Joshua Waitzkin

Right.

Do you know Josh Waitzkin? He's the guy who the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer was made about.

Oh, no kidding.

He's a chess champion, and he's got a beautiful line.

I mean, a lot of what Kostya said, like, I 100% subscribe to and it's stuff that I, you know, hear myself telling my students over the years.

And there's like this great lesson that I've repeated many times from Josh Waitzkin's excellent book, The Art of Learning, where he talks about how people make a mistake and then don't recognize the mistake and then make a worse mistake afterwards.

And so from that, I've really always like emphasized to my students, like when you realize you've made a mistake, try to sort of scrub that.

your thoughts about the position and like really like fresh start yourself.

... and the theory.

Because, like, I, I f- that just brought up that, um, one post I think I made about a Josh Waitzkin or podcast.

Who, he's like a master learner basically, and he was talking about, like, where are you strong in your theories, as in it's not just technical.

Yeah.

Yeah, okay, so for your first question there, so how do I do it? Um, first of all, with difficulty.

Um, and second of all, what I've learned over time and in training and in work, I've learned this, this piece of advice from a guy called Josh Waitzkin, who's a, he wrote an excellent book that I'd recommend to, to anyone out there interested in high performance called The Art of Learning.

It's a bit of a classic in high performance world, and he talks about this concept in there, and he says, "How well we turn it on depends on how well we turn it off." And- I really apply this in my life.

And before, when I started off in the corporate world, I was always on.

Us, us older generation, it's a, just a different game.

Uh, and then the second factor that is very important that's changing how I, I view this is in years past you could get burned because these kids might drop out, right? So I was thinking about it today and I was like, you know, back in the olden times you had Tal Shachked dropped out, Josh Waitzkin dropped out.

Um, you had Parma- Par- uh, Negi drop out.

Negi, yeah.

We can then remember these, and we can f- it's not just to remember but to feel in our bodies, to remember, "Ah." What that does is that connects us back into that experience.

And one of the things I really love from some of the peak performance teachings, and this comes from Josh Waitzkin, he says that when we have a peak experience, what we can do is we can really go back, dial in, "What was happening? What was I doing? Who was I in that moment?" And see that that becomes my new baseline.

So instead of needing to go down, I can actually use that as a jumping-off point to, to keep moving up.

And one of the ways we do that is to connect in each day.

All righty.

Your second book that's coming in a little heavy for you, Liz, it comes in at 259 pages, is The Art of Learning: The Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence, written by Josh Waitzkin, whose name might be familiar to some astute listeners.

Yeah.

This w- this was heavy in the pages, but not a heavy lift because it was a great story, and it's one that you may have heard before.

Okay.

[laughs]

So Josh Waitzkin, apparently he can't sit still because now he's a martial arts champion, and-

Wow