Josh Waitzkin (JOSHWAITZKIN.COM) was the basis for the book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. Considered a chess prodigy, he has perfected learning strategies that can be applied to anything, including his other loves of Brazilian jiu-jitsu (he’s a black belt under phenom Marcelo Garcia) and tai chi push hands (he’s a world champion). These days, he spends his time coaching the world’s top athletes and investors, working to revolutionize education, and tackling his new passion of paddle surfing, often nearly killing me in the process. I first met Josh after reading his book, The Art of Learning, and we’ve become dear friends.
Spirit animal: Gorilla
Josh has no social media, does no interviews (except my podcast, for which he often says to me, “You fuck!”), and avoids nearly all meetings and phone calls. He minimizes input to maximize output, much like Rick Rubin. Josh says: “I cultivate empty space as a way of life for the creative process.”
Josh focuses on depth over breadth. He often uses a principle nicknamed “learning the macro from the micro.” This means focusing on something very small in a field (whether chess, martial arts, or elsewhere) to internalize extremely powerful macro principles that apply everywhere. This is sometimes combined with “beginning with the endgame.” For instance, when Josh gave me a beginner’s tutorial on chess, he didn’t start with opening moves. Memorizing openings is natural, and nearly everyone does it, but Josh likens it to stealing the test answers from a teacher. You’re not learning principles or strategies—you’re merely learning a few tricks that will help you beat your novice friends. Instead, Josh took me in reverse, just as his first teacher, Bruce Pandolfini, did with him. The board was empty, except for three pieces in an endgame scenario: king and pawn against king. Through the micro, positions of reduced complexity, he was able to focus me on the macro: principles like the power of empty space, opposition, and setting an opponent up for zugzwang (a situation where any move he makes will destroy his position). By limiting me to a few simple pieces, he hoped I would learn something limitless: high-level concepts I could apply anytime against anyone. I’ve seen him apply this to many things, including teaching jiu-jitsu, where he can cover nearly all of the principles of jiu-jitsu by focusing on a single submission (endgame) called the “guillotine” (specifically “Marcelotine”).
Josh and I spend a lot of time discussing Marcelo Garcia, 5-time world champion in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, with whom Josh owns the Marcelo Garcia Academy in New York City. Marcelo is arguably the best grappler of the last 100 years, the combined Mike Tyson, Wayne Gretzky, and Michael Jordan of his sport. Whereas most competitors are secretive about their competition prep, Marcelo routinely records and uploads his sparring sessions, his exact training for major events. Josh explains the rationale:
“[Marcelo] was visually showing these competitors what he was about to use against them at 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 4 weeks [away from competition], and his attitude about this was just completely unique: ‘If you’re studying my game, you’re entering my game, and I’ll be better at it than you.’”
TF: I often share exact under-the-hood details of how I’ve built the podcast, put together Kickstarter campaigns, etc. I do this because of two core beliefs. Belief #1—It’s rarely a zero-sum game (if someone wins, someone else must lose), and the more I help people with details, the more detailed help I receive. Belief #2—If it is competitive, I’m simply offering people the details of my game. My attention to detail will scare off half of the people who would have tried; 40% will try it and be worse than me; 10% will try it and be better than me, but … see Belief #1. That 10% will often reach out to teach me what they’ve learned, as they’re grateful for my own transparency.
“I remember when I went skiing with Billy Kidd, who is one of the great Olympic downhill racers from back in the 1960s. He’s an awesome dude. Now he skis out in Colorado wearing a cowboy hat … and he [asked] me years ago when I first skied with him, ‘Josh, what do you think are the three most important turns of the ski run?’ I’ve asked that question to a lot of people since.
“Most people will say ‘the middle because it’s the hardest’ or ‘the beginning because of momentum,’ but he describes the three most important turns of a ski run as the last three before you get on the lift. It’s a very subtle point. For those of you who are skiers, that’s when the slope is leveled off, there’s less challenge. Most people are very sloppy then … they have bad form. The problem is that on the lift ride up, unconsciously, you’re internalizing bad body mechanics.
