Page 136 - The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin_Neat plip book

horizontal files running 1–8, up from whi te’s perspect ive. After each move, a
chess player will write down, for exampl e, Bg4 or Qh5, meani ng Bisho p moves

to g4 or Queen moves to h5. Usually no tation is kep t on a sheet with a carbo n
copy beneath, which allows public and pr ivate records of all ches s ga mes to be
saved. For a number of years, when no tating my gam es, I had also written
down how long I thought on each move. Thi s had the pur po se of he lpi ng me

manage my time usage, but after my first session with Dave, it also led to the
discovery of a very interesting pattern. Lo oki ng back over my gam es, I saw tha t
when I had been playing well, I had two- to ten-minut e, crisp thi nks . Whe n I
was off my game, I would sometimes fall into a deep calculation that lasted

over twenty minutes and this “long thi nk” often led to an inaccu racy. Wha t is
more, if I had a number of long thi nks in a row, the qual ity of my de cisions
tended to deteriorate.
The next morning, Striegel and Loehr told me about thei r concept of Stress

and Recovery. The physiologists at LGE had di scovered that in virtual ly every
discipline, one of the most telling featur es of a dominan t performer is the
routine use of recovery periods. Players who are abl e to relax in br ief moment s
of inactivity are almost always the ones who end up coming thr ough whe n the

game is on the line. This is why the eminen t tenni s pl ayers of thei r da y, suc h as
Ivan Lendl and Pete Sampras, had tho se strangel y pr edictable rout ine s of
serenely picking their rackets between po int s, whet her they won or lost the last
exchange, while their rivals fumed at a bad call or pum ped a fist in excitement .

Consider Tiger Woods, strolling to his next sho t, with a relaxed focus in hi s
eyes. Remember Michael Jordan sitting on the ben ch, a towel on his sho ul de rs,
letting it all go for a two-minut e break bef ore coming back in the ga me?
Jordan was completely serene on the ben ch even tho ugh the Bul ls de spe rately

needed him on the court. He had the fastest recovery time of any athl ete I’ve
ever seen. Jim Harbaugh told me about the fi st time he no ticed thi s pa ttern in
himself. He’s a passionate guy, and liked to root on his defens e whe n the y were
on the field. But after his first sessions at LGE he no ticed a clear impr ovement

in his play if he sat on the bench, relaxed, and didn’t even watch the othe r
team’s offensive series. The more he coul d let thi ngs go, the shar pe r he was in
the next drive.
The notion that I didn’t have to ho ld myself in a state of feverish

concentration every second of a ches s game was a huge liberation. The most
immediate change I made was my way of han dl ing chess gam es whe n it was