Episode #45 Josh Waitzkin: The Art of Learning & Living Life

January 27, 2025 09:00:00

In this episode, my guest is Josh Waitzkin, former child chess prodigy and the subject of the movie and true story Searching for Bobby Fischer. Josh is also a world champion martial arts competitor...

Recommendations

  • Daily Rituals

    book

    One of the best things about Daily Rituals is how few patterns there are through them. It's just.

  • Searching for Bobby Fischer

    movie

    His early life achievements were the topic and focus of the book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer.

  • Searching for Bobby Fischer

    book

    His early life achievements were the topic and focus of the book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer.

  • The Art of Learning

    book

    And I read The Art of Learning.

  • Searching for Bobby Fischer

    book

    So when I was 11 the book Searching for Bobby Fischer came out and then when I was 15 the movie came out.

  • Searching for Bobby Fischer

    movie

    So when I was 11 the book Searching for Bobby Fischer came out and then when I was 15 the movie came out.

  • The Art of Learning

    book

    Then it became the HBI later on. and I'll never forget the moment that I was, I was working with these performance psychologists, and I was, and I was at the gym and I was working with nutritionist, and I was on, I was doing this intense workout. And I looked next to me and there was Jim Harbaugh, who's the head coach at the time of, who was the, um, quarterback at the time of, of the Colts, NFL team. and we got into this amazing dialogue about performance. And it was a real eye opening moment for me, because I realized that we spoke the same language. It's like, holy shit, this guy's a, he's an NFL quarterback and I'm this crazy chess player, but we're doing the same thing. And it was this crystallization moment where I realized that all of these arts are fundamentally connected at the highest levels. And what we're doing is much more similar. Like if you're at the, like I observed that people who are at the pinnacles of different arts, are often doing things that are much more similar than people who are in the same art from them, but at lower levels. There's something in that qualitative experience. And then, then I began studying the principles that connected these things. And then, then I had this interesting experience, I'm going to, I'm kind of compressing a life into a minute or two, but I, um, in my early 20s, when I move, I, I ultimately moved away from chess, and I'm happy to talk about why and that journey, and then I, I moved into the martial arts. The, my study of East Asian philosophy moved me into the study of Daoism and Tai Chi, and then into the, into, into, um, Tai Chi push hands, and I had this really interesting experience where, at that point, I'd been the introspective process of studying chess, had become much more about studying life. And so I was dis, I was, I was in my next exploration of interconnectedness, but I was, I was not playing chess anymore, and I was all in on the martial arts, but I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition, which I did every year for many years, for Dashen Mosulea District for You Research. And I was playing 50 chess games at once, and I was walking around this, this big square, playing against 50, you know, young up and coming strong players at the same time, and I realized at one point, like I wasn't playing chess. I was moving chess pieces, but I was thinking in Tai Chi language. I was, you know, feeling flow, feeling space left behind, riding energetic waves of the game, and it was like, so I was winning all these chess games, but I hadn't played chess in a long time, and I wasn't playing chess. And, and, and it became like, and then my study of Tai Chi became extremely accelerated, and then I started winning, competing, and then I won in the fighting application, and I started winning national championships. And then, and then I became to think about, like, like, or become more and more deeply involved in the study and the exploration of thematic interconnectedness, which has really become a life's work. Um, and then my martial arts life ended up ending, you know, had taken me all over the world, and I won some world championships, and then I moved into Brazilian Jujitsu, and, um, trained in that art for many years, and, um, was training for the world championship for Brazilian Jujitsu. is after winning, um, worlds in the, in the Tai Chi Chuan, and I broke my back in a, in a training camp. I own a school with Marcelo Garcia, who's a dear friend, who's nine time world champion, perhaps the greatest grappler pound for pound to ever live. And I was training at a really high level and I, um, and I was thinking about this, I was getting ready to run, begin my surge toward Black Belt World Championships in Jujitsu, and I ruptured my L4-05 disc. And, um, and it was the first time I'd been moved away from an art, not on my own terms. And it was a, um, it was a, you know, brutal injury, then I ended up, as we do and we're madmen, you know, coming back and training for a year and a half with the broken, the busted up back, and then the doctors told me I had to, I had to let this one go, um, or I'd be crippled for life. And around that period is where I started to go all in on the art of training others, and I said, okay, if I can't be all in training as a competitor as an athlete myself, I, I'd been training, I'd been training elite competitors in mental and physical performance for some time then, but I wanted to take on the challenge of loving training others with the same intensity that I loved training myself. And I, I, I went all in on, on that art, and I'm still all in on that art, but I never actually got to the place where I love not being in the arena myself, as much as being in the arena myself. And, and then in this chapter of my life now, I, I, I've fallen in love with the ocean arts, initially surfing, and now foiling, and for the last, um, eight years I've been living in the jungles of Costa Rica with my family. Um, and I trained three to five hours a day, uh, in foiling, and so I've, I'm in my, my, you know, really intense training lifestyle myself, and, and I train elite mental and physical competitors around the world in, um, in, in finance, in, science, technology, and in sports, I've been doing some amazing work with the Boston Celtics for the last few years. Um, and so that's journey in a nutshell. Happy to dig into any of it.

