The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

Part II, but there was also another component to this preparation. Chinese
martial arts tend to be very secretive, and Tai Chi Chuan is a particularly
enigmatic discipline. If you read the Tai Chi Classics, study the philosophical
foundation, practice the moving meditation, you will gain a sense of awareness,
feel supple, and possibly be able to generate a lot of speed and power. But it is
hard to translate these principles into viable martial application until you test
yourself out in the ring and incrementally separate the real from the mythical.
Unfortunately, many teachers haven’t done this themselves, and they protect
their egos and their schools by claiming to have tremendous power—for
example, the ability to throw someone without touching them—but they
refuse to show anyone. Often, supposedly great martial artists will avoid

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demonstrating their “power” by offering the explanation: “If you and I were to
spar, I might kill you.” Whenever I hear this I know that I am listening to a
charlatan—true masters have control. On the other hand, some very powerful
skills really can be developed and it is true that the greatest secrets are kept for
a very select circle. There is always the lingering question—what is really
possible and what is hype?
Until I went to Taiwan, I had no idea what to expect. And sure enough, the
top competitors were armed with a skill set I had never dreamed of. They were
remarkable athletes who had grown up in a culture that cultivated the
refinement of Push Hands in the same way that the old Soviet Union had
mastered the engineering of great chess players. Following that first
tournament, I was armed with direct observation and many hours of video of
the toughest Push Hands players in the world. That video footage of the top
Taiwanese competitors would prove to be a crucial well of information.
After my first trip to Taiwan, I saw that the greatest practitioners were not
mystics, but profoundly dedicated martial artists who had refined certain
fundamental skills at a tremendously high level. The subtlety of their
unbalancing techniques was sometimes mind-boggling. While an untrained
eye might have seen nothing, these players were using incredibly potent
combinations designed to provoke the tiniest of leans—and then opponents
were on the floor. From 2000 to 2002, I studied these tapes in detail and slowly
refined my game. During those years much of my training was with my dear
friend Tom Otterness, who is William Chen’s senior student and one of the
most powerful internal martial artists I have ever known. Tom is a sculptor
who spends his days molding clay and who subsequently has hands and arms
that feel like a bear’s—add over thirty-five years of Tai Chi training and it’s no
surprise that Tom hits like an avalanche. When Tom and I first started working
together, he would smash me all over the ring. I felt like a tennis ball meeting
a wall of force, and to make matters worse Tom was also a heat-seeking missile
—there was no avoiding his power. I was forced to add subtlety to my
neutralizations and to build up my root
I
so I could survive his onslaughts.
Working with Tom night after night gave me the confidence that I could stand
in the ring with anyone.
When I went back to the Chung Hwa Cup in late November 2002, I was
ready, or so I thought. By now I had won the U.S. Nationals for three straight
years. I regularly competed in multiple weight categories, often giving up over

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a hundred pounds to my opponents and consistently winning heavyweight and
super-heavyweight titles. I was a much improved martial artist and I also knew
what I was getting myself into. My first match of that 2002 Chung Hwa Cup
was against the Austrian representative, who had just won the European
Championship a few months before the Worlds. I described in the previous
chapter how early in the match he nailed me with an upper cut to the groin.
He was a dirty player who counted on getting into his opponents’ heads, but a
large part of my training the previous couple of years had been focused on
handling his ilk. I buckled down and knocked him out of the tournament.
My next match was against the top student of one of the Taiwanese schools.
He was slippery, very fast, but he had a bad habit of rooting off his rear leg
when pressured. As I mentioned in The Illusion of the Mystical, the problem with
putting your weight too far back is that when it shifts forward, as it must
inevitably, there is an opening—a flash when you are vulnerable. I had been
working very hard on my throws for the previous two years, and I was able to
work him toward the edge of the ring, make him lean on me, and then use his
momentum to put him on the ground. His habitual weight distribution served
as a tell and I was all over him. I won the match easily.
Now came the semifinals and my opponent was a Taiwanese star. His name
was Chen Ze-Cheng and he was the guy I had been most impressed with two
years before. In fact, the video footage I had focused on most closely while
preparing for this year’s tournament was of Chen Ze-Cheng dismantling his
opponents. Chen has the physicality of a gazelle. Tall, sinewy, incredibly strong
for his weight, and dazzlingly athletic, he puts opponents on the floor with a
speed and technical virtuosity that just baffles the mind. He is the son of the
top Push Hands teacher in Taiwan, who is also arguably the best trainer in the
world, and so in addition to his physical gifts Chen had been receiving the very
best instruction since childhood.
When the opening bell rang, I was all charged up. Our wrists met in the
middle of the ring and he immediately shot in for a throw, which I crimped.
But he kept the pressure on, pummeling in with his hands to get an
advantageous grappling position. I felt danger everywhere. I kept on brushing
him away from me, staving off throw after throw, but he wouldn’t stop
coming. His power felt internal, relaxed, molten, and always primed for an
explosion. He was all over me, relentless—but he still hadn’t scored any points.
A little over halfway through the first round I caught him off-balance in the

