Page 133 - The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin_Neat plip book

When I started competing in adul t tour nam ents, my amped -up energy and
focus sometimes worked against me. If you recall the chap ter The Soft Zone, I

began having problems with music or other di stractions that go t stuc k in my
mind. Initially I tried to push the world away from me, keep everythi ng silent ,
but this just amplified the noise. A rando m song, whi sper ing spe ctators,
distant sirens, ticking chess clocks, woul d take over my brain unt il che ss

became almost impossible to play. Then I had the breakt hr ough to thi nk to the
beat of the song, embrace distraction, and fi an inner focus tha t coul d exist
no matter what the external environm ent. Fo r years I trained myself to de al
with bad conditions, u se them to my advantage.

It turns out that the next movement of my life woul d put thi s traini ng to
the test on a much larger scale. When I was fifteen years old, Searching for Bobby
Fischer was released and my life went Hollywood. Sudden ly I was in the medi a
spotlight and the struggles of the chess world were compo unde d by extra

pressures on my shoulders. When I pl ayed tour nam ents, fans were all over me,
cameras followed me around, other players seethed with jealous y. If I ha d be en
more mature, I might have been able to translate my yout hf ul exper iences with
music to this larger form of distraction. But I was off-bal ance and onc e aga in

resorted to using my will to block everythi ng out . Ins tead of rolling with the
new vibe of my life, I handled the pressur es by put ting huge amount s of ene rgy
into each chess game.
I recall two moments in particular when I became a man possessed. One

game was a critical matchup in the U.S. Juni or Cham pi ons hi p aga ins t the
gifted Romanian émigré, Grandmaster Gabriel Schwartzman. The othe r was in
the U.S. Championship in 1994, when I squar ed off agai nst my traine r at the
time, Grandmaster Gregory Kaidan ov. In both games, the stakes were hi gh,

both professionally and emotionally. I was all bus ines s, and my int ens ity was a
little wild. Both four-hour struggles passed in a blink. Nothi ng else existed for
me. At one point during our matchup, whi le I was staring lasers at the bo ard,
working my way through the position, Schwartzman walked over to my fathe r,

who was in the audience, and told hi m that he had nev er seen me like thi s—he
said my concentration was so fierce it was scary sitting across from me. Aga ins t
Kaidanov, I felt like a tiger in a cage, seethi ng with raw ener gy. I won bo th
those games, and played some of my most inspi red ches s, but wha t is

interesting is that afterward I was pr ofoundl y dep leted and in bo th cases my