How to Learn Anything: The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin

Nine-Minute Nuggets
Sep 2, 2018 · 10 min read

This is my first ever book summary video! I hope you like it.

Transcript below:

Hi guys! Today I’ll be talking about The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. I picked this book up because I really miss the joy of learning for the sake of learning and I figure, why not learn from a master of the craft.

Josh is an extremely accomplished individual; he’s a chess prodigy who became an International Master at the age of 16, and then went on to became a world champion in competitive martial arts. He’s gotten really good at getting really good at things and he wrote this book to share some of the sort of Jedi mind-tricks that he’s learned over the years.

Josh kicks the book off with a description of what I like to think of as the “intellectual butterfly effect” — the phenomenon whereby a localized chunk of new knowledge or experience can have significant effects in other completely unrelated areas of your life. Reading some great literature might trigger a breakthrough in your chess strategy; learning a new skill might inspire an improvement to some algorithm or process you’re building. He advocates exercising your mind’s ability to generate these insights by continuously cultivating a rich, diverse network of deeply internalized knowledge and experience to facilitate a virtuous cycle of growth.

In order to pull this off, you need to embrace failure. He calls it “losing to win” — deliberately exposing yourself to situations where you will likely fail all in the name of growth. The easiest example I can think of is hypertrophy in the context of bodybuilding; growth happens when we push ourselves past the point of resistance and into unexplored territory.

This isn’t just an exercise; this is a mindset. It’s one of two intelligence mindsets that developmental psychologists distinguish between: the entity theory of intelligence and the incremental theory of intelligence.

Entity theorists believe that their capacities are predetermined and innate. It’s a fixed mindset.

Incremental theorists believe that with hard work, new strengths can be developed incrementally over time. It’s a growth mindset.

Josh presents research that demonstrates how incremental theorists tend to respond more positively to challenging situations than entity theorists, and how they are less likely to break under pressure. He compares the resilience of incremental theorists to that of a blade of grass in the wind. Entity theorists are a bit more rigid, fragile, and less likely to experience extreme growth. They’re more likely to snap under pressure, like a dry twig.

Josh argues that we should therefor embrace a lifestyle of incremental, perpetual learning and exposure to discomfort instead of settling for static, comfortable mediocrity. One example of this in nature is the hermit crab — an animal that periodically exposes itself to extreme risk in order to expand its physical comfort zone. We should be doing that for our spiritual and intellectual comfort zones. We can do this by exposing ourselves to challenge, struggle, and failure.

Painful losses teach us much more than the wins so we shouldn’t avoid them; pour your heart into something even if it might fail. Embracing this mindset will equip you to continue moving forward in the midst of challenge instead of allowing pain to stop you in your tracks and anchor you in place. It’s a form of psychological risk mitigation.

This is why children especially ought to be led through risk-taking and not away from it because they’re our future’s leaders and our future needs unrestrained ambition that is resilient to failure.

Cultivating this kind of mindset is a great first step towards operating within what sports psychologists call The Soft Zone — a state of impregnable, flexible performance. Think of the blade of grass that was used to describe the incremental intelligence theory. Interruptions and surprises don’t shake your resolve when you’re in the Soft Zone. The only way to achieve this level of mental resilience is through effort. If you don’t practice this, you’re at risk for a downward spiral if life throws a curveball your way, which it probably has before, and probably will again, many times. Take a risk; try something bold within your career or entrepreneurial endeavors; if you’re single, introduce yourself to the next cute girl or guy you see.

You should be actively investing in loss and giving yourself to the process of learning.

Josh explains how great performers are characterized by a willingness to get burned time and time again as they sharpen their swords in the fire. There are countless examples of people who have failed bigtime but because of that failure, have experienced great success. The way I see it is that we’re all just bundles blood and bones that take inputs and produce outputs and if you decide to go out of your way to expose yourself to tons of inputs, you’ll inevitably experience a higher frequency and magnitude of success and corresponding failure. That is a choice.

Josh also explains the importance of turning adversity into advantage. If you become injured and immobilized, you can totally sit around sulking and moping with bon bons for a couple months…

Or, as an alternative, you can rise to the challenge and learn how to improve your athleticism in spite of your injury, modifying your lifestyle and focus towards things that don’t require mobility.

That soft zone — a serene present sense of self-assurance, especially under the pressure of adversity — is something you can only achieve it through practice. Find ways to exercise this while you’re in control, instead of waiting for your hand to be forced.

With an understanding of the soft zone in place, Josh then explains how focusing on the micro is a great way to set yourself up for sustainable growth. The way I interpreted his advice is this:

In this image, the circles are the micro components of something you’d like to learn. Chess principles or boxing tactics, for example. The diamonds are your intuitive skills — the subconscious knowledge of these components. The more you focus on one particular component, the more compressed your knowledge gets, and the more developed your intuition becomes. In the above image, focus is given equally to all components.

In this image, a high degree of focus is given to one particular thing, really pumping up your intuitive understanding of that thing and increasing the likelihood of forming a subconscious web that lends itself to that butterfly effect flavor of epiphany we described at the beginning. In order to develop this natural intelligence, Josh writes, “Plunge into the detailed mystery of the micro in order to understand what makes the macro tick.”

