Learning, Philosophy, High Performance: The Ultimate Guide to Josh Waitzkin
Who?
No person has influenced my thinking on learning and high performance than Josh Waitzkin. As someone who’s interested in optimal performance, the learning process and living the most authentic life possible, I’ve found Josh to be an ocean of knowledge.
As a competitor, Josh is a former US National Chess Champion, World Champion in the martial art of Tai-Chi Push hands and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Black belt under Marcelo Garcia. Josh is now onto his fourth and fifth arts of standup paddle surfing and foiling.
Josh consults and coaches the world’s top performers in the world of sports and finance. He also founded the JW Foundation and The Art of Learning Project, a non-profit focused on education which “supports educators, parents, coaches, and students in carving their own paths to excellence”.
Why should I care?
How do top performers become the best in the world?
This is the question which Josh’s life and work will help you answer.
As Tim Ferriss says, Josh Waitzkin is a master at the final 10% in the journey to mastery - where someone goes from the top 5% in a discipline to Top 5 overall, or Top 10 in the world to best in the world. It’s taking people from good to great and from great to extraordinary, by focusing on the internal terrain of high performance.
There are many great books on the science of expertise and high performance. I was influenced greatly by books like Gladwell’s Outliers, K. Anders Ericcson’s Peak and Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow. One thing all those accounts lack is the insight and empathy from an actual top performer. This is what Josh adds and what makes him such a joy to learn from.
Josh’s knowledge doesn’t just come from studying top performers and looking for commonalities, it comes from many years of hard won experience from being at the highest level in a variety of wildly different domains - Chess, Tai Chi Push Hands and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Josh was able to deconstruct why he was so good and generalize that into a larger philosophy of learning and performance, which he’s shared with the world in bits and pieces. I’ve written this post in order to collect all those bits and pieces and put them in one place for you to explore and digest.
If you’re interested in learning, creativity, competition or becoming world class in your discipline, then you’d be wise to study Josh’s life and lessons carefully.
Top 5 of Josh Waitzkin
Here’s my Top 5 resources to learn about Josh’s philosophy on learning and high performance.
...plus Bonuses
How to navigate this list
Best Order: 1-5 in order. That would take you chronologically through Josh’s life and thinking. You can skip #2 if you’re not interested in chess.
Short on Time: 3-5 in order. You’ll get a core of Josh in 3 podcasts with him. You can then return back to 1,2 and the resources in the Bonus section for more.
Really Short on Time: Just read the quotes I’ve selected for each resource. Come back to whichever ones you find most interesting and go check out it’s source.
#1 The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance
[Amazon] [Audible] (I’d recommend the audio version)
The Art of Learning is where Josh deconstructs his rise to the top of the worlds of Chess and Tai-Chi Push Hands. It’s not just a memoir of achievements, but takes us behind the scenes to Josh’s mental states and how he dealt with the psychological and technical challenges of two very different competitive sports. It’s the best place to start to understand Josh, since it tackles the first two arts in which he gained mastery. It lays the foundation for much of his philosophy about competition, performance, the interconnectedness of themes in different domains and his philosophy of doing things in a way that’s true to you.
Some of my favorite takeaways from The Art of Learning:
Your work should be an expression of yourself
“The real art in learning takes place as we move beyond proficiency, when our work becomes an expression of our essence.”
On Grit and a Growth Mindset
“Mental resilience is arguably the most critical trait of a world-class performer, and it should be nurtured continuously.”
A growth mindset is essential to top performance. Top performers win because they’ve learned, iterated and worked and not because they are “smart” or “good”.
“The moment we believe that success is determined by an ingrained level of ability as opposed to resilience and hard work, we will be brittle in the face of adversity.”
Learn more about the growth mindset and how top performers treat everything as a skill.
Self awareness and authenticity
“At the highest levels of any kind of competitive discipline, everyone is great. At this point the decisive factor is rarely who knows more, but who dictates the tone of the battle. For this reason, almost without exception, champions are specialists whose styles emerge from profound awareness of their unique strengths, and who are exceedingly skilled at guiding the battle in that direction.”
