YouSaid · the spoken record

Joshua Waitzkin

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73
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2014-04-18
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2014-04-18
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  1. “Really are based on feeding the unconscious mind, which is the wellspring of creativity information, and then tapping it. So for example, ending the workday with high quality focus on a certain area of complexity where you could use an insight. And then waking up first thing in the morning, pre-input, and applying your mind to it, journaling on it. Not so much to do a big brainstorm, but to tap what you've been working on unconsciously overnight, which of course is a principle that Hemingway wrote about when he spoke about the two core principles in his creative writing process were one, ending the workday with something left to right.”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Aligning their peak energy periods with their peak creativity work, their building lifestyles that are just relentlessly proactive as opposed to reacting to inputs. They're building a daily architecture which is based on maximizing the creative process. And if you think about this relative to most people, a simple case in point is email checking, right? Most people, when they finish a break, even top guys in industries, when they finish a break, whether they wake up first in the morning, what do most people do? They check their email. When they come back from a workout, whether they check their email. When they come back from lunch, what do you do? They check their email. And so what you see is that whenever they're coming back from something after a break, they're soaking in inputs. And so they live this reactive lifestyle. Their creative process is dominated by external noise as opposed to internal music. And a lot of what I work on with guys is creating rhythms in their life.”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “And it's fascinating how the process works. What I do with these guys is after I do my initial diagnostic process, I have ways of revamping the daily architecture, the way they live their life so that they're, for example,”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Well, first of all, I think a core principle to start with is that there are many paths to greatness. I mean, each one of these guys who's really world class is doing it his way. and he is harnessing that eccentricities. He's cultivating his or her strengths as a way of life. There's not an excessive focus on weakness. There's just an embracing of deep, deep study of the preconditions to someone's finest moments of expression and building lifestyles around it. And that's a lot of what I do is help people understand what makes them tick on a very, very deep level relative to the cognitive biases where they locked up and where their greatest intentions come, what kind of external conditions, what kind of internal conditions. And the ones who were really at the top are people who have mastered”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Beautiful, beautiful point. And of course, the thing about Marcelo is that it can often seem initially that he's moving so fast. But what's incredible is that he can also move very slow and do things that you don't see. Just like a great sight of hand artist who's just practicing the art of illusion when we're not practicing it. It's amazing what can be done with intention, with controlling someone's intention. And this is a lot of my training in push hands related to finding ways to essentially control someone's intention so that you were ahead of them. If they were ultimately moving first. You were there before they arrived. It's fascinating psychological component of really high-level training and anything.”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “I was going to say, I mean, I think that's just a gorgeous quote, and I think that most great arts are defined by that space in between.”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “This position, it's this position. So there's three positions. In my mind, if I'm constantly training at the transitions between these positions, these actually expand these transitional frames become positions to me. And so if I'm seeing 100 positions, when you're seeing, take two, then I can play in your blind spots and it can seem mystical to you because you haven't trained there. And that's what Marcelo does by spending all of his time in transition. He's cultivated the art to play in the in-between, which is really what level is all about. One of the core things that highlight the world-class martial arts is all about playing in transition in gaps in your opponent's sight pattern.”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “The opposite of what most Chess players would do and most judicial guards would do. And so he's wide open to constant learning. And the other beautiful thing about Marcelo is people call him the king of scrambles. And if you watch his training style, he's always in transition, which is a really interesting idea to think about in a cross-disciplinary manner because most people get their egos involved in their training and they're trying to dominate all the time and to dominate in almost anything you find a position of dominance and you keep it. But Marcelo always lets his opponents move, and so he's constantly playing in transition. And so if you think about what world-class martial arts means, and you brought up, for example, Marie Ashley, Chess in Washington Square, it's similar, if you're at a much higher level than someone, you can always seem mystical because you're doing things which are outside of their conceptual scheme. The way that it operates in the martial arts is if you think about it through the lens of frames, right? If you and I are looking at a position, and in your mind there's this position leading.”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Completely unique is if you're studying my game, you're entering my game and I'll be better at it. So pure. And if you think about it, it's really deep.”