“As Billy points out, if your last three turns are precise, then what you’re internalizing on the lift ride up is precision. So I carry this on to the guys who I train in the finance world, for example: ending the work day with very high quality, which for one thing means you’re internalizing quality overnight.”
TF: Thanks to Josh, I now always end training sessions on a good “rep,” whether AcroYoga, gymnastics, archery, or other. For instance, even if I have 60 minutes budgeted for a workout, if I hit a fantastic “PR” (personal record) at 45 minutes, or do something new well, I pack it in. In the case of archery, I also use “blank bale” practice, where I start and end all sessions with 5 to 6 arrows shot by feel alone, eyes closed, into a target that is a mere 10 feet away. This is similar to “dry firing” with firearms. One of Josh’s favorite writers, Hemingway, had a practice of ending his writing sessions mid-flow and mid-sentence. This way, he knew exactly where to start the next day, and he could reliably both end and start his sessions with confidence.
“One of my most beautiful memories of [Marcelo] is in the world championship, right before going to the semifinals. He’s napping on a bleacher. Everyone’s screaming and yelling, and he’s asleep on the bleacher. I can’t wake him up.
“He [finally] took a stumble into the ring, [and] you’ve never seen a guy more relaxed before going into a world championship fight…. He can turn it off so deeply, and man, when he goes in the ring, you can’t turn it on with any more intensity than he can. His ability to turn it off is directly aligned with how intensely he can turn it on, so [I train] people to do this, to have stress and recovery undulation throughout their day.
“Interval training [often at midday or lunch break] and meditation together are beautiful habits to develop to cultivate the art of turning it on and turning it off.”
“We’re talking about Marcelo embodying the principle of quality in all these little ways [e.g., specific cleaning protocols for the gym, having people tidy their uniforms in class]. These little ways, you could say don’t matter, but they add up to matter hugely.”
TIM: “Oh, I think the little things are the big things. Because they’re a reflection. This may sound clichéd, but how you do anything is how you do everything.”
JOSH: “It’s such a beautiful and critical principle, and most people think they can wait around for the big moments to turn it on. But if you don’t cultivate ‘turning it on’ as a way of life in the little moments—and there are hundreds of times more little moments than big—then there’s no chance in the big moments…. I believe that when you’re not cultivating quality, you’re essentially cultivating sloppiness.”
“Lateral thinking or thematic thinking, the ability to take a lesson from one thing and transfer it to another, is one of the most important disciplines that any of us can cultivate. From a really young age, we [my wife and I] began to cultivate this [in our toddler son, Jack] around this principle of ‘go around.’ The first time, we were staying in a little cottage in Martha’s Vineyard in a big field, and he was trying to get in one door. He couldn’t, but he could get in the other door, and I said, ‘Jack, go around.’ He looked at me and he went around.
“Then ‘go around’ became language for us, in terms of solving puzzles and in terms of any time you run into an obstacle. Working with the metaphor of ‘go around’ opened up this way that we could just have dialogue around connecting things—taking away a principle from one thing and applying it to something else—and we’ve had a lot of fun with that.”
“That’s a term from my buddy, Graham Duncan [a successful manager of a ‘fund of funds’], who’s a dear friend of ours who’s come on our surf adventures. He’s a brilliant thought partner … you think about the entanglement of genius and madness, our brilliance and eccentricity. Understanding that entanglement is a precursor to working with anybody who’s trying to be world-class at something, because the entanglement is fundamental to their being. They have to, ultimately, embrace their funk, embrace their eccentricity, embrace what makes them different, and then build on it.”
Back in the world of combat sports and jiu-jitsu:
“It’s very interesting to observe who the top competitors pick out when they’re five rounds into the sparring sessions and they’re completely gassed. The ones who are on the steepest growth curve look for the hardest guy there—the one who might beat them up—while others look for someone they can take a break on.”