Being present is a lifestyle
“The secret is that everything is always on the line. The more present we are at practice, the more present we will be in competition, in the boardroom, at the exam, the operating table, the big stage. If we have any hope of attaining excellence, let alone of showing what we’ve got under pressure, we have to be prepared by a lifestyle of reinforcement. Presence must be like breathing.”
Thematic Interconnectedness
Everything we do is an expression of ourselves. Therefore, no two domains are different. The principles and mental states that lead to success and high performance in one domain can be applied and translated over in order to achieve success in other domains.
This is similar to billionaire investor Charlie Munger’s technique of using multidisciplinary mental models, i.e borrowing ways of thinking from other, seemingly unrelated domains, in order to tackle a problem.
The Downward Spiral
Every mistake we make has both a technical and emotional component. We should strive not just to correct the technical error (e.g the wrong move, the words we said, the way we held the racquet), but understand the emotional error that caused it. Regaining presence after a technical error and not allowing the momentum of your emotions to take over is the difference between life and death in a game and sometimes in life itself. Josh tells the following story which unfolded on the busy streets of New York:
“I saw a woman standing a few feet away from me, wearing headphones and moving to the music...Suddenly she stepped right into oncoming traffic...Immediately as she stepped forward, a bicycle bore down on her from the left. The biker lurched away at the last second and left her with a solid but harmless bump. She could’ve walked away unscathed if she just stepped back onto the pavement, but instead she turned and cursed the bicyclist.
A taxicab was next to speed around the corner, hitting the woman from behind and sending her reeling 10ft into the air.” (yikes)
Like the woman in the story, we slip into downward spirals often in life and in performance. Having the presence to notice our first mistake, will stop us from fatal ones.
Stress and Recovery
In order to perform at peak intensity, we cannot burn ourselves out by training as hard as we can 24/7. Learning to let go and turn it off is just as important as learning to turn it on. Recovery allows us to turn it on with greater intensity.
“The better we are at recovering, the greater potential we have to endure/perform under stress.”
Learning for the Long Term
Focus on learning principles not tactics. This sets you up for steady growth in the long term, rather than high short term growth followed by a crash when the tactics stop working.
To learn more, check out The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance [Book] [Audio Book]. I recommend the audio version.
Continue to #2 The Psychology of Performance from Chessmaster
Or skip to:
#3 Josh Waitzkin on the Tim Ferriss Podcast 1
#4 Josh Waitzkin on the Tim Ferriss Podcast 2
#2 The Psychology of Performance from Chessmaster
“Everyone at a high level has a huge amount of chess understanding, and much of what separates the great from the very good is deep presence, relaxation of the conscious mind, which allows the unconscious to flow unhindered.” - Josh Waitzkin
Imagine being there when the Apple fell on Newton’s head and him narrating you his thought process in the subsequent months when he developed calculus? Josh’s course on the Psychology of Performance is precisely that. It gives you an insider's view into the games that influenced Josh’s philosophy on competition and performance.
In the course, Josh explains the psychology of performance through examining his time as a world-class chess player. There are annotated games where he explains his thought process during the game, deconstructing both technical and emotional mistakes.
Even if you’ve never played chess, his analysis of the emotional states that lead to technical chess errors is well worth your time, as that translates into other disciplines and into day to day life.
Here are my favorite themes and games of the course:
You can find all the videos from the course in this Youtube Playlist and in the ChessMaster Grand Master Edition Game (the game is unfortunately only available on PC, NintendoDS and PSP). Chessmaster was where my love for Josh’s philosophy began, as I first encountered this course as a child playing primary school chess back in South Africa.
Continue to #3 Josh Waitzkin on the Tim Ferriss Podcast 1
Or skip to:
#4 Josh Waitzkin on the Tim Ferriss Podcast 2
#3 Josh Waitzkin on the Tim Ferriss Podcast 1
[Podcast] [Transcript]
This was the podcast that brought together two worlds for me. On one hand you have Tim Ferriss, master of the 80/20, popularizer of hacking your way to getting good at anything fast. And on the other hand there’s Josh Waitzkin, who focuses relentlessly on quality and the slow process of refinement, unlearning and self expression to become the best.
It’s one of the most insightful conversations on learning and performance ever.
Tim talks to Josh about the themes of his two arts, Chess and Tai Chi Push Hands, as well as his third art, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. It’s packed densely with golden nuggets on performance, learning and life, from both Josh and Tim.
Some of my favorite takeaways from Josh Waitzkin on the Tim Ferriss Podcast 1:
There are many paths to greatness. Do things your own way.
“A core principle to start with is that there are many paths to greatness. Each one of these guys who's really world class is doing it his way and he's harnessing his 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 studying of the preconditions to someone's finest moments of expression and then they build their lifestyles around it.”
“[Working with Marcelo Garcia] I've learned even more deeply the importance of the lesson that there are many paths to greatness. And to take a guy like Marcelo and to try to fit him into a chess player's hyper-conceptual mold would be terrible. And he's so great because of his just unbelievable commitment to doing it his way and he's done things in extraordinary ways.”
Construct proactive lifestyles, not reactive ones
“[When working with coaching clients we] have ways of revamping their daily architecture, the way they live their life. So that they're, for example, aligning their peak energy periods with their peak creativity work. They're building lifestyles that are relentlessly proactive as opposed to reacting to inputs.”
What does it mean to be living a reactive lifestyle? Josh elaborates, using the example of checking email (or social media) during your breaks from work:
“So what you see is whenever [people are] coming back from something after a break, they're soaking in inputs. So they live this reactive lifestyle. Their creative processes are dominated by external noise as opposed to internal music.”
What does it mean to live a proactive lifestyle?
“a lot of what I work on with guys is creating rhythms in their life that really are based on feeding the unconscious mind, which is the wellspring of creativity information and then tapping it.”
“This is a core habit, journaling, certain post-mortem processes, ending your day with a reflection of the quality of the work, where the core is, complexity that you're wrestling with, hugely important.”
At the highest levels, it’s about unlearning, rather than learning
“... much of what I've been focused on in recent years has been unlearning. When I think about that last movement the equivalent, say number ten 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 and releasing them, identifying cognitive biases blocking your way.”
“If you can really train people to get systematic about nurturing their creative process, it's unbelievable what can happen and most of that work relates to getting out of your own way. It's unloading. It's the constant practice of subtraction, reducing friction.”
“It's the movement towards unobstructed self-expression. If you think about 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, deeply individualized work. I'm 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.”
Presence is the antidote to emotional inertia that leads to bad decisions
“...let's say we make a decision and we then feel the need to justify that decision, and so we make more decisions to justify that initial decision. Then we basically get ourselves into this deep wormhole which is caused by the attempt to justify.”
“So this relates to a lack of presence which really connects to a cognitive bias, an addiction to a past evaluation as opposed to a present one.”
“And so of course, a very simple antidote to most of this is presence. If we can look at a moment or a chess position or an investment decision or any decision with very clean presence, outside of emotional inertia, then we can often slice through just amazing amounts of fat with very, very simple decisions...”
The importance of being True to yourself
“I have built a lifestyle around being true to myself. Maybe a big reason is because my mom used to always tell me as a kid to follow my heart, follow my dreams. I never made decisions for money or for external things. I always trusted that if I was true to myself, these things would follow. And so my professional life, my foundation, my school, I only work with people who I feel are ethically aligned, who have a good energy, who I feel really good about intuitively.”
I keep empty space in my life. My life is about quality and not quantity and it's about depth and not breadth. My businesses are based on doing very, very deep and very excellent work with just a handful of people.
When you're not cultivating quality, you're cultivating sloppiness
“...I really like to cultivate quality as a way of life and I believe that when you're not cultivating quality, you're essentially cultivating sloppiness.”
This story below is one of my favorites on how we must be mindful of cultivating quality in the little moments:
I remember when I went skiing with Billy Kidd who is one of the great downhill racers from back in the '60s Olympic ski team. He's an awesome dude. Now he skis out in Colorado wearing a cowboy hat, just a timeless guy, brilliant dude. And he was saying to me years ago when I first skied with him, "Josh, what do you think are the three most important turns of the ski run?