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “I've learned even more deeply the importance of the lesson that there are many paths to greatness. And to take a dialect like Marcelo and to try to fit him into a chess player's hyper conceptual mold would be terrible because he'd be killing his Sean. And he is so great because of his unbelievable commitment to doing it his way. And he's done things in an extraordinary ways. I mean, for example, you know how in these competitive arts everyone's very secret about their repertoires. We have this program, which you know well called MG in Action, where people, Jiu-Jitsu guys from around the world, log in to watch all of Marcelo's training sessions, his sparring sessions, his lessons, everything. When he was competing in Abu Dhabi, Submission Grappling World Championship, and Munjal's, which is the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu World Championship, we were streaming his sparring sessions every night. So he was basically showing his competitors what he was about to use against that in two weeks and three weeks and four weeks. And his attitude about this, which is”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “I catch them thousands of times. This is a guy, you almost never see Marcelo get caught more than once with something. And it's amazing to see how he relates the world through his kinesthetic intelligence. So, for example, if you're looking, when we were looking for spaces for our school, we'd walk into a big room and I'd be thinking about the division.”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “His physical intelligence, his mind boggling. I mean, when he'd come fishing with me, you throw him on a stand up paddleboard in three-foot shop, and everyone just flies off of paddleboards when they just stand up on them. And he's just beautiful. I mean, he just finds the balance points. I mean, I've never seen someone learn so quickly how to handle waves, boats, handling fishing lines being free diving, being on riding waves on paddleboards. When you're on the marsh, I've been a stand-up fighter for many years. I mean, throng is my core art. When I'm doing stand-up training with Marcelo, I caught him with most of the throws in my repertoire one time. I don't think I've ever caught him with a throw twice.”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Then he moved to Florida and I would travel to Florida to work with him. And ultimately, I made the decision I wanted to bring him to New York, mostly because I was at that point planning to make a run for the World Championship in this art. And there was no better way to do it than to get my ass kicked by the very best to ever live in the sport. He's just a wonderful guy. And he's just unbelievably martial artist. And so we opened up the school together. And I've been on the masks with him other than when one of us has been injured and it's been a lot of injuries in these sports just all the time. And it's been a fascinating experience. I mean, Marcelo is so profoundly different from me. I'm a really conceptual guy, I think abstractly. Of course, my foundation in chess, Marcelo is one of the most, well, he's the most kinesthetically overdeveloped person I've ever met. And of course, overdevelopment, underdevelopment tend to come hand in hand conceptually.”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “To put it in context relative to my life, so the art of learning ends with the two thousand four World Championship. It ends with describing the narrative of that just absolutely harrowing crazy experience. I won't give the punchline, but it was really intense. And after this, I decided I wanted to be a beginner again to put on a white belt, literally, and figuratively. And so I took on this third major mountain in my life, Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I was training out in the West Coast for about a year when I was actually writing the art of learning. I was training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu twice a day. This was after I'd spent five years taking notes. Then I had the 2004 Worlds, then I was writing it. I started training with John Machado out there. Then I came back to New York. I started training with Marco Santos here, and I started developing this relationship with Marcelo, who's just the greatest grappler to ever live. And we were doing a lot of private lessons. We developed a French.”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Lay the foundation for the work that I do today with brilliant mental performers who are just trying to make that movement to the equivalent to world champion.”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Your creative process as a hose with a big crimp in it. If you release it just unbelievable pressure can be released. And a lot of what I'm doing with people is trying to move them from very good to great or from great to truly elite by deeply individualized work on helping them really find ways to express the core of their being through their art, which is, as you know, a big theme in my life from when I played chess at my highest level. That's what I was doing when I had a period of being really locked up in my chess career, which we can go into in more detail if you want, I was doing the opposite, I was trying to fit into someone else's mold. And then ultimately when I transitioned away from chess into the martial arts, I returned to that experience of self-expression. That's what I really start to understand it very deeply. I think it was the crisis towards the end of my chess career, which really”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Where I'm training people who are at the cutting edge of the finance world. And this is really interesting work because we're focusing on that last one or point one percent of the learning process, which is really my specialty. It's highly individualized. It's cutting edge work on their learning process, their idea generation, their creativity, their performance psychology, their resilience. Fascinating work. And what I've discovered, it's interesting because I wrote this book called The Art of Learning years ago. And so people are always coming to me to speak about learning, but much of what I've been focused on in recent years has been unlearning. When I think about that last movement, from the equivalent of being, say, number 10 to number one in the world to number five to being number one in the world, it's much more about finding subtle obstructions, finding friction points, releasing them, identifying cognitive biases that might block in your way. It's the movement towards unobstructed self-expression. So if you think about...”