The Art of Learning

Why it’s on the list: Waitzkin was the child chess prodigy of Searching for Bobby Fischer and then a world champion in tai chi push hands — two fields with nothing in common except the process of getting good at them. The book is his attempt to write down that process: the “investment in loss,” incremental over entity theories of ability, and entering a performance state on command rather than by luck.

Where I heard about it

• Just Flow With It — referenced there first.
• My own reading list — one of the few titles I typed out by hand rather than pasting a link, as “The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin.”

Connections

• Josh Waitzkin — author.
• Just Flow With It — the long read where this book first entered the corpus.
• Flow — the state Waitzkin’s second half is about building a trigger for.
• Deliberate Practice · Mastery · Learning — the literature this sits inside.

Where this appears

• Just Flow With It