The Art of Learning

Waitzkin was a chess prodigy, the subject of the film Searching for Bobby Fischer, and later won world championships in tai chi push hands. The book examines what transferred between two apparently unrelated disciplines and argues that the transferable element is the process of learning rather than any content.

His central technical concepts include making smaller circles, meaning taking a single technique and refining it inward until it becomes internalised and can be executed with minimal movement; investment in loss, meaning deliberately accepting defeat during training in order to learn, which requires giving up short-term results; and numbers to leave numbers, meaning that explicit rules are learned thoroughly and then discarded as the understanding becomes intuitive.

He also covers the entity and incremental theories of intelligence, which map onto Dweck's fixed and growth mindsets and which Waitzkin encountered as a child prodigy praised for talent; the soft zone, meaning the ability to remain focused amid disruption rather than requiring ideal conditions; building trigger routines that reliably produce a performance state; and the management of physical and emotional state as a component of intellectual performance.

The chapters on his own failures, including the period after the film when he could not play chess without the weight of his public identity, are the most honest. The evidence is entirely personal. Waitzkin generalises from two disciplines and from his own unusual capability, which limits how much a reader can conclude. The specific techniques, particularly investment in loss and making smaller circles, are stated concretely enough to apply to any skill acquired over years.