[Book review] - "The art of learning" by Josh Waitzkin
My first book review of 2020.
What Josh has accomplished is incredible. He is an eight-time national chess champion, and the subject of the movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer", at his prime, quit Chess and moved to martial arts, won World Championship in Tai Chi Chuan.
He combined learning techniques from Chess into martial arts. That was very intriguing for me. Ability to distill fundamental principles from something very intellectual, Chess, and apply them in something perceived as very physical, martial arts. This book delves deep into understanding how you need to bring both mind and body together to achieve higher performance! At the highest level, mind, and body, they are inseparable!
At about ~250 pages, this is a small but dense book packed with a lot of insights on learning and peak performance. Some key learnings from the book.
Investment in loss: People need time in new skills before they can improve. Great ones are willing to get burned time and again as they sharpen their swords in the fire. So, it is OK to lose as long as you are learning.
Making smaller circles: Focus on fundamental principles while learning. Isolate what matters. Depth beats breadth any day.
Building your trigger: How do you handle the unpredictability of external events that affect your performance? Build your trigger, where he explains how you can get into the zone in a moment's notice. he lays down a step by step process that is very actionable! Needs a lot of practice though!
One learning tip that had always helped me: Reflection.
When I was in my 11th class, I was absolutely overwhelmed by the number of concepts that were thrown at me on a daily basis. It was brutal given my memory. I asked one of the lecturers for help, and he suggested this simple tip. in the 10 min break between classes, spend few mins reflecting on what happened. That is it. This simple tip helped me immensely over the years, until my university graduation :)
Overall, highly recommend this book, except that it has too many references to Chess, sometimes, I felt disconnected.