The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

Beginner’s Mind and Investment in Loss have been. Periodically, I have had to take
apart my game and go through a rough patch. In all disciplines, there are times
when a performer is ready for action, and times when he or she is soft, in flux,
broken-down or in a period of growth. Learners in this phase are inevitably
vulnerable. It is important to have perspective on this and allow yourself
protected periods for cultivation. A gifted boxer with a fabulous right and no
left will get beat up while he tries to learn the jab. Or take the talented high
school basketball player learning how to play point guard at the college level.
He may have been able to dominate schoolyards in his past, but now he has to
learn to see the whole court, share the ball, bring the best out of his teammates.

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If a young athlete is expected to perform brilliantly in his first games within
this new system, he will surely disappoint. He needs time to internalize the
new skills before he will improve. The same can be said about a chess player
adjusting to a new opening repertoire, a martial artist learning a new
technique, or a golfer, for example Tiger Woods, taking apart his swing in
order to make a long-term improvement.
How can we incorporate these ideas into the real world? In certain
competitive arenas—our working lives, for example—there are seldom weeks
in which performance does not matter. Similarly, it is not so difficult to have a
beginner’s mind and to be willing to invest in loss when you are truly a
beginner, but it is much harder to maintain that humility and openness to
learning when people are watching and expecting you to perform. True
enough. This was a huge problem for me in my chess career after the movie
came out. Psychologically, I didn’t give myself the room to invest in loss.
My response is that it is essential to have a liberating incremental approach
that allows for times when you are not in a peak performance state. We must
take responsibility for ourselves, and not expect the rest of the world to
understand what it takes to become the best that we can become. Great ones
are willing to get burned time and again as they sharpen their swords in the
fire. Consider Michael Jordan. It is common knowledge that Jordan made more
last-minute shots to win the game for his team than any other player in the
history of the NBA. What is not so well known, is that Jordan also missed
more last-minute shots to lose the game for his team than any other player in
the history of the game. What made him the greatest was not perfection, but a
willingness to put himself on the line as a way of life. Did he suffer all those
nights when he sent twenty thousand Bulls fans home heartbroken? Of course.
But he was willing to look bad on the road to basketball immortality.

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CHAPTER 11
M
AKING
S
MALLER
C
IRCLES
My search for the essential principles lying at the hearts of and connecting
chess, the martial arts, and in a broader sense the learning process, was inspired
to a certain extent by Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
I’ll never forget a scene that would guide my approach to learning for years to
come. The protagonist of Pirsig’s story, a brilliant if eccentric man named
Phaedrus, is teaching a rhetoric student who is all jammed up when given the
assignment to write a five-hundred-word story about her town. She can’t write
a word. The town seems so small, so incidental—what could possibly be
interesting enough to write about? Phaedrus liberates the girl from her writer’s
block by changing the assignment. He asks her to write about the front of the
opera house outside her classroom on a small street in a small neighborhood of
that same dull town. She should begin with the upper-left hand brick. At first
the student is incredulous, but then a torrent of creativity unleashes and she
can’t stop writing. The next day she comes to class with twenty inspired pages.
I believe this little anecdote has the potential to distinguish success from
failure in the pursuit of excellence. The theme is depth over breadth. The
learning principle is to plunge into the detailed mystery of the micro in order
to understand what makes the macro tick. Our obstacle is that we live in an
attention-deficit culture. We are bombarded with more and more information
on television, radio, cell phones, video games, the Internet. The constant
supply of stimulus has the potential to turn us into addicts, always hungering
for something new and prefabricated to keep us entertained. When nothing
exciting is going on, we might get bored, distracted, separated from the
moment. So we look for new entertainment, surf channels, flip through
magazines. If caught in these rhythms, we are like tiny current-bound surface

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fish, floating along a two-dimensional world without any sense for the gorgeous
abyss below. When these societally induced tendencies translate into the
learning process, they have devastating effect.
* * *
Let’s return to the martial arts. I think it is safe to say that many people
consciously or unconsciously associate the term martial art with legend and
film. We think of ninjas passing invisibly through the night, or shrouded
heroes running up walls and flying through the air in Crouching Tiger Hidden
Dragon. We see wild leaping Van Damme kicks and Jackie Chan flips. We
watch completely unrealistic choreography, filmed with sophisticated aerial
wires and raucous special effects, and some of us come away wanting to do that
stuff too. This leads to the most common error in the learning of martial arts:
to take on too much at once. Many “Kung Fu” schools fuel this problem by
teaching numerous flowery forms, choreographed sets of movement, and
students are rated by how many forms they know. Everyone races to learn more
and more, but nothing is done deeply. Things look pretty but they are
superficial, without a sound body mechanic or principled foundation. Nothing
is learned at a high level and what results are form collectors with fancy kicks
and twirls that have absolutely no martial value.
I had a different approach. From very early on, I felt that the moving
meditation of Tai Chi Chuan has the primary martial purpose of allowing
practitioners to refine certain fundamental principles.
I
Many of them can be
explored by standing up, taking a stance, and incrementally refining the
simplest of movements—for example pushing your hands six inches through
the air. With the practice of this type of simplified motion you can feel the
subtlest ripples inside the body. You become aware of all the tension that
resides in your feet, legs, back, and shoulders. Then you release the tension,
step by step, hour by hour, month by month, and with the fading of tension
comes a whole new world of sensation. You learn to direct your awareness
inside the body, and soon enough your fingers come alive with tingling, you
feel heat surging up your back and through your arms. The Tai Chi system can
be seen as a comprehensive laboratory for internalizing good fundamentals,
releasing tension, and cultivating energetic awareness.

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I practiced the Tai Chi meditative form diligently, many hours a day. At
times I repeated segments of the form over and over, honing certain techniques
while refining my body mechanics and deepening my sense of relaxation. I
focused on small movements, sometimes spending hours moving my hand out
a few inches, then releasing it back, energizing outwards, connecting my feet to
my fingertips with less and less obstruction. Practicing in this manner, I was
able to sharpen my feeling for Tai Chi. When through painstaking refinement of
a small movement I had the improved feeling, I could translate it onto other