As a chess master and international martial arts champion, Josh Waitzkin has lived a full life, and he is not 35 as of this writing. The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimum Results, with crucial lessons described and clarified along the way, chronicles his journey from chess prodigy (and the subject of the film Searching for Bobby Fischer) to the Tai Chi Chuan World Championship.
Marketing expert Seth Godin has written and said that as a result of reading a business book, one should resolve to change three things; in Waitzkin's volume, the reader can find several lessons. Waitzkin has a list of principles that appear in the book, but specifically what the principles are and how they link together is not always clear. However, this doesn't really hurt the readability of the novel, and it is a slight annoyance at best. There are many lessons for an educator or a leader, and I found the book entertaining, edifying, and instructive as one who teaches college, was president of a chess club in middle school, and began practicing martial arts about two years ago.
Among the hustlers of New York's Washington Square, Waitzkin's chess career started, and he learned how to focus on the noise and distractions it brings. This experience taught him the ins and outs of competitive chess-playing, as well as the importance of the cagey players he played with for stamina. Chess teacher Bruce Pandolfini, who became his first mentor and grew him from a prodigious talent to one of the world's best young players, discovered him in Washington Square.
The book portrays the life of Waitzkin as a contrasting study; perhaps this is deliberate in view of Waitzkin's acknowledged obsession with Eastern philosophy. The hostility of the park chess players and young prodigies who brought their queens into the action early or who set intricate traps and then pounced on the errors of opponents are among the most valuable lessons. These are great ways to dispatch weaker players easily, but they do not develop stamina or abilities. He compares these techniques with the attention to detail that, over the long run, contributes to true mastery.
In chess and martial arts, and perhaps by extension in education, according to Waitzkin, an unfortunate fact is that people learn many superficial and often impressive tricks and techniques without having a subtle, complex command of the fundamental principles. Tricks and traps can impress (or vanquish) the credulous, but against someone who really knows what he or she is doing, they are of minimal usefulness. Fast-checkmate strategies are likely to falter against players who can deflect attacks and get one into a long middle game. It is superficially satisfying to smash inferior players with four-move checkmates, but it does nothing to make one's game better.
As an anecdote, he offers one child who won several games against inferior competition but who refused to consider real obstacles, settling for a long string of victories over obviously inferior players (pp. 36-37). This reminds me of the advice I recently received from a friend: always strive to make sure that you're the stupidest person in the room so that you always understand. However, many of us derive our self-worth from being big fish in tiny ponds.
The discussions of Waitzkin cast chess as an intellectual boxing match, and given his discussion of martial arts later in the novel, they are especially fitting. Muhammad Ali's tactic against George Foreman in the 1970s will be remembered by those familiar with boxing: Foreman was a hard hitter, but he had never been in a long war before. With his "rope-a-dope" style, Ali won, enduring Foreman's blows calmly and waiting for Foreman to exhaust himself. His chess lesson is fitting (p. 34-36) as he addresses talented young players who have concentrated more on winning quickly rather than improving their games.
In chapter two, Waitzkin builds on these stories and adds to our comprehension of learning by addressing the approaches to learning "entity" and "incremental". Entity theories claim that things are innate; therefore, since he or she was born to do so, one can play chess or do karate or be an economist. Failure is, therefore, profoundly personal. By comparison, "incremental theorists" perceive losses as possibilities: "the novice can become the master step by step, gradually" (p. 30). When faced with challenging material, they rise to the challenge because their approach is geared towards mastering something over time. Entity theorists, under strain, fail. Waitzkin compares his plan, in which he spent a lot of time coping with end-game approaches where they had very few pieces for both teams. He said, on the other hand, that many young students start by learning a broad range of opening variations. In the long run, this hurt their games: "(m)some very talented children expected to win without much resistance." "They were emotionally unprepared when the game was a fight." For some of us, pressure becomes a cause of paralysis and errors are the beginning of a downward spiral (pp. 60, 62). However, as Waitzkin argues, if we are to achieve our full potential, a different approach is required.
The shock-and-awe, blitzkrieg approach to chess, martial arts, and eventually all that has to be mastered is a fatal error that can everything be learned by rote. Waitzkin derides martial arts practitioners who become "form collectors that have absolutely no martial value with fancy kicks and twirls" (p. 117). On problem sets, one might say the same thing. The emphasis of Waitzkin in Tai Chi was "to refine certain basic principles" (p. 117), but there is a fundamental difference between technical skill and true understanding. One thing is learning the movements, but it is quite another to know how to decide what to do next. The concentrated concentration of Waitzkin on refined fundamentals and procedures meant that in later rounds he stayed strong while his opponents withered. In this passage (p. 123), his approach to martial arts is summarized:
