Josh Waitzkin

A child chess champion and Tai Chi Chuan world champion describes his journies to the top, sharing the lessons he has learned and identifying key principles about learning and performance that readers can apply to their life goals.

A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence

The Art of Learning

An eight-time national chess champion and world champion martial artist shares the lessons he has learned from two very different competitive arenas, identifying key principles about learning and performance that readers can apply to their life goals. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

Julien Sobczak

An immersive look into excellence.

This book is one of the most interesting books about learning. You will discover the path to mastery from the trenches.

The book is mostly written as a memoir, relating the journey of the author to conquer chess and martial art tournaments. Having a basic understanding of these disciplines is preferable to appreciate the content and the subtle lessons. I loved the first part (about chess). I failed to grasp the second one (about the martial art Tai Chi Chuan). The last part puts it all together and is closer to a self-help book.

"The Art of Learning" is more an entertaining reading than a practical book with clear principles and practices to try. You don't need this book if you just want to learn a new skill. But if you want to engage seriously in a discipline, what you will learn in this book is precious and as unique as the author's experience.

Jason Long

Fairly interesting, but the title is very misleading. There's not much about learning, but a ton on mental preparation for elite level competition.

Luke Kanies

Worth reading, but by no means does it describe an art. There's no self-reflection, no understanding of this book in context, and certainly no attempt to make the book applicable to most people. It's primarily worth reading for the opportunity consider how you personally learn.

A glaring question in the whole book, but unanswered, is how the author is able to spend such a large amount of time on things that are clearly unrelated to his occupation, if he has one. Does this relate to an occupation? Does he use it there? It's just weird that it's not even mentioned.

Ashley Flitter

I really wanted to like it. I pushed through the parts that simply seemed like humble bragging and was rewarded with a few good nuggets on building strong learning habits. But overall I was quite disappointed with the lack of specific actions and the overwhelming amount of personal story. I like Waitzkin for many reasons, but this book is not one of them.

Mike Gregory

This was a great book, it really makes you think outside the box. You can tell how much of an avid thinker Josh is by the way he explains everything in detail and with precision. I enjoyed the book and will use the method that is taught in the book so I can snap my focus within minutes to ensure I always perform my best. I look forward to whatever josh Waix

I.m. ruzz

it's unaccountably rare to find someone who can perform at the highest levels of human capacity (mentally or physically) who can articulate much meaningfully about how they do it. You can survey top performers, and many have, and most won't have a concrete framework of thought behind that performance and most of it is intuitive. the underlying principals are essentially a mystery. 

Josh Waitzkin has performed at high levels both mentally (through world class junior chess) and physically (through world class martial arts competition) and has systemized his process and has a very clear understanding of how he's achieved the things he has. 

He does a fairly effective job of communicating this to readers. I say fairly effective because quite honestly some of the conceptual stuff is pretty difficult to translate. How would you go about explaining a highly advanced concept built on the backs of hundreds of other highly advanced concepts to someone at the starting point? 

in much the same way you can read a book one year and get one subset of points from it that resonate with you then read it again the next and get a secondary set despite the content remaining unchanged, so it is with explaining intricate conceptual information. You will come away understanding only the parts you are ready to understand despite the possibility there's a dearth of additional information there. 

on that front, i recommend you read the book and see what you come away with. however, what i think most people will universally come away with is a strong sense that people like Waitzkin are operating on an entirely different plane of experience than most of us. 

the level of attention to detail, discipline, commitment and just plain work is far beyond that of the average person and it seems to catapult them to positions where the difference between first place and third is roughly equal to that of third place and not entering a competition, skill wise. 

all the advanced conceptual stuff aside it's very hard to come away from this book feeling you've been taking anything at all seriously in your entire life. And quite possibly that insight may bring light to a question some of carry about why some people seem to be so much more productive (apparently naturally) than the average. It also challenges the belief some people are just "better" at something than others. 

more likely, some people are more focused and committed. playing the game (whatever game that is) on a level that makes 99% of the population look like dilettantes. this isn't about type 'A' anality and drive, it's about engagement and devotion of the self to some particular thing consistently over long spans of time. 

it's not about working yourself to death in the pursuit of something. or labouring endlessly toward a particular deadline, or goal. it's about an intense fundamental focus on minute but critical parts of process which can elevate one person's performance heads above another. 

Watizkin makes plain, despite a mild stink of self congratulatory biography, that the thing that separates the best from the rest is generally speaking how serious one takes their pursuit and how engaged they are in improvement. 

There's a conception out there that time and experience will trump most everything. Simply enduring and spending large blocks of time specialized in a particular area will separate you from the pack and in some sense this is true. Drawing on my own experience as a programmer I see this at play every day where junior developers make core mistakes because the way the conceptualize problems suffers from a lack of experience. they see the problem wrong from the outset because they've not enough experience with problems in general to unify common structural elements and avoid those problems implicitly. 

I have an edge there through experience. However, the order of difference between the work i do and the work people who are changing the programming world do is dramatic, and those inexperience developers will catch up to me and surpass me in time. It's unlikely either of us will catch up to or surpass those few top programmers because we're playing an entirely different game. 

One topic that never comes up is how Josh is able to devote himself so entirely to his particular goals without concern for money or facing the distractions and constraints of normal existence costs. And it's an important thing to consider, and an important thing to leave out. 

Most of us have obligations that supersede our own focus. many of us are obligated by the constraints of reality to put our focus in a particular place (which may or may not enhance us) whether we want to or not because the consequences of not are felt in very concrete financial terms. 

On the whole, the book was insightful and challenging. In interesting look into the motivations, thought processes and experiences of a top level performer, but i fear much of the book is abstract, and impractical for those of us trying to earn our daily bread while improving our selves. 

if i took nothing else away from the book, I took a subtle understanding of the mental dynamics involved in being a top level performer which i previously had little insight into. Whether I can (or want to) realistically integrate much of that insight into my own life remains unclear. 

The inertia of personality, and habit are great and trying to motivate oneself on rewards that are hard to internalize (but easy to imagine) is slippery ground. Josh had the benefit of beginning living his life in a micro to macro focus from very early on and developed strong habits and techniques as a young chess champion that define his expectations of experience. For those of us with a more normal upbringing and more normal expectation there is the added requirement of throwing off years of habit, experience and perhaps greatest expectation about what a day may contain to qualify as a good day. 

none of this was addressed, and perhaps he didn't need to address it. But these are real problems for people who want to take anything from what he's shared and neglecting them makes the book less vital and less engaged to it's own purpose.

The Art of Learning A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence

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