  • Lessons of History

    book

    it and some of are downright dangerous we published the audio book of it, right? And I think I I think I told Tim, he'll remind me, I think I might have I think I told Tim about that book a lot like many many years ago, and he did the audio book. and it's so good. It's so good. But what and it just follows the daily routine, it it breaks down the daily routine. It's like two to three to four page chapters on like a 100 some brilliant artists and scientists and creators and they're just so random. How they're all are so weird or out partying all night, drugs, alcohol, caffeine, others are super regimented and monk like. It's the range of daily architectures is is so vast. So I think we need to have like that awareness and that sense of humor and humility about it, and we can get systematic and structured at the same time. I think it's important to hold both of those. I mean, what you just asked, I I do believe that that that beautiful period when we first wake up and that dream state is so powerful. And I think that people almost, almost all people immediately pick up their phone and start checking messages, which just shuts down one's awareness of what's been happening beneath the surface all night. So I think that that's a real lost opportunity. I remember year when I was 11 years old, I read this, my dad actually gave me this, this Hemingway, um, essay on his creative process. And there's one of my favorite, one of the most sometimes there's like an insanely potent book that's put together and it's, two, two that come to mind are Lessons of History, which is this short compilation of Will and Ariel Durant, um, two of the greatest historians who've published tens of thousands of pages. This, it's this short compilation of, of a handful of thematic essays. It's only like a 100 pages of, of all their life's work boiled down to a few themes. It's unbelievably potent.

  • Hemingway on Writing

    book

    I remember year when I was 11 years old, I read this, my dad actually gave me this, this Hemingway, um, essay on his creative process. And there's one of my favorite, one of the most sometimes there's like an insanely potent book that's put together and it's, two, two that come to mind are Lessons of History, which is this short compilation of Will and Ariel Durant, um, two of the greatest historians who've published tens of thousands of pages. This, it's this short compilation of, of a handful of thematic essays. It's only like a 100 pages of, of all their life's work boiled down to a few themes. It's unbelievably potent. And Hemingway on Writing is another book of that nature, which takes all of Hemingway's from, from his, from his books, from his letters, private letters, from his articles and essays, and notebooks, like everything he's written about the creative process, and boils it into this like short book on his principles of creativity. Just unbelievable. But before that book came out, I read this piece, this short thing he'd written about the creative process, which was essentially he'd always leave a sentence unwritten. He'd end his workday with a sentence, like half written. So leaving with a sense of direction. And then he would let it go. You know, he would go out drinking, he would do all the things that Hemingway did, and then he would return to it first thing in the morning, and that like unwritten sentence would become a paragraph in a page in his mind, and it would be a way to hit the ground running. And that's what really spurred me to start creating this process in my chess life of always ending my chess study with something left, like posing my unconscious a question, like studying the complexity and then releasing it, which later became, and then tapping into it first thing in the morning, pre-input, which later became my MIQ process and then I developed team wide MIQ processes of the teams that I work with all have versions of the MIQ that they utilize as individuals, but then as teams, and it's an amazing way to develop a shared consciousness in a team. To have everybody be able to tap into the question that's top of mind for every member of their team, or for a leader to be able to be aware of what is the most important question for every one of my scientists or my analysts or anything. It's a really powerful way to cultivate shared consciousness and it becomes our game tape, because if we have an, if we're tracking our MIQs, let's say I'm studying something for three weeks or for four weeks. Um, and what do I think is most, if I'm tracking the questions that I think are most critical for that thing, and I'm deepening my analysis of it, what I'll arrive at, what I think in day one, will be very different from the MIQ in day 14, and then we can study the gap, and then we can start to the patterns of the gap, the gaps, and this is what I call MIQ gap analysis. So if I'm setting a chess position, like if I play a chess game against you and it's incredibly complex, um, and I don't quite understand this position, and then I do a deep, deep analysis of it, what I'll arrive at after 14 or 16 or 18 hours of study, will be different from what I felt during the game. Now, what's interesting is, this is a cool thing about chess study. If we, if my understanding was here during the chess game, after like a few hours, I might be like really far away from that. But after I've completed this study, I'll usually be like very similar but deeper. So it's often, like deeper, like closer than where you were after a few hours of study, but it's like a deeper level in. But what's the gap between that and that between where I was in the game, and what are the patterns in the gaps? And then if you think about those patterns in the gaps for, through those lenses of the technical, the thematic, and the psychological, right? We deconstruct it in that way. Then that becomes our game tape, right? One of the hardest things for mental athletes is to actually have game tape the way basketball players do, or foilers do, or fighters do. Where you can see the actual game tape. We need to create our mental game tape. So this is a way that I, it both enhances the creative process and creates the game tape for the training process. And then studying the, the gap analysis we do, reveals what we need to do, to do, to focus our deliberate practice on.

  • Team of Teams

    book

    And a dear friend, um, Chris Fussel, who is a brilliant man who, um, he wrote Team of Teams and one Mission. He was a elite Navy Seal and then he ended up running Joint Special Operations command, JSOC with Stan McCrystal, then he was president of the McCrystal Group and now he's president of Lyla Science. um, Jeff, Chris and I and a brilliant man named Jack Millwood, who's the Chief cultural officer have been teaming up and I brought, I brought together this tribe of a few different brilliant friends, um, who were part of this.