The Art of Learning
By: Josh Waitzkin
Josh Waitzkin is a literal genius. He's the subject of the movie, Searching for Bobby Fischer which chronicles his meteoric rise as a childhood chess prodigy.
After winning a ridiculous amount of national titles in chess, Josh applied the same learning techniques to master martial arts and won a world title in the Tai Chi Push Hands. Bringing together philosophy and practicality of learning, he created the bible for those who seek to hone any skill further and better.
I ordered The Art of Learning after repeatedly hearing people I look up to mentioning it over and over again. I think it was Ryan Holiday and Tim Ferriss talking about the book that finally pushed me to purchase it.
Favorite Quotes:
“Initially one or two critical themes will be considered at once, but over time the intuition learns to integrate more and more principles into a sense of flow. Eventually the foundation is so internalized that it is no longer consciously considered, but is lived. This process continuously cycles along as deeper layers of the art are soaked in. ”
“Children who associate success with hard work tend to have a ‘mastery-oriented response’ to challenging situations, while children who see themselves as just plain ‘smart’ or ‘dumb,’ or ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at something, have a ‘learned helplessness orientation.’”
“The key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not to live in a shell of static, safe mediocrity. Usually, growth comes at the expense of previous comfort or safety.”
“We need to put ourselves out there, give it our all, and reap the lesson, win or lose. The fact of the matter is that there will be nothing learned from any challenge in which we don’t try our hardest. Growth comes at the point of resistance. We learn by pushing ourselves and finding what really lies at the outer reaches of our abilities.”
“Musicians, actors, athletes, philosophers, scientists, writers understand that brilliant creations are often born of small errors. Problems set in if the performer has a brittle dependence on the safety of absolute perfection or duplication. ”
“In most everyday life experiences, there seems to be a tangible connection between opposites. Consider how you may not realize how much someone’s companionship means to you until they are gone—heartbreak can give the greatest insight into the value of love. Think about how good a healthy leg feels after an extended time on crutches—sickness is the most potent ambassador for healthy living. Who knows water like a man dying of thirst? The human mind defines things in relation to one another—without light the notion of darkness would be unintelligible.”
“We must take responsibility for ourselves, and not expect the rest of the world to understand what it takes to become the best that we can become. Great ones are willing to get burned time and time again as they sharpen their swords in the fire.”
“If I want to be the best, I have to take risks others would avoid, always optimizing the learning potential of the moment and turning adversity to my advantage. ”
“The secret is that everything is always on the line. The more present we are at practice, the more present we will be in competition, in the boardroom, at the exam, the operating table, the big stage. If we have any hope of attaining excellence, let alone showing what we’ve got under pressure, we have to be prepared for a lifestyle of reinforcement. Presence must be like breathing.”
“We don’t live within a Hollywood screenplay where the crescendo erupts just when we want it to, and more often than not the climactic moments in our lives will follow many unclimactic normal, humdrum hours, days, weeks, or years. So how do we step up when our moment suddenly arises?
My answer is to define the question Not only do we have to be good at waiting, we have to love it. Because waiting is not waiting, it is life. Too many of us live without fully engaging our minds, waiting for that moment when our real lives begin Years pass in boredom, but that is okay becuase when our true love comes around, or we discover our real calling, we will begin. Of course the sad truth is that if we are not present to the moment, our true love could come and go and we wouldn’t even notice. And we will have become someone other than the you or I who would be able to embrace it. I believe an appreciation for simplicity, the everyday—the ability to dive deeply into the banal and discover life’s hidden richness—is where success, let alone happiness, emerges. ”
For more details, reviews, or to purchase:
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years
By: Donald Miller
I love this book — it’s one I almost wish I'd wrote myself. The idea is simple: If we live good stories, we live good lives.
Donald Miller beautifully chronicles his transition from writing good stories to actually living good stories and the profound effect it has on his life. Perhaps I love this book so much because I had a remarkably similar revelation while pedaling a bicycle across the United States myself. I've never found a message to ring truer to me and be so effective in improving one's life.
Favorite Quotes:
“The truth is, if what we choose to do with our lives won’t make a story meaningful, it won’t make a life meaningful either.”
“Robert McKee says humans naturally seek comfort and stability. Without an inciting incident that disrupts their comfort, they won’t enter into a story. They have to get fired from their job or be forced to sign up for a marathon. A ring has to be purchased. A home has to be sold. The character has to jump into the story, into the discomfort and fear, otherwise the story will never happen.”
“It’s true that ambition creates fear, it also creates the story. But it’s a good trade, because as soon as you point toward a horizon, life no longer feels meaningless. And suddenly there is risk in your story and a question about whether you’ll make it. You have a reason to get out of bed in the morning. I’d be lying if I said it was all fun. I’d definitely lost a few hours of sleep imagining myself collapsing on the Inca Trail, but it beat eating ice cream and watching television. I was doing something in real life. I’d stood up and pointed towards a horizon, and now I had to move, whether I wanted to or not.”
““Why would the Incas make people take the long route?” my friend from Alabama asked.
“Because the emperor knew,” Carlos said, “the more painful the journey to Machu Picchu, the more the traveler would appreciate the city once he got there.””
“That’s the thing you realize when you organize your life into the structure of a story. You’ll get a taste for one story and then want another, and then another, and the stories will build until your living a kind of epic risk and reward, the whole thing will be molding you into the actual character who’s roles you’ve been playing. And once you have a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can’t go back to being normal; you can’t go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time. The more practice stories I lived, the more I wanted an epic to climb inside of and see through til it’s end.”
“It’s like this with every crossing, and with every story too. You paddle until you no longer believe you can go any further. And then suddenly, well after you thought it would happen, the other shore starts to grow, and it grows fast. The trees get taller and you can make out the crags in the cliffs, and then the shore reaches out to you, to welcome you home, almost pulling your boat into the sand.”
“I realized how much of our lives are spent trying to avoid conflict. Half the commercials on television are selling us something that will make life easier. Part of me wonders if our stories aren’t being stolen by the easy life.”
“But it’s like I said before about writers not really wanting to write. We have to force ourselves to create these scenes. We have to get up off the couch and turn the television off, we have to blow up the inner tubes and head to the river. We have to write the poem and deliver it in person. We have to pull the car off the road and hike to the top of the hill. We have to put on our suits, we have to dance at weddings. We have to make alters.”
“I took a lot of comfort in that principle. It wasn’t necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.”
“Bob and Maria couldn’t afford a boat and a house, so they bought the land, put a port-a-potty on it, and lived in a tent for two years, so they could afford to have a boat. It was one of the happiest times of their lives, Bob said.”