Page 90 - The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin_Neat plip book

CHAPTER 11

MAKING SMALLER CIRCLES

My search for the essential principles lying at the hearts of and conne cting

chess, the martial arts, and in a broader sense the learni ng process, was ins pi red
to a certain extent by Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
I’ll never forget a scene that woul d gui de my appr oach to learni ng for years to
come. The protagonist of Pirsig’s story, a brilliant if eccent ric man na med

Phaedrus, is teaching a rhetoric studen t who is all jammed up whe n gi ven the
assignment to write a five-hundred- word story about her town. She can’t write
a word. The town seems so small, so inci dental—what coul d po ssibl y be
interesting enough to write about? Phaedr us liber ates the girl from he r writer’s

block by changing the assignment. He asks her to write about the front of the
opera house outside her classroom on a small street in a small nei ghbo rho od of
that same dull town. She should beg in with the upper -left hand brick. At fi st
the student is incredulous, but then a torrent of creativity unl eashe s and she

can’t stop writing. T he next day she co mes to class with t wenty ins pi red pa ge s.
I believe this little anecdote has the potential to di stingui sh suc cess from
failure in the pursuit of excellence. The theme is depth over breadth. The
learning principle is to plunge into the detailed mystery of the micro in orde r

to understand what makes the macro tick. Our obs tacle is that we live in an
attention-deficit culture. We are bo mbar ded with more and more inf ormation
on television, radio, cell phones, video gam es, the Int ernet . The cons tant
supply of stimulus has the potential to tur n us into addi cts, always hunge ring

for something new and prefabricated to keep us entertained. Whe n no thi ng
exciting is going on, we might get bored, distracted, separated from the
moment. So we look for new entertainment, sur f channel s, fl p thr ough
magazines. If caught in these rhythm s, we are like tiny current-bo und sur face