“One of the biggest mistakes that I observed in the first year of Jack’s life was parents who have unproductive language around weather being good or bad. Whenever it was raining, you’d hear moms, babysitters, dads say, ‘It’s bad weather. We can’t go out,’ or if it wasn’t, ‘It’s good weather. We can go out.’ That means that, somehow, we’re externally reliant on conditions being perfect in order to be able to go out and have a good time. So, Jack and I never missed a single storm, rain or snow, to go outside and romp in it. Maybe we missed one when he was sick. We’ve developed this language around how beautiful it is. Now, whenever it’s a rainy day, Jack says, ‘Look, Dada, it’s such a beautiful rainy day,’ and we go out and we play in it. I wanted him to have this internal locus of control—to not be reliant on external conditions being just so.”
My daily journaling isn’t limited to mornings. I use it as a tool to clarify my thinking and goals, much as Kevin Kelly (here) does. The paper is like a photography darkroom for my mind.
This chapter shares is a transcription of a real entry from October 2015.
It was written in Samovar Tea Lounge in San Francisco after a 2-hour walk and led me to re-incorporate “deloading” phases in my life. “Deloading” is a concept used in strength and athletic training, but it can be applied to many things. Let’s look at the sports definition, here from the website T Nation:
A back-off week, or deload, is a planned reduction in exercise volume or intensity. In collegiate strength-training circles, it’s referred to as the unloading week, and is often inserted between phases or periods. Quoting from Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning: “The purpose of this unloading week is to prepare the body for the increased demand of the next phase or period,” and to mitigate the risk of overtraining.
So, how might this relate to creativity, productivity, or quality of life?
Let’s start with a personal outcome: In the last 12 months, I’ve used deloading outside of sports to decrease my anxiety at least 50% while simultaneously doubling my income.
Deloading for business, in my case, consists of strategically taking my foot off of the gas. I alternate intense periods of batching similar tasks (recording podcasts, clearing the inbox, writing blog posts, handling accounting, etc.) with extended periods of—for lack of poetic description—unplugging and fucking around.
The unplug can still be intense (search “4-hour reality check” for an example), but you shouldn’t be working on “work.”
Let’s dig into the journal entry, as it provides much of the reasoning. I’ve added some additional thoughts below it:
___________
TUES—SAMOVAR @ 5:40PM—
The great “deloading” phase.
This is what I’m experiencing this afternoon, and it makes a Tuesday feel like a lazy Sunday morning. This is when the muse is most likely to visit.
I need to get back to the slack.
To the pregnant void of infinite possibilities, only possible with a lack of obligation, or at least, no compulsive reactivity. Perhaps this is only possible with the negative space to—as Kurt Vonnegut put it—“fart around”? To do things for the hell of it? For no damn good reason at all?
I feel that the big ideas come from these periods. It’s the silence between the notes that makes the music.
If you want to create or be anything lateral, bigger, better, or *truly* different, you need room to ask “what if?” without a conference call in 15 minutes. The aha moments rarely come from the incremental inbox-clearing mentality of, “Oh, fuck … I forgot to … Please remind me to … Shouldn’t I? … I must remember to …”
___________
Inbox land is the land of the lost, and we all become lost.
My Tuesday experience reinforced, for me, the importance of creating large, uninterrupted blocks of time, during which your mind can wander, ponder, and find the signal amidst the noise. If you’re lucky, it might even create a signal, or connect two signals (core ideas) that have never shaken hands before.
I’ve scheduled deloading phases in a few ways: roughly 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. daily for journaling, tea routines, etc.; 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. every Wednesday for creative output (i.e., writing, interviewing for the podcast); and “screen-free Saturdays,” when I use no laptops and only use my phone for maps and coordinating with friends via text (no apps). Of course, I still use “mini-retirements” à la The 4-Hour Workweek a few times a year.
Deloading blocks must be scheduled and defended more strongly than your business commitments. The former can strengthen and inform the latter, but not vice versa.
To sum up, how can one throttle back the reactive living that has them following everyone’s agenda except their own?
Create slack, as no one will give it to you. This is the only way to swim forward instead of treading water.