How to Become a World Champion in Any Field
Key points from The Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin
You may think that world champion athletes have trained in their chosen sport since they were children. Yet Josh Waitzkin, the chess prodigy who was the subject of the film Searching for Bobby Fischer, only discovered the martial art of Tai Chi Chuan after he retired from competitive chess. In only a few short years, he was able to become a World Champion in the sport.
The secret is that, instead of learning how to play chess, he learned how to learn. The skills and techniques he developed to become the Under-18 World Champion in chess are the skills and techniques that he used to catapult himself to the top of Tai Chi Chuan.
In his book, The Art of Learning, he shares his personal story of developing the techniques of becoming a champion. Since I’m a much faster reader, my husband asked me to summarize the book for him. I thought you might find it useful as well.
If you follow Josh’s guidance, you can rise to the top of whatever field you choose.
Step 1: Master the fundamentals incrementally
When Josh was studying chess, he started by learning what the names of the different chess pieces were and how they moved. Then, he studied simplified situations (one king versus a king and a pawn) to build his intuitive understanding. He continued in this manner, gradually increasing complexity.
When he was studying martial arts, he spent six months mastering the basic Tai Chi forms before he began training in how to use them in combat. He spent hours each day adjusting the tiniest flaw in each posture to build his body’s recognition of proper energy flow.
Why incremental study is important
If a student believes they are successful because of innate talent, setbacks and defeats can be devastating. The student will then choose less difficult challenges that they are certain they can achieve, rather than push themselves to take on challenges that lead to growth.
Students who believe they are successful because of their hard work and good learning processes, on the other hand, view setbacks and defeats as learning opportunities. Losing never feels good, but they are not devastated by the experience.
How you react to losing determines your resilience. To become a champion, you must view loss as an opportunity for growth.
You also need to see a single mistake as nothing more than that, and allow yourself to recenter to your new situation. Staying calm and keeping presence of mind prevents a single mistake from becoming a downward spiral of cascading mistakes.
Step 2: Invest in loss
Investing in loss means putting yourself into a situation where you expect to lose while training. Then you struggle to find a way not to lose. This gives far more growth and development than merely competing at your own level.
When Josh was learning to play chess, as a six-year-old boy, he played against the adults who spent their days playing chess in the park near his home. Then he played against a chess coach who was a master of the game. By contrast, the young chess prodigies who could not handle losing, eventually stopped improving.
When he studied martial arts, he routinely sought out a strong and aggressive fighter who could easily overpower him. Although he got beaten up a lot in training, when it came to competitive matches, he’d developed strategies that let him triumph over stronger, more aggressive fighters. They were so used to relying on their strength and aggression that they fell apart when those strategies didn’t work.
Another key point he makes is that your emotional response to losing, especially losing “unfairly”, is what prevents you from winning. If you allow someone to cast you as a victim, your thoughts will chase each other with anger and resentment. You will not be able to focus on moving forward. Instead, view cheating or unfair behavior as a tactic the other player is trying. Don’t allow them to control you.
How to invest in loss
Investing in loss translates into three specific types of behavior.
Stretch your skills by finding opponents slightly better than you. Your improvement will plateau while you internalize information, but then you will see another growth spurt.
Seek out situations where you are facing a particular scenario that gives you trouble. Then keep trying different possible solutions, expecting that most of the time you will lose. Eventually, you’ll hit on something that works for you. It may be something no one has ever tried in that situation before, or it may be a classic response that you put a slight twist on.
When analyzing your performance, focus on those moments when your intuition was not up to the task of moving you forward. For whatever reason, at that moment, you did not know what to do next. Analyze both your emotional and mental state at that moment. Keep studying the moment from different angles until your intuition makes the leap to the correct action.
Step 3: Perform as you live
The best styles of performance will match your personality.
When Josh was playing chess, his strategy was to make the game as chaotic as possible, because he was comfortable in a chaotic environment. He played boldly, attacking rather than defending. When a coach tried to have him study great players who excelled at defense, his game fell apart. He had to learn defense by studying the great attack players who played those great defenders.
In the martial arts, he realized he was not as physically gifted as the athletes he was competing against. There, his strategy was to find ways to negate their greater physical gifts, while looking for the tiniest cracks that he could manipulate to his advantage. He relied on his greater strategic capabilities, developed by his years of playing chess.
All good performers, in any field, rely on coaches to help them reach greatness. Find a coach who will work with your innate personality to develop a style specific to you, rather than one who will try to fit you into a cookie-cutter approach.
Your performance challenges mirror your life challenges
Because your performance in your chosen field is based on your personality, the things that cause problems for you in your life will also cause problems for you in your performance. If you can see how they are mirroring each other, you can use the same solution for both.
Josh uses the example of discovering that he was slow to react to transitions. The first few days he was at a chess competition, he would be missing the familiar people and environment he had left. This was mirrored in his chess play, as he was slow to react to changes in the scenarios of the game, stuck in what had been the previous scenario.
By spotting this connection, he was able to work on it in both his chess and his life. When he traveled, he arrived early so that he could spend time learning about his new location. That changed his viewpoint from holding on to the past, to eagerness to learn about the new. In turn, that helped him recognize shifts during chess matches and be primed to discover how to take advantage of them.
This is also why great insights in one field often come from intense study in other fields. Since both fields are mirrors to your life, the solution to a problem in one may be easier to see in the other.