Billy describes the three most important turns of a ski run are the last three before you got in the lift and it's a very, 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're taking away a lot of the muscle they've been using. 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 workday with very high quality which opens up, for one thing, you're internalizing quality overnight.
For more, listen to Josh Waitzkin on the Tim Ferriss Podcast 1
Continue to #4 Josh Waitzkin on the Tim Ferriss Podcast 2
Or skip to:
#4 Josh Waitzkin on the Tim Ferriss Podcast 2
[Podcast] [Transcript]
In this episode, Josh and Tim go deep and talk about the subtle mental and internal aspects of Josh’s learning philosophy,
This episode is important because it reveals many of the techniques and principles Josh uses to train his high performing clients, many techniques that we can apply to our own lives as we navigate the journey to peak performance in our respective fields.
This episode goes beyond Josh’s days as a competitor, as we get a glimpse of Josh as a friend, coach and parent and get to see how he applies his learning philosophy to those every day pursuits.
Some of my favorite takeaways from Josh Waitzkin on the Tim Ferriss Podcast 2:
The Armchair Professor vs Man in the Arena
It’s better to learn from Philosophers - people in the arena - who are practitioners of a craft, than Philosophologists - armchair professors - people who study other practitioners, without doing it themselves.
Josh: The difference between the philosopher and the philosophologist is what Tim is referring to – or the writer and the literary critic, or the man in the arena and the armchair professor.
Tim: Or Remy from "Ratatouille" and Anton Ego, who's the food guy
I elaborate on the Armchair Professor vs the Man in the Arena in my post on Skin in the Game, as part of the series on How to Pick Good Teachers to Accelerate Your Learning.
Internal Orientation (Proactive) vs External Orientation (Reactive)
“We want to build a proactive way of life that's fundamentally moved from the inside out versus a reactive way of life where we're constantly reacting to all of these inputs which we may or may not want and where we're constantly beleaguered by or pressed by a sense of how we're going to be perceived – social pressures”
“...for [top performers] to be successful, they have to operate from the inside out. They have to bring out the essence of who they are as a performer or as a human being. They have to bring that out through their art. But if they are constantly feeling pressured by what others expect from them, what others want from them, how they'll be perceived, or how people are looking at their posts, or how their tweet is being responded to…[then they’re being reactive]. And it's natural – it's completely human – but then we're aware of how we're perceived.”
“And so you have the man in the arena who's compromised by a sense of self-consciousness of how the critics are going to perceive him or her which is ridiculous because it's like an A player thinking about the approval of a C player and that's disastrous. That's external orientation.“
On Parenting
“One of the biggest mistakes that I observed in the first year of Jack's (Josh’s son) life – or Year 2 of Jack's life – that I observed as parents is that they have this language around weather being good or bad.
“And whenever it was raining, they'd be like, "It's bad weather." You'd hear moms, babysitters, dads, talk about, "It's bad weather. We can't go out," or, "It's good weather. We can go out."
And so 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. I don't think we've missed one storm – other than maybe one when he was sick – but I don't think we've missed a single storm, rain or snow, going outside and romping in it. And we've developed this language around how beautiful it was. And so 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. And I wanted him to have this internal locus of control – to not be reliant on external conditions being just so.“
Meditation and Training For the Storm
“...it's really important to have a core meditation practice which is, at least in the beginning, in the conditions in your life that are most conducive to deep focus and to not being distracted. Later in life, we want to be able to tap our meditation under complete chaos but we want to cultivate that, initially, in the most peaceful time possible.”
“Learn how to do this in a controlled, un-stressful environment and then you can ratchet up over time to when you can use it in the most stressful of environments.“
“Right, because we don't ultimately want to be meditating in a flower garden. We want to be able to meditate and have a meditative state throughout our lives – in a hurricane, in a thunderstorm, when sharks are attacking you – any moment.”
