial artists cultivate for situations with multiple opponents or other such unpredictable occasions. In a relaxed enough state of mind, you can zoom in on something in front of you with great precision while maintaining a very sharp awareness of your surroundings. PLayers must let the unconscious flow while the conscious leads and follows, sorting out details, putting things in order.
  • if you compare the thought process of a Grandmaster to that of an expert (a much weaker, but quite competent chess player), you will often find that the Grandmaster consciously looks at less, not more. That said, the chunks of information that have been put together in his mind allow him to see much more with much less conscious… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Unfamiliar Terrain 

• Because of our different backgrounds, training with Ahmed often led to creative eruptions. When such knowledge gaps exist, much of the battle involves surviving the unexpected and bringing the game into a place where the neural pathways are carved. Other times, it’s like running a gauntlet. When the transition from the familiar to the foreign takes place, it feels like the mind is flying downhill over fresh snow and suddenly hits a patch of thick mud.
• When it felt like a blur, my conscious mind was trying to make sense of unfamiliar terrain. Now my unconscious navigates a huge network of subtly programmed technical information, and my conscious mind is free to focus on certain essential details that, because of their simplicity, I can see with tremendous precision, as if the blink in my opponent’s eyes takes many seconds.
• The key to this process is understanding that the conscious mind, for all its magnificence, 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.
• Another way of understanding this difference in perception is with the analogy of a camera. With practice I am making networks of chunks and paving more and more neural pathways, which effectively takes huge piles of data and throws it over to my high-speed processor—the unconscious. Now my conscious mind, focusing on less, seems to rev up its shutter speed from, say, four frames per second to 300 or 400 frames per second. The key is to understand that my trained mind is not necessarily working much faster than an untrained mind—it is simply working more effectively, which means that my conscious mind has less to deal with.

Chinese martial arts tend to focus more on energy than pattern recognition. My goal was to find a hybrid—energetic awareness, technical fluidity, and keen psychological perception. Chess meets Tai Chi Chuan.

Psychological Warfare

• As I improved as a chess player and competitor, my opponents and I developed increasingly complex understandings of psychological tells. A little change in my breathing pattern might alert a rival that I had just seen something I didn’t like.
• I’m an outgoing guy and tend to wear my heart on my sleeve. Instead of trying to change my personality, I learned how to use it to my advantage. While some chess players spend a lot of energy maintaining a stony front, I let opponents read my facial expressions as I moved through thought processes. My goal was to use my natural personality to dictate the tone of the struggle. Just how a poker player might hum a tune to put it in the head of an opponent (thereby “getting in his head”), I would control the psychology of the game by unmasking myself.
• Of course I was not so transparent. Mixed in with my genuine impressions would be misleading furrows of the brow, trickles of fear, or subtle flutters of excitement. Sometimes this type of deception would simply involve the timing of a sip of water or a flicker of my eyes.This type of environment was a hotbed of psychological maneuvering. It was during these years that I began to draw the parallels between people’s life tendencies and their chessic dispositions. Great players are all, by definition, very clever about what they show over the chessboard, but, in life’s more mundane moments, even the most cunning chess psychologists can reveal certain essential nuances of character.
• If, over dinner, a Grandmaster tastes something bitter and faintly wrinkles his nose, there might be an inkling of a tell lurking. Impatience while standing on line at the buffet might betray a problem sitting with tension. It’s amazing how much you can learn about someone when they get caught in the rain! Some will run with their hands over their heads, others will smile and take a deep breath while enjoying the wind. What does this say about one’s relationship to discomfort?
• This is where Making Smaller Circles and Slowing Down Time come into play. When working with highly skilled and mentally tough opponents, the psychological game gets increasingly subtle. The battle becomes about reading breath patterns and blinks of the eye, playing in frames the opponent is unaware of, invisible technical manipulation that slowly creates response patterns. If I understand a series of movements more deeply, in more frames, with more detail, then I can manipulate my opponent’s intention without him realizing what happened.
• First of all, most people blink without knowing it, so they probably won’t consider it a weakness that may be exploited in competition.
• Because our minds are so complex, if you give us a small amount of material to work with, and we do it with great intensity, then we can break it down into microscopic detail. If our conscious mind is purely focused on the eyes, they will seem to take a while to blink. We see them beginning to close, closed, starting to open, and then open again. That’s all we need.
• This type of psychological warfare is at the center of nearly all high-level competitive disciplines—and I mean competitive in the loosest sense imaginable. For example, the car salesman and potential buyer are opponents. When two highly trained minds square off, in any field, the players are in a fight to enter each other’s heads. These exchanges feel like epic tennis rallies in which the tilt of battle sways back and forth as one player picks up on a faint tell that may or may not exist long enough to be exploited, and the other has to feel the danger, and swat the rival out of his mind before it is too late.
• While refined mental competitors can have extended dialogues of this nature, in my observation most people are relatively unaware of their psychological subtleties. This makes for easy pickings for the astute rival.
• To master these psychological battles, it is essential to understand their technical foundation. Contrary to the ego-enforcing descriptions of some “kung fu masters,” there is nothing mystical about controlling intention or entering the mind of the opponent. These are skills to be cultivated like any other
• Grandmasters know how to make the subtlest cracks decisive. The only thing to do was become immune to the pain, embrace it, until I could work through hours of mind-numbing complexities as if I were taking a lovely walk in the park. The vise, after all, was only in my head. I spent years working on this issue, learning how to maintain the tension—becoming at peace with mounting pressure. Then, as a martial artist, I turned this training to my advantage, making my opponents explode from mental combustion because of my higher threshold for discomfort.

In virtually every competitive physical discipline, if you are a master of reading and manipulating footwork, then you are a force to be reckoned with.

While more subtle, this issue is perhaps even more critical in solitary pursuits such as writing, painting, scholarly thinking, or learning. In the absence of continual external reinforcement, we must be our own monitor, and quality of presence is often the best gauge. We cannot expect to touch excellence if “going through the motions” is the norm of our lives. On the other hand, if deep, fluid presence becomes second nature, then life, art, and learning take on a richness that will continually surprise and delight. Those who excel are those who maximize each moment’s creative potential—for these masters of living, presence to the day-to-day learning process is akin to that purity of focus others dream of achieving in rare climactic moments when everything is on the line. 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.

Stress & Recovery

• Striegel and Loehr told me about their concept of Stress and Recovery. The physiologists at LGE had discovered 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.
• In the coming months, as I became more attuned to the qualitative fluctuations of my thought processes, I found that if a think of mine went over fourteen minutes, it would often become repetitive and imprecise. After noticing this pattern, I learned to monitor the efficiency of my thinking. If it started to falter, I would release everything for a moment, recover, and then come back with a fresh slate. Now when faced with difficult chess positions, I could think for thirty or forty minutes at a very high level, because my concentration was fueled by little breathers.
• At LGE, they made a science of the gathering and release of intensity, and found that, regardless of the discipline, the better we are at recovering, the greater potential we have to endure and perform under stress.
• 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.
• Ultimately, with incremental training very much like what I described in the chapter Making Smaller Circles, recovery time can become nearly instantaneous. And once the act of recovery is in our blood, we’ll be able to access it under the most strained of circumstances, becoming masters of creating tiny havens for renewal, even where observers could not conceive of such a break.
• Your performance training, the first step to mastering the zone is to practice the ebb and flow of stress and recovery.
• 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.
• As we get better and better at releasing tension and coming back with a full tank of gas in our everyday activities, both physical and mental, we will gain confidence in our abilities to move back and forth between concentration, adrenaline flow, physical exertion (any kind of stress), and relaxation.
• Now that your conscious mind is free to take little breaks, you’ll be delighted by the surges of creativity that will emerge out of your unconscious. You’ll become more attuned to your intuition and will slowly become more and more true to yourself stylistically. The unconscious mind is a powerful tool, and learning how to relax under pressure is a key first step to tapping into its potential.

Relaxation to improve performance 

• As children, we might be told to “concentrate” by parents and teachers, and then be reprimanded if we look off into the stars. So the child learns to associate not focusing with being “bad.” The result is that we concentrate with everything we’ve got until we can’t withstand the pressure and have a meltdown.
• This tendency of competitors to exhaust themselves between rounds of tournaments is surprisingly widespread and very self-destructive. Whenever I visit scholastic chess events today, I see coaches trying to make themselves feel useful or showing off for parents by teaching students long technical lessons immediately following a two-hour game and an hour before the next round. Let the kid rest! Fueling up is much more important than last-minute cramming—and at a higher level, the ability to recover will be pivotal.
• So how do we step up when our moment suddenly arises? My answer is to redefine the question. Not only do we have to be good at waiting, we have to love it. Because waiting is not waiting, it is life.
• I believe an appreciation for simplicity, the everyday—the ability to dive deeply into the banal and discover life’s hidden richness—is where success, let alone happiness, emerges. *  *  *
• 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. The real power of incremental growth comes to bear when we truly are like water, steadily carving stone. We just keep on flowing when everything is on the line.

Creating a Trigger for catalyzing performance 

• This is a problem I have seen in many inconsistent performers. They are frustrated and confused trying to find an inspiring catalyst for peak performance, as if the perfect motivational tool is hovering in the cosmos waiting for discovery. My method is to work backward and create the trigger.
• 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 next step was to create a four- or five-step routine. Dennis had already mentioned music, meditation, stretching, and eating. I suggested that an hour before the next time he played catch with his son, Dennis should eat a light snack. 
• The next step in the process is the critical one: after he had fully internalized his routine, I suggested that he do it the morning before going to an important meeting.
• He did so and came back raving that he found himself in a totally serene state in what was normally a stressful environment. He had no trouble being fully present throughout the meeting.
• 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). Once the routine is internalized, it can be used before any activity and a similar state of mind will emerge. Let me emphasize that your personal routine should be determined by your individual tastes.
• The next step of the process is to gradually alter 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. The key is to make the changes incrementally, slowly, so there is more similarity than difference from the last version of the routine. This way the body and mind have the same physiological reaction even if the preparation is slightly shorter.
• But I did not leave it at that. I had learned that martial arts tournaments are, if anything, unpredictable. We don’t always have five minutes of peace and quiet before going to battle.
• Incrementally, I started shortening the amount of form I did before starting my training. I did a little less than the whole form, then 3/4 of it, 1/2, 1/4. Over the course of many months, utilizing the incremental approach of small changes, I trained myself to be completely prepared after a deep inhalation and release. I also learned to do the form in my mind without moving at all. The visualization proved almost as powerful as the real thing. This idea is not without precedent—recall the numbers to leave numbers, form to leave form, and Making Smaller Circles discussions in Part II. At a high level, principles can be internalized to the point that they are barely recognizable even to the most skilled observers.
• The ideal for any performer is flexibility. 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.
• You are trained to perform optimally on a moment’s notice, then you may emerge unscathed from some hair-raising situations. But far more critical than these rare climactic explosions, I believe that this type of condensing practice can do wonders to raise our quality of life. Once a simple inhalation can trigger a state of tremendous alertness, our moment-to-moment awareness becomes blissful, like that of someone half-blind who puts on glasses for the first time. We see more as we walk down the street. The everyday becomes exquisitely beautiful. The notion of boredom becomes alien and absurd as we naturally soak in the lovely subtleties of the “banal.” All experiences become richly intertwined by our new vision, and then new connections begin to emerge.
• All moments become each moment. This book is about learning and performance, but it is also about my life. Presence has taught me how to live.

Emotions

• There are those elite performers who use emotion, observing their moment and then channeling everything into a deeper focus that generates a uniquely flavored creativity. This is an interesting, resilient approach based on flexibility and subtle introspective awareness. Instead of being bullied by or denying their unconscious, these players let their internal movements flavor their fires.
•  I’ll focus on one of the most decisive emotions, one that can make or break a competitor: Anger. As we enter into this discussion, please keep in mind the three steps I described as being critical to resilient, self-sufficient performance. First, we learn to flow with distraction, like that blade of grass bending to the wind. Then we learn to use distraction, inspiring ourselves with what initially would have thrown us off our games. Finally we learn to re-create the inspiring settings internally. We learn to make sandals.
• It took me some time to realize that blocking out my natural emotions was not the solution. I had to learn to use my moment organically. Instead of being thrown off by or denying my irritation, I had to somehow channel it into a profound state of concentration. 
• The next step in my growth process would be to stay true to myself under increasingly difficult conditions.
• For the year following this incident at the Nationals, I devoted myself to staying principled when sparring with creeps. I sought out dirty players and got better and better at keeping cool when they got out of control.
• The only way to succeed is to acknowledge reality and funnel it, take the nerves and use them. We must be prepared for imperfection. If we rely on having no nerves, on not being thrown off by a big miss, or on the exact replication of a certain mindset, then when the pressure is high enough, or when the pain is too piercing to ignore, our ideal state will shatter.
• The Soft Zone approach is much more organic and useful than denial. The next steps of my growth would be to do with anger what I had with distraction years before. Instead of denying my emotional reality under fire, I had to learn how to sit with it, use it, channel it into a heightened state of intensity. Like the earthquake and the broken hand, I had to turn my emotions to my advantage.
• It has been my observation that the greatest performers convert their passions into fuel with tremendous consistency.
• Instead of being dominated by or denying my passions, I slowly learned how to observe them and feel how they infused my moment with creativity, freshness, or darkness.
• Once I had a working relationship with my emotions, I began to take on my psychological reaction to foul play in the martial arts with a bit more subtlety. I believe that at the highest levels, performers and artists must be true to themselves. There can be no denial, no repression of true personality, or else the creation will be false—the performer will be alienated from his or her intuitive voice. I am a passionate guy. The fact of the matter is that I don’t particularly like dirty players. Their relationships to competition, to ego, to sport, to art, to violence, to foul play—it all rubs me the wrong way.
• The next step in my training would be to channel my gut reaction into intensity. This is not so hard once you get comfortable in that heated-up place. It is more about sweeping away the cobwebs than about learning anything new. We are built to be sharpest when in danger, but protected lives have distanced us from our natural abilities to channel our energies. Instead of running from our emotions or being swept away by their initial gusts, we should learn to sit with them, become at peace with their unique flavors, and ultimately discover deep pools of inspiration. I have found that this is a natural process. Once we build our tolerance for turbulence and are no longer upended by the swells of our emotional life, we can ride them and even pick up speed with their slopes.
• Truly superb competitive psychologists are finely attuned to their diverse moods and to the creative potential born of them.
• Tigran Petrosian was known by his rivals to have a peculiar way of handling this issue. When he was playing long matches that lasted over the course of weeks or even months, he would begin each day by waking up and sitting quietly in his room for a period of introspection. His goal was to observe his mood down to the finest nuance. Was he feeling nostalgic, energetic, cautious, dreary, impassioned, inspired, confident, insecure? His next step was to build his game plan around his mood. If he was feeling cautious, quiet, not overwhelmingly
• Petrosian tried to be as true to himself as possible on a moment-to-moment basis. He believed that if his mood and the chess position were in synch, he would be most inclined to play with the greatest inspiration.
• If you think back to the chapter Building Your Trigger and apply it to this description, you’ll see that Garry was not pretending. He was not being artificial. Garry was triggering his zone by playing Kasparov chess. I highly recommend that you incorporate the principles of Building Your Trigger into your process. Once you are no longer swept away by your emotions and can sit with them even when under pressure, you will probably notice that certain states of mind inspire you more than others. For some it may be happiness, for others
• Once you understand where you lie on this spectrum, the next step is to become self-sufficient by creating your own inspiring conditions. Kasparov triggered his zone by acting confident and then creating the conditions on the chessboard and a dynamic with his opponent in which he played his best.
• But how do you play your best when there is no one around to provide motivation?
• First, we cultivate The Soft Zone, we sit with our emotions, observe them, work with them, learn how to let them float away if they are rocking our boat, and how to use them when they are fueling our creativity.
• Then we turn our weaknesses into strengths until there is no denial of our natural eruptions and nerves sharpen our game, fear alerts us, anger funnels into focus.

Higher States of Performance

• Next we discover what emotional states trigger our greatest performances. This is truly a personal question. Some of us will be most creative when ebullient, others when morose. To each his own. Introspect. Then Make Sandals, become your own earthquake,
• Discover what states work best for you and,
• In my experience the greatest of artists and competitors are masters of navigating their own psychologies, playing on their strengths, controlling the tone of battle so that it fits with their personalities.
• I have found that in the intricate endeavors of competition, learning, and performance, there is more than one solution to virtually every meaningful problem. We are unique individuals who should put our own flair into everything we do.
• I have talked about style, personal taste, being true to your natural disposition. This theme is critical at all stages of the learning process.
• If you think about the high-end learning principles that I have discussed in this book, they all spring out of the deep, creative plunge into an initially small pool of information. In the early chapters, I described the importance of a chess player laying a solid foundation by studying positions of reduced complexity (endgame before opening).
• Then we apply the internalized principles to increasingly complex scenarios. In Making Smaller Circles we take a single technique or idea and practice it until we feel its essence. Then we gradually condense the movements while maintaining their power, until we are left with an extremely potent and nearly invisible arsenal.

Slowing Down Time

• In Slowing Down Time, we again focus on a select group of techniques and internalize them until the mind perceives them in tremendous detail. After training in this manner, we can see more frames in an equal amount of time, so things feel slowed down.
• In The Illusion of the Mystical, we use our cultivation of the last two principles to control the intention of the opponent—and again, we do this by zooming in on very small details to which others are completely oblivious.
• The beautiful thing about this approach to learning is that once we have felt the profound refinement of a skill, no matter how small it may be, we can then use that feeling as a beacon of quality as we expand our focus onto more and more material.
• Once you know what good feels like, you can zero in on it, search it out regardless of the pursuit.
• At the highest levels of any kind of competitive discipline, everyone is great. At this point the decisive factor is rarely who knows more, but who dictates the tone of the battle.
• For this reason, almost without exception, champions are specialists whose styles emerge from profound awareness of their unique strengths, and who are exceedingly skilled at guiding the battle in that direction. 
• We were both working so hard that if one of us stopped learning, he would get killed in the ring. It was during the last four months of our preparation that I came upon my fundamental strategy for the tournament—what chess players call prophylaxis.

If I have learned anything over my first twenty-nine years, it is that we cannot calculate our important contests, adventures, and great loves to the end. The only thing we can really count on is getting surprised. No matter how much preparation we do, in the real tests of our lives, we’ll be in unfamiliar terrain. Conditions might not be calm or reasonable. It may feel as though the whole world is stacked against us. This is when we have to perform better than we ever conceived of performing. I believe the key is to have prepared in a manner that allows for inspiration, to have laid the foundation for us to create under the wildest pressures we ever imagined. In the end, mastery involves discovering the most resonant information and integrating it so deeply and fully it disappears and allows us to fly free.