The Art of Learning — How to Become World-Class in Any Skill
Skill Development Expert Profile — Josh Waitzkin
Josh Waitzkin is a skill-learning phenomenon. In his youth, he was a chess prodigy and he later won the world championships in Tai-chi push hands, became a black belt holder in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and is now mastering the skills of stand-up paddleboarding and foiling (variations of surfing).
When becoming a world champion in tai chi push hands, he beat opponents who had thousands of more hours of practice than him. What allowed him to do so?
Josh claims that his most developed skill is his understanding of the art of learning. Due to his deep understanding of learning, he’s able to quickly develop new skills and proceed towards excellent levels of performance.
He is now coaching some of the world’s top performers in how to learn faster and his main focus is on the last one per cent of performance. His main goal in life is to investigate and understand what it takes to become world-class in any skill.
These are some of the secrets from the lessons he learned while competing at the highest levels in chess and tai chi push hands.
Investing in loss
When you’re starting a new skill, you’re not supposed to be good, so it’s acceptable to make mistakes and not care about how you look. Josh suggests exercises that are challenging and where you get a lot of quality repetitions in a short amount of time. The main goal should be long-term improvement.
In the martial arts, he purposefully fought opponents who were a lot better than him. He spent months getting crushed by more experienced opponents but eventually got used to their methods and started beating them.
If you have already practised a skill for a while, but are never challenging yourself against someone better, you’re unlikely to develop. Only when you’re pushing your limits can you grow and improve your capabilities.
Depth over breadth
“In intense competition, those who win have slightly more honed skills than others, not a mysterious technique, but a profound mastery of a basic skill set.” — Josh Waitzkin
Rather than focusing on a wide range of fancy techniques, Josh argues that the key to mastering a skill is to understand the essence of the fundamentals.
When you learn and understand a technique to fluency, it becomes instinctive to do it. This frees up your mind to focus on things such as decision making or picking up cues in your opponent’s moves. This only happens when you’ve learned the fundamentals extremely well.
The small things matter
If you want to become a world-class performer, it’s essential to find all the subtle things that are holding you back. Every little detail can prevent you from reaching your full potential. From the way you think to how you plan your practice.
It can be easy to think that someone is just more talented than you, and there is no point in even competing against them. But these people may have been working to improve parts of their performance that you haven’t even noticed. Skills such as the ability to focus and how to stay calm in stressful situations are particularly difficult to assess in other people. You don’t know how advanced they are just by looking at them. And these factors make a significant difference in performance. If you can train these skills in addition to the skill you’re working on, you can reach a much higher level.
In almost any discipline, most top competitors have a comparable technical understanding of the game. The result is, therefore, often determined by their mental state. Who can stay calm under pressure, recover from a mistake and find the energy to fight when the body is tired? To become world-class, you must focus as much on your mental state as your practical knowledge. How you do the little things matter. Over time they add up and become the big thing.
Slowing down time
When you do something over and over, you internalise the techniques until the mind eventually perceives them in great detail. After training in this manner, it’s as if time has slowed down and you have better time to react when your opponent makes a move. Tiny details in how they move their shoulders or hips can make you prepared for what will come very instinctively.
We see an example of this in tennis serves. The shots are coming in so fast that you wouldn’t normally have time to react. But as tennis players train their ability to see small differences in the ball toss and shoulder rotation of the opponent, they can predict where the ball will come before it has been hit.
Training in adverse conditions
Josh deliberately studies under challenging conditions. This is to prepare for opponents who don’t follow the rules or very distracting environments during competitions.
When he grew up, his opponents at the chessboard often had dirty tricks such as kicking his legs or tapping the board to distract him. To be able to concentrate under these conditions, Josh started practising with loud music in his bedroom or in smokey bars, conditioning himself to perform in all types of environments. His goal was to hear internal music rather than external noise. For every skill you learn, you can simulate difficult conditions to make performing under pressure easier.
Another example of learning under adverse conditions was when Josh broke his arm just six weeks before the tai chi world championships. This meant that he could only use one arm in practice. This forced him to learn how to fend off opponents with one arm alone. This gave him a considerable advantage when the other arm healed, as he had learned to control opponents with one arm and could use the other to attack his opponent.
Recovery
When you’re competing at a high-level, it’s often those that recover fastest between games that have an advantage. Too often, people spend energy between games, when they instead should be resting. When you’re doing any task that requires a lot of focus, relaxing in between games is crucial. The preparation and training should be done before the event, not during the event itself.
Reaching world-class level
“There are clear distinctions between what it takes to be decent, what it takes to be good, what it takes to be great, and what it takes to be among the best.” -Josh Waitzkin
Josh claims that the key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process and not to live in a shell of static, safe mediocrity. Growth comes at the expense of comfort and safety.
When you aim to be the best, your mind should be searching for small details and new angles that will help you improve the learning process. Any setback should be a lesson, and you should come back wiser than before it happened.
Josh is excellent at translating great learning from one art to another. Since he’s been at a high level in other skills previously, he can visualise himself mastering any skill he takes on. He knows the effort it takes to get to a very high level of performance.
The most important lesson to learn from Josh is that if you master how to learn one skill, you will significantly enhance your ability to learn other skills in the future. The process is the same, only with different techniques and training methods. When you’ve mastered this process, you’ve truly understood the art of learning.
Take home message
The art of learning skills follows some universal principles. If you understand them, it becomes a lot easier to learn any new skill.
The best way to develop your understanding for the art of learning, is to study and practice until you reach a very high level in a skill. The concepts are hard to learn just by reading about them, and must be applied in actual practice.
If you want to reach world-class level in anything, every little detail matters and it’s essential to push the boundaries for what you can do in every practice session.
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