The little things are the big things
Josh: A core part of how I train people is around the interplay of themes or principles and habits. The habits are what we can actually train at. The principle is what we're trying to embody. And so we'll train at two, or three, or four, or five habits which are the embodiment of a core principle but the idea is to burn the principle into the hundreds of manifestations of that principle that will become our way of life. And so, in this case, we're talking Marcelo Garica (5x Brazilian Jiu-jitsu world champion) embodying the principle of quality in all these little ways. 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 ...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's hundreds of times more little moments than big – then there's no chance in the big moments.
Tim: We do not rise to the level of our hopes. We fall to the level of our training.
High Quality requires Empty Space
“In my way of life, I've built a life around having empty space for the development of my ideas in the creative process and for the cultivation of a physiological state which is receptive enough to tune in very, very deeply to people I work with.”
“I could triple the amount of people that I work with very easily...but my growth curve would change fundamentally and my internal physiological training would take a hit – I wouldn’t have enough time for meditation, for reflection afterward, for development of the thematic takeaways of every session that I have. In the creative process, it's so easy to drive for efficiency and take for granted the really subtle internal work that it takes to play on that razor's edge.”
“You have to have an embodied state there. And I think that's a mistake that a lot of people make in everything that they do. They just scale – they scale and dilute the quality.”
Journaling and The Most Important Question (MIQ)
“We have a routine where we end each workday thinking, "What's the most important question in what I'm doing right now?" Pose the question to the unconscious and then wake up first thing in the morning and brainstorm on it.
If we're working on a given project and we're reflecting on what's the most important question here, and we're journaling on it, and the brainstorm in the morning, we're doing a lot of things to open the channel systematically between the conscious and the unconscious mind. We're waking up in the morning and beginning our day proactively.
But then, if you sit back after a month and you look back at your three, or four, or five journals, brainstorms, Q & As, on a given subject and you think about, "Okay, so, in the moment, this is what I thought was most potent but now I realize this, in fact, would have been most potent.
What's the gap?
Deconstruct the gap between your understanding then and your understanding now and then design your training process around deconstructing that gap and training at what that gap revealed. It's a really powerful way for individuals to discover what assumptions underlie the gap or the blind spot.
And so you're training yourself, day in and day out to be an increasingly potent thinker. This is manifesting scarcity. We are forcing ourselves – no matter how many resources we have – to think about what is the most important question in what we're working on right now.”
For more, listen to Josh Waitzkin on the Tim Ferriss Podcast 2
Continue to #5 Josh Waitzkin on the Progression Project Podcast
Or skip to: Bonuses
#5 Josh Waitzkin on the Progression Project Podcast
Rounding out the Top 5, we have this podcast which deals with Josh’s fourth and fifth domains - Paddle Surfing and Foiling. The interviewer is Josh’s coach in those domains, Erik Antonson [Instagram][Twitter] [Podcast].
This podcast is noteworthy because we get to see Josh in the middle of his journey to mastery in these domains, as he was training under Erik for 16 months months into paddle surfing at the time of recording. We get the unique opportunity to witness the dialogue between Josh and his coach and to hear the dialogue of two top performers and practitioners. As always, Josh offers insight into his learning and performance processes and also touches on parenting, his transitions between sports and other the idea of learning from others’ experiences with the same intensity as our own.
Some of my favorite takeaways from Josh Waitzkin on the Progression Project Podcast:
Love as the Core Motivator for Mastery
There’s a misconception that mastery means hating practice, but tolerating it as a necessary evil to becoming great. But for Josh, love is what motivates him to practice.
“Love has been at the core of everything I've done.”
“...it's passion. It's love. It's a sense of alignment. When I think about it relative to myself or other people who I might be working with, it's doing what I love and doing whatever I'm doing in a way that I love. I find that you can do almost anything. And find your passion for it, as long as you're doing it in a way that's connected to who you are as a learner.”
“I've trained for many, many years at this principle of living on either side of pain: learning to turn what feels uncomfortable, learning to turn that place of mental resistance at the stretch point into something that I crave, that I love, that I enjoy.”
On Plateaus in the Learning Process
“If you've studied chemistry you know that potential energy and kinetic energy chart where you see the buildup of potential energy right before there's an explosion into kinetic energy.”
“And you see this all the time in the learning process and in the creative process, whether you're talking about idea generation or studying complexity. You're stuck, you're stuck, you're stuck, you sleep on it, then you wake up and boom! You have this huge insight!”
