Page 167 - The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin_Neat plip book

competitive repertoire that was uni quel y my own. Immediately after coming
home to New York City, m y work beg an.

The first couple months of training after the Worlds were mostly ment al.
For one thing, I had to let my body heal . My sho ul der was a mess and it ne ede d
some time before it could take full-tilt impact . So I studi ed tapes, br oke do wn
the technical repertoires of Chen Ze-Chen g and the other top Taiwane se

players. Watching hours of footage frame by frame I picked up on in tely
subtle setups and plays with footwork that really open ed my eyes to wha t I was
up against. The difference between num ber s 3 and 1 is mount ainous . I woul d
have to become a whole other kind o f athl ete. S tep by step.

By mid January I was back on the mats do ing soft training tha t di dn’t
aggravate the injury but kept my body fl d. I worked on some new techni cal
ideas, integrated the movement s int o my arsenal by do ing slow-motion
repetitions. By March I could mix it up at ful l speed witho ut worrying abo ut

my shoulder, but I still wasn’t playing compet itively so much as worki ng on
the ideas I described in the chapters Making Smaller Circles, Slowing Down Time,
and The Illusion of the Mystical. I was still in the “research and dev elopm ent”
stage.

I have talked about style, personal taste, bei ng true to your na tur al
disposition. This theme is critical at all stages of the learni ng pr ocess. If you
think about the high-end learning princi ples that I have di scussed in thi s bo ok,
they all spring out of the deep, creative pl unge int o an initially small po ol of

information. In the early chapters, I described the impo rtance of a che ss pl ayer
laying a solid foundation by studying po sitions of reduced compl exity (endgame
before opening). Then we apply the internalized pr inci ples to incr easingl y
complex scenarios. In Making Smaller Circles we take a single technique or idea

and practice it until we feel its essence. Then we gr adual ly conde ns e the
movements while maintaining their power, unt il we are left with an extremely
potent and nearly invisible arsenal. In Slowing Down Time, we again focus on a
select group of techniques and int ernal ize them unt il the mind pe rceives the m

in tremendous detail. After training in thi s manner, we can see more frames in
an equal amount of time, so things feel slowed do wn. In The Illusion of the
Mystical, we use our cultivation of the last two princi ples to cont rol the
intention of the opponent—and agai n, we do thi s by zooming in on very small

details to which others are completely obl ivious .