The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin | Book Summary and PDF

Key points in The Art of Learning PDF summary:

1. Do it for the love of it – The importance of loving the process of doing or learning something
2. Go after the challenges – A key mental trait of great people and how to cultivate it
3. Investment in loss – Why it’s better than investing in winning
4. Understand yourself and use it – How to have the highest level of success for yourself
5. Master the fundamentals – Build on your fundamentals

Why you should read this book:

Read this book if you are in the process of learning something new, undertaking a new endeavor in life, or trying to figure out something.

You will know what makes us learn better and what makes us learn worse or not learn at all. You want to learn as quickly as possible and that’s what you can expect to learn from this book.

About the author:

Josh Waitzkin was a national chess champion at the age of 9. He then moved on from chess to tai chi. Eventually he mastered the latter and became a world champion.

While many might say he’s superhuman and a genius, it’s not the case. He actually spent a lot of time on practice and on learning, which is what this book is all about.

Key Ideas

1) Do it for the love of it

This idea refers to the love of doing or the process.

Whatever you’re trying to learn or master, whether it is rock climbing or playing the guitar or your business, you’ve got to enjoy it. If you don’t enjoy the process of doing it, it’s going to be hard to get good at it.

If you just do it for the sake of glory, you’re not really doing it for the love of the process.

• You will not push your comfort zone.
• You will have a fixed mindset.

This happened after Josh became the national champion in chess. He was pushed to keep winning. As a result, instead of playing the game to enjoy it (which was what he was doing most of the time), he started playing the game just for the glory of it. He was playing just to win.

Eventually, he lost the love of the game. It did not excite him anymore. That was when he had to walk away from chess and find a new passion, which was tai chi.

It’s very important that we love what we’re doing, otherwise it’s going to be tough to learn or to keep doing.

2) Go after the challenges

Expose yourself to challenges, failures, and risks because they can be used to your advantage. As the book by Ryan Holiday, Obstacle is the Way, talks about, the obstacles are your way forward.

Always seek out challenges in order to learn and grow. Don’t run away from them because pushing ourselves and finding the limit of our abilities is the way to move further along our path.

One of the key features of all the great ones in different areas of life, whether in sports or business or art or whatever it is, is mental resilience:

• The ability to handle tough situations, chaos and stress
• The willingness to be pushed beyond the comfort zone
• Being able to stay clear-headed in challenging moments

We need to cultivate this mental clarity under stress.

If you want to excel at something in this world —

• You’ve got to take risks.
• Push your comfort zone.
• Go for the challenges. You cannot shy away from them.

3) Investment in loss

This is one of my favorite ideas in the book, partly because of the paradox of investing in loss.

Investing in loss does not sound very intuitive. Most of us think we need to invest in winning. However, it’s when we invest in loss — i.e., going for things even though we might fail — that we learn the most.

In order to grow, give yourself to the learning process.

• Give up the idea that you have to win all the time
• You don’t have to be a perfect success.

The great ones are always willing to get burned in order to learn and get better. Michael Jordan is a prime example. We know him as one of the greatest players ever, but what we don’t know is that he also missed the most last-minute game-winning shots than anyone else.

Yet we still celebrate him as one of the greatest successes.

• Michael Jordan was investing in his loss.
• He was learning.
• In order to become great, he knew he had to take risks and chances.
• Sometimes he failed miserably. But that’s part of becoming Michael Jordan, and that’s what made him great.

4) Understand yourself and use it

This idea is about being yourself, something I also learned deeply from J. Paul Getty’s book, How to Be Rich.

Here, Josh says the biggest problem is people trying to fit in. The highest level of success comes when we are trying to be ourselves in any given discipline, and we have to convert our passion into success.

One of the ways to get the very best out of yourself is to understand what gets the very best out of yourself by identifying the emotional state that triggers your greatest performances.

• Is it when you’re trying to help someone?
• When you’re being challenged to rise to the occasion?
• Or is it when you have people supporting you and cheering for you?

Whatever it is, find that emotional trigger and be able to tap into it whenever you need it. That will help you get the very best out of yourself.

5) Master the fundamentals

The last key idea, and probably one of the most basic ideas that every sports coach will talk about, is mastering fundamentals and sticking to them.

Depth will beat breadth any given day.

Again, it’s the same idea I learned from J. Paul Getty in his book How to Be Rich. You want to dig an inch wide and a mile deep.

It’s not like the mysterious or flashy techniques that win — it’s the fundamental skills.

Building on our fundamentals is important to be able to learn and become the very best.

Related Readings:

• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
• Make It Stick by Peter Brown
• The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin