Josh Waitzkin first made his name as a chess prodigy — he hates the term — before moving on to competitive t’ai chi, where he won the world championships, and now Brazilian jiu-jitsu, where he hopes to compete at that same high level.
He believes that many of the same habits that led to his chess success carry over into other endeavors, and he wrote a book, The Art of Learning, that explores those commonalities.
Under the gimmicky title of 7 Habits Essential for Tackling the Multitasking Virus, he enumerates his core ideas — which I’ve edited down slightly:
1. Do what you love. Once you see that spark of inspiration in your child’s eyes, encourage her to dive in. If we dig deeply into something, anything, at a young age, and we touch Quality, then that scent of Quality will be a beacon for us for the rest of our lives. We will know what it feels like. And we will know what it is like to love learning.
2. Do it in a way you love and connect to. This issue is very personal to me, as it precipitated the crisis that ended my chess career. I lost a life’s work because I did not listen to my gut, and it took me many years and a new discipline to return to my roots. We must be true to ourselves to thrive.
3. Give people a choice and they become engaged. My mom told me a beautiful story a few nights ago. She learned to play chess from me and for the past fifteen years has run chess programs in schools in New York City and New Jersey. She’s the greatest teacher and mother I could ever dream of. In one of her kindergarten classes there is a little boy named Evan who drives all his teachers crazy. No matter what they are doing, he always wants to read a book. His school life has become defined by teachers taking books out of his hands, telling him to sit down and listen with the rest of the kids. This is unfortunately a typical response to an unusual mind.
So in my mom’s first few chess classes with Evan, she would be teaching a lesson on a demonstration board, or everyone would be playing chess games, and Evan would walk to the bookshelf, pick up a book, sit down and start reading. My mom’s solution: she smiled and gave Evan a chess book that covered similar material to what she was teaching. He immediately put down his other book, opened his eyes wide and started reading the chess book. The wonderful thing about the story is that after a few classes in which my mom embraced his mind and gave him a chess book to read, Evan started putting down the chess book and listening to her lessons. Then he started playing chess with the other kids instead of isolating himself. The next somewhat surprising step is that some other kids started asking for chess books too. The visual learners started to creep out of the woodwork, and the whole class now thrives because a teacher was willing to listen to them.
4. Release a fear of failure. We’ve all heard the “I wasn’t trying” excuse. That is protecting the ego. And disengaging from any one thing by skipping along the surface of everything is another version of not trying. Many kids, by the way, have told me their attraction to video games is an escape from the pressures of the real world. They are safe from failing in that virtual reality. If we can relieve the fear of failure, then engagement will become a less terrifying experience.
Fortunately, this is not so difficult. Parents and teachers simply need to transition from result-oriented to process-oriented feedback. Tell a child you are proud of the work done instead of praising the result. Help them internalize what developmental psychologists call an incremental theory of intelligence — a perspective that associates the road to mastery with effort and overcoming adversity. The alternative, a fixed or entity theory associates success with an ingrained level of ability in a particular trait — thus the language “I’m smart at math.” This is a much more brittle approach because it does not embrace imperfection. Most valuable lessons come from learning from our errors, and if we associate messing up with being “dumb” then we can become paralyzed by a fear of failure. Think about it this way — if a well-intentioned parent tells a child that she is a winner, and that child associates success with being a winner, what happens when she inevitably loses? The winner becomes a loser. The developmental psychologist Carol Dweck has done very important research and writing in this field, and I have explored the dynamic in the context of my life in The Art of Learning.
5. Build positive routines. Cultivating new habits is the best way to get rid of bad ones. So if you are trying to get your child to stop playing video games, then I would suggest replacing the activity with something else that he or she loves to do but that is healthy — for example go outside and have a catch, read a book together, or go to a dance class during video game hours. Do this for 5 or 6 days in a row and the craving for reading or exercise will replace the craving for Nintendo.
6. Do one thing at a time. If we are tackling multi-tasking, we can replace the habit of doing 6 things at once with the routine of doing one thing at a time. Skipping along the surface will get us nowhere, and if we cultivate the muscle of digging deep, then it will grow. Not only will single-tasking increase effectiveness, but it will also open up our creativity in the learning process. We’ll start making connections we never dreamed of, because we’ll be touching the principles that operate everywhere.
Let’s take the martial arts as an example — most people want to start off by learning ten or fifteen fancy techniques that they’ve seen in movies or watched the advanced students apply. This will lead to years of wasted time and hollow learning. The more powerful approach is to spend days, weeks, even months on one relatively simple technique. What happens then is quite beautiful. You start to get a sense for what it feels like to do something well with your body. Your mechanics become unobstructed, you experience a smooth fluidity, you focus on subtle ripples of sensation. Once you reach this point of full body flow, you can turn your attention to other techniques and you will very quickly internalize them at a high level, because you know what Quality feels like — or in less abstract language, you have internalized axioms that govern all techniques. This same process applies to chess. Learn a principle deeply, and it will manifest everywhere. Whatever we are cultivating, depth beats breadth any day of the week.
7. Take Breaks. There is no way we can focus intensely on something for many hours in a row without burning out. The human mind thrives in an oscillatory rhythm. We need to pulse between stress and recovery in order to think creatively over long periods of time. I learned this lesson in my chess career, trying to concentrate feverishly in world-class tournaments 8 hours a day for two weeks straight. After starting to train with the performance psychologists at the Human Performance Institute, I noticed that after an intense 13 minutes of thinking in a chess game, the quality of my process deteriorated slightly. So I started taking little breaks between chess moves or whenever my energy flagged — if extremely tired, I’d wash my face with cold water or even go outside and sprint 50 yards, which would flush my physiology and leave me energized. My endurance and creativity soared. A nap is a beautiful thing to fill up the tank. So is a quick 30 minute workout. A great way to improve mental recovery is with physical interval training. Have you or your child’s physical exercise follow the rhythm of stress and recovery, and your ability to take breaks and recover from mental strain will also improve dramatically.