The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin

Home >> The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance by Josh Waitzkin (2008)

Author: Joshua Waitzkin
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Free Press (May 20, 2008)
Language: English
Assessment: 5/5

American International Master Joshua Waitzkin is well known for being the star behind Searching for Bobby Fischer as well as his role in the hugely successful program Chessmaster. I remember when I was still a pre-teen listening to Waitzkin's lectures in the old Chessmaster 8000 program (later, version 9000 and the 10th Edition) and feeling awed by Waitzkin's amazingly lucid ability to concisely explain the nuances of a competitive chess game, especially the psychological side of things.

After listening to Waitzkin's Chessmaster lectures, I tried to search up what happened to Waitzkin. I searched my database and was surprised to find no games from him after the year 1999. I looked up his Wikipedia page and was disappointed to learn that he had retired from competitive chess. I glanced over something about him achieving some decent results in martial arts before closing the page. I had no conception of the scale of these "decent results" until I read Waitzkin's book.

Normally I only recommend this book to people if they have either knowledge of competitive chess or of martial arts. However, given you are on this website, I already now that you play chess.

In purchasing this book, my expectations were high, especially given the average rating of 4.5/5 stars on Amazon.com from 50+ reviews. Surely Waitzkin's brilliant ability to speak in Chessmaster would also translate over to his writing skills. I was not to be disappointed! He uses illustrious flashback scenes to bring you to some of the pivotal moments of his competitive careers, such as a US Junior Chess Championship final and the final round of the World Tai Chi Championship. The latter was a very intimidating competition to take part in. The tournament was held in Taiwan, where many of Waitzkin's opponents were trained solely in martial arts from early childhood. Attempting to overcome such opponents was no simple feat.

Waitzkin's first art was chess. He was recognised as a prodigy (a term which he personally dislikes) and his achievements in chess were phenomenal, including beating World Champion Garry Kasparov in a simultaneous display at the age of 11, and winning the US Junior Chess Championship in 1993 and 1994. For various reasons which he discusses in the book, he shifted his focus to martial arts, in particular, the Chinese defensive and meditative martial art Tai Chi Chuan. Waitzkin comes to realise many similarities about the learning process in what appeared to be two completely distinct disciplines. This book is an outline of Waitzkin's generalisation of the learning process, which can be applied to innumerable disciplines in life.

What will be of long-term use for the reader is Waitzkin's detailed descriptions of the process of learning and adopting the right attitudes for optimum growth. Drawing upon many of his own experiences, he painstakingly goes through important concepts such as entity and learning theories (which I have talked about in a previous blog post), dealing with intimidation, the downward spiral, the power of presence and conditioning oneself into the zone. I have mentioned aspects of Waitzkin's rich philosophies in many of my recent articles. (I finished reading the book about 7 months ago and have since read it a second time.)

Conclusion

This is one of those books that will take countless readings to fully digest - the material is just to deep to understand straight away. It is also a positive, uplifting book - one that encourages you to shoot for the stars and emphasises that nothing can truly stop you if you adopt the correct attitude towards learning. Highly recommended!

To purchase products, I recommend Wholesale Chess. They provide the highest quality chess products at the lowest prices (especially for US and Canadian players). They even offer to match prices with other chess websites! Even though I live overseas, this is where I choose to purchase chess goods.

For chess opening training and repertoire maintenance, I highly recommend the software that I personally use, Chess Openings Wizard. This software was approved by Grandmaster Peter Svidler (FIDE rating 2730 as of January 2011) many years ago.

Links

Google preview of The Art of Learning (includes many readable pages!)
The Art of Learning on Amazon.com
Official Page

Article originally written: Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Article edited (slightly): Tuesday, June 14, 2011