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Well, I have three major dimensions to my creative life right now. Maybe four, I guess the most important one is my son Jack, who he's a little over two years old and loving my life. So that's maybe the most important part of my life, no question about it. I run a nonprofit educational foundation, and we have called the JW Foundation, the Art of Learning Project. And we have a couple hundred programs in schools around the country internationally as well. And so this is integrating these principles that have been developing in schools, working with teachers, parents, and children around this individualized and thematic relationship to learning that I've been developing. So this is one dimension. The other one is Iona, a martial arts school, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu school with Marcelo Garcia, who's a nine-time world champion. You know him well, Tim. He's really the Michael Jordan of the Grappling World. This is world-class athletes training there. And then I run a consulting business.”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Of the energetic flow had been interrupted. And then I'd have to reverse engineer myself back to that one game, that one component of the flow, and then I'd remember the game. And then I would remember exactly what the vision had been, and then I'd say, ha, this was the position. And then it would take me two or three times going back around to get all the balls back up in the air to get back to the energetic flow. So actually, for me, giving Simuls sort of felt similar to playing chess one chess game. But that was my own relationship to it. I think that probably if you ask 10 different very strong chess players that all give somewhat different answers.”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Level manifestation of that same kind of dynamic. I mean, for me, playing simuls is something akin to juggling a lot of balls and all of the, to each chess, I wasn't playing 40 different games, for example, separately. The flow of all 40 games would sort of coalesce into one larger sense of flow. And it was actually really interesting. Often when I give a simul and there'd be a youth competition and the winners of the youth competition would play against me. And so sometimes kids would cheat. They'd really want to beat me. So they would cheat. So I'd be walking around this big thing and then I'd get to the table and they'd have shifted the positions to try to win if they could win it would be a big thing. And my experience when that happened was as if you had, imagine you had like 40 balls up in the air and suddenly they would all crash onto the floor. I would know that they had changed the position not by reaching the board and remembering what the position was and then seeing they had changed it. It would initially be this feeling.”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “somewhat abstractly into something that could be replicated more systematically. You know, I think it's different for every chess player. I mean, one of the beautiful things about chess is that you can approach it in so many different ways. And to be world class, what you need to do essentially is express the core of your being through the art. I think this is true of many arts, and that's probably something we'll get into more deeply. So you can have a very mathematical person who plays chess mathematically. You can have a very musical person who plays chess musically. Someone might be much more kinesthetic like myself and sort of a feeling for flow and hidden harmonies and almost a physically energetic relationship to chess. When I first learned to play chess, when I was six years old in Washington Square Park, it was a battle. I loved the feeling of just going into a fight with someone and finding these hidden harmonies and finding where these animal passions mixed with this technical complexity. Much later when I got much better playing simuls, it was sort of a higher...”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “riding the energetic wave of the game like I was in my push hands training. I wasn't playing chess. I wasn't thinking in chess language. I wasn't calculating variations. I was feeling the flow, filling the space left behind like I would in the martial arts. And I had this realization I was playing beautiful chess, but I wasn't consciously playing chess, that the barriers between these two different arts had dissolved in my mind. And that's when I started to conceive of the idea of the book. And a lot of the process of, I spent five years taking notes, four or five hundred pages of notes in the book before I actually sat down and wrote it. And a lot of that process was deconstructing what I'd been doing rather intuitively. So essentially what it felt like was translation of parallel learning. These are two rather abstract terms. That's the language that I was using internally when I was first thinking about the book because I felt like I was just taking the essence of one art and translating it over into another. And in the process of writing it involved deconstructing what I'd been doing.”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “I initially started thinking about the idea of the book about two years into my martial arts life. So I transitioned from chess into studying, into meditating, into studying East Asian philosophy. Then I started getting into Tai Chichuan and ultimately into the martial application of it, push-ends. And I started to experience this very interesting transition from the principles, my level and chest just began to translate directly over into the martial arts. And I think it was primarily one experience I had. It was something around two years into my tachy training, I was giving a simultaneous chess exhibition in Memphis, Tennessee at a fundraiser for muscular dystrophy. And I was playing 45 or 50 boards at once. So I'm walking down the middle of this big square of chess tables. Everyone's playing one game. I'm playing each of them. And about 40 minutes into the simul, I had this experience that was so interesting. I began to feel like I was...”

    2014-04-18 · The Tim Ferriss Show · Episode 2: Joshua Waitzkin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT