Page 50 - The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin_Neat plip book

tournaments, my games tended to last longer, sometimes going on for six or
eight hours. Kids have trouble focusing for so long and strange thi ngs can

happen to a young mind straini ng under intense pr essur e. One da y I was
working my way through a compl ex position in a tour nam ent at the
Manhattan Chess Club, and a Bon Jovi song I had hear d earlier in the da y
entered my mind. I tried to push it away and retur n to my calculation, but it

just wouldn’t leave me alone. At first thi s seemed funny, but soon the mus ic
eclipsed the chess game. I couldn’t thi nk, an d en ded up bl under ing a nd l osing.
Soon enough, this problem became rampan t in my ches s life. If I he ard a
particularly catchy tune at home or on the way to a tour nam ent , I woul d

sometimes be haunted by it for day s. Thi s might sound trivial, but for me it
was disastrous—there I’d be, eleven years old, facing down a wily old che ss
master, and the theme song from Ghostbusters would be hammering away in my
brain. The more I tried to block out the di straction, the louder it woul d ge t in

my head. As a young boy I felt alone with this probl em, but in recent years
while lecturing on performance ps ychology, I have found that many hi gh- stress
performers have similar symptoms.
Over time, as I became more and more fi ated on irritating mental mus ic, I

started being bothered by noises I had nev er even no ticed bef ore. In a silent
playing hall, the sound of a distant ambul ance or whi sper ing spect ators can be
an uproar. A ticking chess clock can be a telltale hear t, po undi ng like thunde r
in your mind. I was having terribl e and hilarious noise pr obl ems, and the n one

day I had a breakthrough. I was playing a tour nam ent in Phi ladelphi a with a
Phil Collins song rattling away in my brain when I realized that I coul d thi nk
to the beat of the song. My chess calculations beg an to move to the rhy thm of
the music, and I played an inspired game. After thi s moment, I took the bul l

by the horns and began training to hav e a more resilient conc ent ration. I
realized that in top-rank competition I coul dn’t count on the world be ing
silent, s o my only option was to become at peace w ith t he n oise.
The victims of my training method were my par ents and sister. A few times

a week, while studying chess in my bedroom, I blasted mus ic. Sometimes it
was music I liked, sometimes music I didn’t like. Fo r a period of many mont hs
I blared booming Gyuto monk chan ts, whi ch drove my sister, Katya, to ut ter
distraction. My family’s little apartment was bes ieged by my bi zarre traini ng

concept, and it’s amazing they put up with me. My idea was to become at pe ace
with distraction, whatever it was. Dur ing thi s per iod of time, in my early