The best way to internalize something is to tack it on to something that you already know — a process called chunking. This was proven in a study that demonstrated chess players who were given actual board positions were much more likely to remember the positions than if they were given a nonsensical arrangement of pieces (image). The first board was a relatable situation that they could attach to prior experience as an experiential exercise, whereas the second board removed that element of internalized wisdom and was nothing more than a visual memory exercise where the participants had none of that crystallized knowledge to anchor the positions to.

That crystallization of experience into the subconscious is what enables you to be less adherent to rigid, dogmatic principles and turns learning into unlearning as the logical, literal sources of your abilities evaporate in favor of a more fluid, interwoven instinct, fueled by TONS of that “logical compression”. This is the stuff of open-mindedness.

The cool thing is, once some piece of knowledge becomes part of your subconscious, you don’t even need to think. There is no internal dialogue. The things you’ve learned become so tightly packed and readily accessible that compared to a novice, you’re operating at lightspeed autopilot and would probably struggle to transfer your knowledge to a novice because it’s become so deeply embedded. You don’t have the cognitive overhead of cerebral activity and active thinking or internal dialogue; it’s a higher bandwidth headspace based on a sense of pressurized instinct deeply ingrained through repeated exposure to failure.

Josh then explains how — just like you can architect your subconscious, you can also manipulate it. He gives an example of a client of his — Dennis — who was having trouble getting into a positive, focused mindset before important business meetings. The solution for Dennis was to think about the activities that generally put him into that mindset — in his case, it was playing ball with his little boy. Josh then built a routine for Dennis that allowed him to anchor that emotional state of playing ball to a series of more convenient behaviors. The idea is that you can invoke your own soft zone through self-conditioning, gradually anchoring the deeper emotional hooks to more manageable activities and then invoking them at will.

So you can control your own subconscious and you can invoke the Soft Zone and emotions at will, but you’re also at risk of being manipulated by master conditioners. Be wary of lawyers, salesmen, and negotiators who have mastered the art of conditioning your subconscious. Masters of these crafts operate in that subconscious space to achieve their objectives with little effort. Any competitive activity has this psychological component as well and the masters of these activities must learn to wield it as a competitive advantage.

To become more resilient, Josh recommends incorporating periods of stress and recovery into your lifestyle. One way to do this is through physical exertion — push hard for a brief period of time, and then chill out. Josh advocates embracing the peace that punctuates the chaos instead of allowing the chaos to spill over. This instills a tolerance for the transition between favorable and unfavorable environmental conditions.

Josh also explains how one part of risk tolerance is leveraging your emotions to fuel your fire instead of denying them or allowing them to take the wheel. The anger you feel after someone wrongs you or the elation you feel after someone delights you could drive your behavior recklessly, or, if you maintain control, it could motivate you to carry on with an enhanced, unemotional focus, awareness, and resolve with emotion in back seat, not tucked away in the trunk like a ticking time bomb. Like everything, this takes practice, and it can be exercised whenever something pulls you down or fires you up. Next time something upsets you, try chilling out until the emotion takes a seat in the back and then let it inform your future decisions without full-on driving them.

In summary — in order to get really, really good at something, internalize knowledge by diving deep into a small pool of information to forge that dense, foundational bundle of subconscious, potent, unthinking intuition. Part of that dive must involve failure in order for the raw material to be pressurized and crystallized. The more crystallized bundles you accumulate, the more resilient you will be in the face of life’s surprises, and the more readily you’ll be able to overcome and leverage obstacles to your advantage. (broken right arm = stronger legs, better coordination of left arm). Every aspect of your life will stand to benefit if you go off, take risks, learn new, unrelated, and random things, and get uncomfortable.

Discussion

That’s my interpretation of the book’s biggest takeaways.

It was an extremely breezy read — no unnecessary jargon or ego. For someone who has achieved so much, Josh managed to convey his wisdom without tooting his own horn or patronizing the reader at all. The tone was very humble and relatable.

There was a solid ratio of actionable insight to anecdote and storytelling

It read a bit more like an autobiography at times but his stories are all great, engaging examples of the concepts he’s teaching the reader and they help drive them home, so I have no complaints.

As far as how I’m using it and how it’s impacted me –

In my personal relationships, it pushed me to step out of my comfort zone and rekindle some relationships that I’ve neglected over the past few years. One of those people inspired me to create this channel, which I may not have actually acted upon if I didn’t hear the nagging voice of this book telling me to pour my heart into something uncomfortable.

In my social life, it’s reinforced the importance of saying yes to social invitations; I’m a bit socially anxious and introverted so saying “yes” a bit more might help fill out some of the weak spots in my soft skills.

Spiritually — this book helped me recognize that riding my motorcycle along the PCH is absolutely something I should embrace since it’s one of the few things that puts me in that soft zone.

As far as emotionally — It taught me how to leverage my less savory emotions towards people who have wronged me into more objective, focus-enhancing motivators.

Within my career, I have a tendency to select opportunities that I’m familiar with, but this book reminded me that random knowledge can inspire epiphany in other areas of life and that gives me a more amenable outlook towards exposing myself to the risk of new, unfamiliar things in my day job. The risk of failure will increase along with the risk of growth; the key is to fail responsibly so I don’t end up living under a bridge.


Originally published at nineminutebooks.wordpress.com on September 2, 2018.

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