The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin: Animated Book Summary

The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin is a National Champion Chess Player and a World Champion in Push Hands Tai Chi Chaun. He attributes much of his success to his ability to learn efficiently, quickly and effectively.

The Art of Learning is a guidebook using examples from Josh's life to improve your learning skills, retention and ability to grasp new concepts quickly.

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[Player-sthn]

1. Accept defeats and mistakes so you can learn from them, dont let your pride get in the way of your learning.
2. Make sure you dont make the same mistakes multiple times, this is a waste of your time and shows you havent learnt from your mistakes. Spend time analysing what you did wrong so you dont make the same mistake again.
3. Make sure to challenge yourself, but get the balance right, be sensible. You should try to compete in higher levels so you get beaten and learn new lessons, there is no point always winning in easy situations as you will never get better, but keep in mind not to challenge yourself too much against far too hard opponents as this can be demoralising and it may be impossible for you to understand and learn in areas far above what you are comfortable with.
4. Focus on simple things first to have a strong understanding. Make sure you understand how each component/chess piece works fully and can use them naturally before trying to be successful at a complicated procedure involving many components/winning the game of chess.
5. Use interval training: make sure to do some intensive and effective training, then take a short break to let your brain learn the new information. This helps prevent overload and fatigue and so you end up learning more effectively than if you would have kept on training and just forgotten the new information you just learned as you are already moving on.
6. Master the fundamentals. This is like 4. but remember to master anything advanced, you must learn the basics very well first and the advanced things will come more naturally. We manage to walk flawlessly every time yet we never think about every movement as it has become natural as we have mastered the fundamentals and have a basic understanding of physics. It is much better to know a fundamental skill perfectly than to perform many advanced skills poorly. 7. ties in with 6. make sure to understand fundamentals to have a strong foundation, as if your knowledge of a subject is like a house, the foundations must be very strong to make the rest of the house tall and grand.
8. Work on weaknesses. These are your most vulnerable areas and you will need to cover them as opponents will try to exploit your weaknesses. It is also important in mastering more areas of a chosen subject as your weakness may lock more areas related which may be important. Imagine if one road is blocked which branches into many more important roads, this will severely increase traffic on the available road and hurt your progress as you wont be able to use the other important 'roads'.
9. Make sure you are inspired by or learn from someone whose style you like. Match your personality. If you always perform in a certain style, dont try to change that style and dont choose a mentor with a different style, rewiring your brain to be like someone else is very hard and not worth it if your style is also effective.

[printedpage]

The consistency is inspiring. Keep up the good work.

[stroluga]

Sadly, I already knew all this, I have just never applied it. Starting today, I'm going to stop making the decision to repeat the same mistakes over and over.

[john_dee]

Read the book and don’t recall “10 minutes” being the anchor.