“My whole life I had studied techniques, principles, and theory until they were integrated into the unconscious.”  – Josh Waitzkin

Joshua Waitzkin was national chess champion in the U.S. 8 times, inspiring the movie “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” and more recently has earned two world champion titles in Pushing Hands, the martial arts version of Tai Chi. It’s fair to say that he knows something about learning.

Quite a bit of The Art of Learning is devoted to Waitzkin’s career in both chess and pushing hands, and unfortunately though enjoyable it is perhaps a bit short on wisdom. Interspersed with that, however, are discussions of how he sees the learning process and the principles he believes underlie expertise in any discipline.

Waitzkin introduces a few vague lists of principles, but in essence argues the key to excellence is the gradual mastery of fundamental principles, over time interlinked into complexity and integrated into our subconscious.  The key to such learning is to take the small things you learn and ‘chunk’ them into larger ideas in your memory, ensuring efficient storage and retrieval. As a result, an expert martial artist and a beginner actually perceive different things. A complicated strike may be made up of six parts, but an expert perceives it as one moderately fast attack. The beginner, on the other hand, sees six different moves, all blindingly fast. Mastery of the fundamentals can actually change not just how you perform an event but also how you perceive an event.

Once you’ve achieved this chunking of basic concepts into complicated ones, he argues, you start achieving the deeper mastery critical for progress, and the correct decision can even seem intuitive. Studies of chess grandmasters, for example, have shown they do not see many moves farther ahead than weaker players. Instead, they have an intuition on which moves may be best, and so though they study the same number of possible moves, they study better quality ones.

Given Waitzkin’s success, the book is certainly inspirational, and mixed in with the story of his life are a few seeds of wisdom. I think my favourite story was that apparently as an offshoot of Soviet hypnosis programs, young Soviet chess players were taught to tap a piece quickly but softly against the table, in an effort to subliminally speed up the thinking of their opponent and encourage errors. Who knew?

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