“There's always periods of what looks like a plateau. But you're just building up that potential energy. Because you're assimilating complexity. You're transitioning a lot of material from the unconscious and unconscious minds. And suddenly, it all connects. And then you have these explosions.”
Quality Above All Else
“My approach is one that prioritizes depth before breath. Almost everyone goes the other way, breadth first or go wide and then deep. Or maybe go wide and never go deep, which is actually what our culture tends to be moving toward - everyone's distracted doing a million things at once.”
“If you do something with incredible depth, you develop this feel for quality. That's what I want for my kids. I want them to explore quality and love and have them just feel how beautiful it is to do arts deeply in a way that they are so passionate about.”
How does this focus on quality translate into training? Josh gives the example of training in martial arts:
“I really believe in going deep into something and touching quality.” “If you're trying to learn a technique in the martial arts, most people will drill it right handed, left handed, right handed, left handed etc. I would drill it very hard, very deeply on one side, then translate that level of quality to the other side. Rather than train five techniques, I’d learn one very deeply and then you can translate that level of depth to the other techniques. “
“If teaching someone martial arts, I would work on one technique with somebody, and then have them work on all the internal principles and the body mechanics of that of doing that one thing with quality, and then learn everything else with that level of quality.”
Finding Your Own Way
“One of the most common mistakes that I see people make, whether you're talking with kids or adults, in the learning curve is trying to do it, like someone else does it. Whether it's your dad, or your hero, or Michael Jordan, or Tiger Woods, or whatever the sport is, there are people who are who are at the top, and you can try to do it like somebody else. But then it's very different from trying to figure out the relationship to the art which is completely your own.”
“...the path [to mastery] should be different for everybody, depending on what someone's personalities like, what their biases are, what their past is.”
“I think that one of the things about exceptional learners who are tuned to who they are, is they have an understanding of the fact that certain paths will really lead to these explosive growth spurts in time, and from the outside, it might look like that they're just smashing into a tree. But internally, they know that they're working in a way that's going to crystallize inside of themselves.”
“If you take investors, there might be an investment, which one from the outside we think is objectively good. But it really isn't objectively good. It has to fit into one's portfolio of investments in a way that emerges from one's own mental models. Otherwise, it is not a form of self expression. Then, when you enter volatility, you're not gonna know what to do with it.
And so, I believe that this theme of self expression, and attunement to oneself and developing one's own mental models, is utterly critical in the learning process. And one of the most dangerous things that anyone can do is to try to copy others’ mental models. It's better to have none than to copy others, because then when the storm comes, you're going to not have a compass to navigate with.”
For more, listen to Josh Waitzkin on the Progression Project Podcast.
Bonuses
Here are some bonus resources that did not make it into the Top 5, but are worth checking out after absorbing The Top 5.
Reading list
Here’s Josh’s recommended reading lists on Learning and Creativity, Philosophy, and Leadership and Culture.
My highlights from Josh’s reading list:
On Learning: The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, Mastery by Robert Greene, The 4-Hour Chef by Tim Ferriss, Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, Mindset by Carol Dweck
On Philosophy: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, Siddartha by Hermann Hesse, The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti: A Mahayana Scripture translated by Robert F Thurman, The Chhandogya Upanishad
Leadership: Ferguson’s Formula (HBR)
Interviews
A list of all Josh’s interviews, along with links can be found here.
Conversation with Josh and Adam Robinson [Youtube] - look out for the theme of “living on the other side of pain” and his discussion of HRV training.
How to Cram 2 Months of Learning into 1 Day: Josh on Tim Ferriss Show [Youtube] [Transcript]
Josh Waitzkin on Beginner’s Mind, Self Actualization and More [Youtube]
Josh also has a chapter in Tim Ferriss’s “Tools of Titans”
You can find a full bio of Josh and learn more about him on his website.
What did you think?
I hope you find Josh Waitzkin’s work as interesting and influential as I have. Do get in touch with me on Twitter (@avthars) or via email (avthar at avthar dot com) if you’d ever like to discuss it!
