The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

Defense, about the eccentric chess genius Luzhin—well, that is Dvoretsky.
When seated at a chessboard, Dvoretsky comes to life. His thick fingers
somehow manipulate the pieces with elegance. He is extremely confident,
arrogant in fact. He is most at home across the table from a talented pupil, and
immediately begins setting up enormously complex chess compositions for the
student to solve. His repertoire of abstruse material seems limitless, and it
keeps on coming hour after hour in relentless interrogation. Dvoretsky loves to
watch gifted chess minds struggle with his problems. He basks in his power
while young champions are slowly drained of their audacious creativity. As a
student, I found these sessions to be resonant of Orwell’s prison scenes in 1984,
where independently minded thinkers were ruthlessly broken down until all
that was left was a shell of a person.
Training with Yuri Razuvaev feels much more like a spiritual retreat than
an Orwellian nightmare. Razuvaev’s method depends upon a keen appreciation
for each student’s personality and chessic predispositions. Yuri has an amazing
psychological acumen, and his instructional style begins with a close study of
his student’s chess games. In remarkably short order, he discovers the core of
the player’s style and the obstructions that are blocking pure self-expression.

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Then he devises an individualized training program that systematically deepens
the student’s knowledge of chess while nurturing his or her natural gifts.
Mark Dvoretsky, on the other hand, has created a comprehensive training
system that he believes all students should fit into. His method when working
with a pupil is to break the student down rather brutally and then stuff him or
her into the cookie-cutter mold of his training system. In my opinion this
approach can have profoundly negative consequences for spirited young
students.
During the critical period of my chess career following the release of the
film Searching for Bobby Fischer, there was a disagreement about what direction
my study should take. On one side was Dvoretsky and his protégé, my full
time coach, who believed I should immerse myself in the study of prophylaxis,
the art of playing chess like an anaconda. Great prophylactic players, like
Karpov and Petrosian, seem to sense their opponent’s intention. They
systematically cinch down the pressure, squeezing every last breath of life out
of their prey while preventing any aggressive attempt before it even begins to
materialize. They are counterpunchers by nature and they tend to be quiet,
calculating, rather introverted personalities. On the other side of the argument
was Yuri Razuvaev, who insisted that I should continue to nurture my natural
voice as a chess player. Razuvaev believed that I was a gifted attacking player
who should not be bullied away from my strengths. There was no question that
I needed to learn more about Karpov’s type of chess to make the next steps in
my development, but Razuvaev pointed out that I could learn Karpov from
Kasparov.
This was a delicate and rather mystical-feeling idea, and I wish I had
possessed the sophistication as a sixteen-year-old boy to see its power. On one
level, Razuvaev’s point was that the great attacking players all possess keen
understanding of positional chess, and the way for someone like myself to study
high-level positional chess is to study the way the great players of my nature
have integrated this element of the art. An interesting parallel would be to
consider a lifetime rock guitarist who wants to learn about classical music. Let’s
say there are two possible guides for him in this educational process. One is an
esoteric classical composer who has never thought much of the “vulgarity of
rock and roll,” and another is a fellow rocker who fell in love with classical
music years ago and decided to dedicate his life to this different genre of music.
The ex-rocker might touch a common nerve while the composer might feel like

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an alien. I needed to learn Karpov through a musician whose blood boiled just
like mine.
Razuvaev’s educational philosophy falls very much in line with Taoist
teachers who might say “learn this from that” or “learn the hard from the soft.”
In most everyday life experiences, there seems to be a tangible connection
between opposites. Consider how you may not realize how much someone’s
companionship means to you until they are gone—heartbreak can give the
greatest insight into the value of love. Think about how good a healthy leg
feels after an extended time on crutches—sickness is the most potent
ambassador for healthy living. Who knows water like a man dying of thirst?
The human mind defines things in relation to one another—without light the
notion of darkness would be unintelligible
Along the same lines, I have found that if we feed the unconscious, it will
discover connections between what may appear to be disparate realities. The
path to artistic insight in one direction often involves deep study of another—
the intuition makes uncanny connections that lead to a crystallization of
fragmented notions. The great Abstract Expressionist painters and sculptors,
for example, came to their revolutionary ideas through precise realist training.
Jackson Pollock could draw like a camera, but instead he chose to splatter paint
in a wild manner that pulsed with emotion. He studied form to leave form.
And in his work, the absence of classical structure somehow contains the
essence of formal training—but without its ritualized limitations.
By extension, studying the greatest attacking chess games ever played, I
would inevitably gain a deep appreciation for defensive nuance. Every high-
level attacking chess creation emerges from a subtle building of forces that is at
the core of positional chess. Just as the yin-yang symbol possesses a kernel of
light in the dark, and of dark in the light, creative leaps are grounded in a
technical foundation. Years later, my martial arts training would integrate this
understanding into my everyday work, but as a teenager I didn’t understand. I
don’t think I was even present to the question.
TWO WAYS OF BREAKING A STALLION
Along with her many other impressive abilities, my mom, Bonnie Waitzkin,
trains horses. She used to compete as a hunter jumper and dressage rider, and as
a young boy I often went with her to the barn in New Jersey and romped

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around on the ponies. I could never believe the way she communicated with
the animals. If there was a problematic horse, people called my little mom,
who would walk up to an angry 1,700-pound stallion, speak in a soothing
voice, and soon enough the horse would be in the palm of her hand.
Mom has a unique ability to communicate with all animals. I’ve seen her
hand-line five-hundred-pound blue marlin to the side of the boat, with barely
any strength. Angry, barking dogs quiet and lick her legs. Birds flock to her.
She is a whisperer. She loves the animals and she speaks their natural body
language.
Bonnie explains that there are two basic ways of taming a wild horse. One is
to tie it up and freak it out. Shake paper bags, rattle cans, drive it crazy until it
submits to any noise. Make it endure the humiliation of being controlled by a
rope and pole. Once it is partially submissive, you tack the horse, get on top,
spur it, show it who’s boss—the horse fights, bucks, twists, turns, runs, but
there is no escape. Finally the beast drops to its knees and submits to being
domesticated. The horse goes through pain, rage, frustration, exhaustion, to
near death . . . then it finally yields. This is the method some like to call shock