The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

“Lose Yourself”
World Junior Chess Championship Calicut, India November 1993
I was sixteen years old, sitting at a chessboard in Calicut, India. Sweat dripped down
my sides as I battled to stay focused in the sweltering heat. The sun was high, the air
still, the room stuffed with rustling world-class thinkers. I had traveled from New York
City to represent America in the World Championship for chess players under the age of
twenty-one. Each country sent its national champion to compete in a grueling two-week
marathon of pure concentration, endurance, calculation, strategy—all-out psychological
war. My father and I had flown into Bombay a week earlier and had traveled south to
the event, where I met my girlfriend, who was representing Slovenia in the women’s
division of the tournament. She was a brilliant girl, gorgeous, otherworldly, fiercely
intense, moody, my first love. Tormented love and war, a complicated mix. Less than
ideal for World Championship competition, but the life of a top chess player is a strange
one. Brutal competition mixes with intense friendships. Players try to destroy their
opponents, to ruin their lives, and then they reflect on the battle, lick their wounds, cull
the lessons, and take a walk.
From one perspective the opponent is the enemy. On the other hand there is no one who
knows you more intimately, no one who challenges you so profoundly or pushes you to
excellence and growth so relentlessly. Sitting at a chessboard, just feet away from the
other, you can hear every breath, feel each quiver, sense any flicker of fear or exhilaration.
Hours pass with your entire being tapping into your opponent’s psyche, while the other
follows your thoughts like a shadow and yearns for your demise. Brilliant minds all
around the world devote themselves to the intense study of this mysterious, brutal
intellectual sport, and then the best of them collide in distant outposts.

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Here I was, in a strange faraway land, sweating in the oppressive heat, trying to
find my beloved art in the figurines in front of me. Above me thousands of spectators hung
from the rafters, whispering, staring at the chessboards like Sutra—somehow chess and
India resonate like ancient lovers. I was disjointed, out of whack, not yet settled into the
rhythm of the tournament. Even for the master, sometimes chess can feel like home, and
sometimes it can be completely alienating, a foreign jungle that must be explored as if for
the first time. I was trying to find my way home.
Across from me was the Indian National Champion, and between the two of us lay
the critical position of our struggle. We were three hours into the battle and I had been
thinking for twenty minutes. A curious thing happened in that time. So far I had been
grinding my way through this game. It was the first round, I had no flow, no inspired
ideas, the pieces were alien, the position strange. After about ten minutes of thought, I
began to lose myself in the variations. It is a strange feeling. First you are a person
looking at a chessboard. You calculate through the various alternatives, the mind
gaining speed as it pores through the complexities, until consciousness of one’s separation
from the position ebbs away and what remains is the sensation of being inside the
energetic chess flow. Then the mind moves with the speed of an electrical current, complex
problems are breezed through with an intuitive clarity, you get deeper and deeper into the
soul of the chess position, time falls away, the concept of “I” is gone, all that exists is
blissful engagement, pure presence, absolute flow. I was in the zone and then there was an
earthquake.
Everything started to shake and the lights went out. The rafters exploded with noise,
people ran out of the building. I sat still. I knew what was happening, but I experienced
it from within the chess position. There was a surreal synergy of me and no me, pure
thought and the awareness of a thinker—I wasn’t me looking at the chess position, but I
was aware of myself and the shaking world from within the serenity of pure engagement
—and then I solved the chess problem. Somehow the earthquake and the dying lights
spurred me to revelation. I had a crystallization of thought, resurfaced, and vacated the
trembling playing room. When I returned and play resumed, I immediately made my
move and went on to win the game.
* * *
This intense moment of my life was the launching point for my serious
investigation of the nuances of performance psychology. I had used an
earthquake to reach a higher state of consciousness and discover a chess solution

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I may not have otherwise found. As this book evolves, I will gradually lay out
my current methodology for triggering such states of creative flow. Eventually,
by systematically training oneself, a competitor can learn how to do this at
will. But the first obstacle I had to overcome as a young chess player was to
avoid being distracted by random, unexpected events—by the mini
earthquakes that afflict all of our days. In performance training, first we learn to
flow with whatever comes. Then we learn to use whatever comes to our
advantage. Finally, we learn to be completely self-sufficient and create our own
earthquakes, so our mental process feeds itself explosive inspirations without
the need for outside stimulus.
The initial step along this path is to attain what sports psychologists call
The Soft Zone. Envision the Zone as your performance state.
I
You are concentrated on the task at hand, whether it be a piece of music, a
legal brief, a financial document, driving a car, anything. Then something
happens. Maybe your spouse comes home, your baby wakes up and starts
screaming, your boss calls you with an unreasonable demand, a truck has a
blowout in front of you. The nature of your state of concentration will
determine the first phase of your reaction—if you are tense, with your fingers
jammed in your ears and your whole body straining to fight off distraction,
then you are in a Hard Zone that demands a cooperative world for you to
function. Like a dry twig, you are brittle, ready to snap under pressure. The
alternative is for you to be quietly, intensely focused, apparently relaxed with a
serene look on your face, but inside all the mental juices are churning. You flow
with whatever comes, integrating every ripple of life into your creative
moment. This Soft Zone is resilient, like a flexible blade of grass that can move
with and survive hurricane-force winds.
Another way of envisioning the importance of the Soft Zone is through an
ancient Indian parable that has been quite instructive in my life for many years:
A man wants to walk across the land, but the earth is covered with thorns. He
has two options—one is to pave his road, to tame all of nature into compliance.
The other is to make sandals. Making sandals is the internal solution. Like the
Soft Zone, it does not base success on a submissive world or overpowering
force, but on intelligent preparation and cultivated resilience.
My relationship to this issue of coping with distraction began with the
quirkiness of a ten-year-old boy. In the last chapter I mentioned that as my
chess understanding grew more sophisticated and I transitioned to adult

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tournaments, my games tended to last longer, sometimes going on for six or
eight hours. Kids have trouble focusing for so long and strange things can
happen to a young mind straining under intense pressure. One day I was
working my way through a complex position in a tournament at the
Manhattan Chess Club, and a Bon Jovi song I had heard earlier in the day
entered my mind. I tried to push it away and return to my calculation, but it
just wouldn’t leave me alone. At first this seemed funny, but soon the music
eclipsed the chess game. I couldn’t think, and ended up blundering and losing.
Soon enough, this problem became rampant in my chess life. If I heard a