Step 4: Increase focus to increase speed
The subconscious mind can process far more information at far higher speed than the conscious mind. The conscious mind is better suited for direction and decision.
The more you can offload your processing to the subconscious mind, the faster you are able to make sense of a situation. You will come to a conclusion about what to do next while others are still thinking.
The way to do this is by hyper-focusing. Instead of trying to know everything about the situation, gradually build up your internal representations of the situation so that fewer details give you more information.
It is similar to the way that, in a car accident, time seems to slow down, and the driver’s brain speeds up. It’s because the driver is hyper-focused on trying to avoid the accident, and all other details become irrelevant.
How to increase focus
You start with a solid foundation of basics (step 1). Once you’ve internalized that information, you apply it to increasingly complex situations.
For each new technique or strategy you learn, practice that one technique or strategy until you understand the essence of it at an intuitive level. Condense down all the extraneous details, until only the core of the technique or strategy is left.
Focus on the few details that stand out, against a background of the greater context of technique or strategy. For example, in martial arts, the best time to launch a particular attack may be when your opponent blinks. So you focus on the subtle movements of the muscles around the eyes, ready to spring into your attack at the first hint of a blink.
When Josh was studying video tapes of fights to understand what was happening, he would watch them frame by frame, in order to could catch these tiny changes.
Step 5: Control your intensity and recovery
It can be difficult to perform at the high levels required for competition. If you play at full intensity all the time, you will burn out your mental and physical reserves.
You need to be able to turn your intensity on and off. Brief bursts of intense concentration or physical exertion are followed by total rest and recovery. Don’t think about what just happened, or what is going to happen. Completely rest.
Josh achieved this insight by working with the Human Performance Institute in Orlando, Florida. They specialize in sports psychology and training of high-caliber professional athletes. They determined that what separates world class performers from others is how completely they are able to relax in the moments of inactivity in their field.
How to train yourself to control intensity and recovery
Your mind and your body are linked. By training your physical performance in high intensity followed by a cool-down period of recovery, you train your mental performance as well.
Choose an activity that can be done at high intensity, such as riding a stationary bicycle, jogging on a treadmill, or lifting weights. Use a heart monitor to determine your intensity level.
Perform the activity at a high intensity — not so high as to risk a heart attack, but enough to boost your heart rate. It may take five or ten minutes of high intensity work to get you into that zone. Then drop the intensity for a minute and allow your heart rate to drop. Alternate a minute of high intensity with a minute of lower intensity.
As you do this over and over, you’ll gradually be able to drop the recovery time from one minute, to 45 seconds, to 30 seconds, to 15 seconds. Or, keeping the same recovery time, you’ll be able to increase the intensity and duration of the high intensity activity.
Although it appears that you are training your body, you are also training your mind. If you need to think at a sustained intensity for long periods of time, take micro-breaks where you think about nothing.
Step 6: Train yourself to trigger your best performances
Initially, you may find that you can be easily distracted from your performance. Rather than trying to force a distraction-free zone, learn how to avoid being distracted. Retain your focus regardless of your environment.
For some people, this level of focus comes naturally. Others need to practice being exposed to distractions until they can tune them out.
Then, when distractions do arise, you can take advantage of them to spark new connections in your thought process. You can find insights from distractions, while keeping your main focus on your performance.
Finally, you can create a trigger that allows you to manufacture a flow state where you will automatically enter that heightened performance level.
How to create a flow state trigger
Base your trigger on anything you currently do in your life where you feel in that blissful, timeless state known as flow.
Then, create a routine of four or five steps that you can do prior to the flow activity. The routine will have some common points. The best routines include a small snack, a breathing or meditation activity, a physical activity, and a particular sound. Then, you will perform the flow activity.
An example might be to have a fruit smoothie, meditate, then do some yoga stretches, listen to a favorite song, and perform your flow activity.
Another example might be to eat a handful of almonds, focus on breathing in and out for a count of four, jog in place while singing the chorus of “We Are the Champions”, and perform your flow activity.
What the actual pieces of the routine are is not as important as including all the pieces. You can choose any light, nutritious snack to fuel your body and brain for your intense performance. Experiment with different types of breathing and meditation, physical activities, and sounds, until you find ones that resonate with you.
For a month, follow the routine every day. Once you have fully internalized it, you can do the first three or four steps of the routine prior to any activity. You will automatically drop into a flow state for the performance of that activity.
Conclusion
The Art of Learning details the lessons Josh Waitzkin used to become a world champion chess player, representing the United States six times in the under-18 category, as well as a world champion martial artist.
He found that the same techniques that allowed him to master chess at the highest level were applicable to martial arts as well. Talking with others in a wide range of endeavors, from Superbowl winning quarterbacks to top business performers, he has seen that the techniques are applicable across all disciplines.
How you can play at the top of your game
By following the six steps of his process, you can become a champion in whatever field you choose.
- Master the fundamentals incrementally
- Invest in loss
- Perform as you live
- Increase focus to increase speed
- Control your intensity and recovery
- Train yourself to trigger your best performances
I highly recommend you read his book for more details if you find this process helpful. But in the meantime, this basic overview of The Art of Learning is enough to get you started on improving your performance right away.
Ready to have a better tomorrow?
I’ve created a cheat sheet to help you gain control of your life, increase your confidence, and become optimistic about the future. If you follow this daily, you will change your life very quickly!