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middle of one of his attacks and exploded into a huge push that sent him
flying. It looked like Chen was going out of the ring, but he landed with his
toes still in, heels hovering over the line, and he did a matrix maneuver, head
backwards nearly to the floor while he pushed out with his waist to keep his
balance and stay in bounds. Such an athlete! I charged into the attack but just
when I arrived he was upright again and somehow rooted. This was a war.
Playing in that ring with Chen I had the feeling that he was in my skin,
sucking out my energy. I kept on pushing him away like a bad dream. I would
unbalance him a little, weather his storms, but his conditioning was amazing
and he kept coming back. With about thirty seconds to go in the round, I
started to feel drained. I have come to understand that this is a big part of
Chen’s strategy—he pressures opponents, nags them. He is looking for
openings but really just goading rivals into exhausting themselves by pushing
him away. He keeps pummeling in, getting pushed back, and returning with
an endless persistence. I felt this happening and decided to stay in the clinch
for a minute, let him in, see if he could do anything. I was on the floor before I
could blink.
It was a stunning throw. I was up and then I was down, and I didn’t know
what hit me. I got up shaking my head and came back at him. There wasn’t
much time left, and I was overaggressive and got taken down again. The
second round was more of the same. He pressured me, I staved him off,
searched for openings, but for the most part he felt like a martial giant. About
a minute into the round, he caught me flat-footed and the next thing I knew I
was piling face first into the mats. Man was he fast! Then he just held me off,
protecting his lead. I went after him and was in the middle of a wild attack, a
desperate attempt to come back when the bell rang and the match was over.
We hugged. He had beaten me with grace and true excellence. My neck and
shoulder were throbbing in pain. I was wrecked. I had one more match in the
tournament—a fight for third place, which I somehow managed to win despite
hardly being able to move the right side of my upper body. So I took bronze in
the tournament and had two more years to stew in my juices until my next
chance. The bar had been set.
After the 2002 World Championships I was a man on a mission. The time
had come to take my game to a new level. I had felt up close and personal what
the best in the world was all about and I knew it was within reach. This next
phase of my learning process would be about building and refining a

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competitive repertoire that was uniquely my own. Immediately after coming
home to New York City, my work began.
The first couple months of training after the Worlds were mostly mental.
For one thing, I had to let my body heal. My shoulder was a mess and it needed
some time before it could take full-tilt impact. So I studied tapes, broke down
the technical repertoires of Chen Ze-Cheng and the other top Taiwanese
players. Watching hours of footage frame by frame I picked up on infinitely
subtle setups and plays with footwork that really opened my eyes to what I was
up against. The difference between numbers 3 and 1 is mountainous. I would
have to become a whole other kind of athlete. Step by step.
By mid January I was back on the mats doing soft training that didn’t
aggravate the injury but kept my body fluid. I worked on some new technical
ideas, integrated the movements into my arsenal by doing slow-motion
repetitions. By March I could mix it up at full speed without worrying about
my shoulder, but I still wasn’t playing competitively so much as working on
the ideas I described in the chapters Making Smaller Circles, Slowing Down Time,
and The Illusion of the Mystical. I was still in the “research and development”
stage.
I have talked about style, personal taste, being true to your natural
disposition. This theme is critical at all stages of the learning process. If you
think about the high-end learning principles that I have discussed in this book,
they all spring out of the deep, creative plunge into an initially small pool of
information. In the early chapters, I described the importance of a chess player
laying a solid foundation by studying positions of reduced complexity (endgame