Being a world champion in a sport is a tough challenge that requires talent, discipline, and ultimate mastery of your game.  Anyone reaching this level of achievement should consider him or herself very lucky to be a member of an elite group.  Now, if you are a world champion in two completely unrelated areas, you are a rare exception indeed.  The question that begs to be answered is if the process that leads you to exceptional performance in one area is repeatable and applicable to other areas of achievement.  Is exceptional performance learnable? Is it simply a question of mastering the art of learning?

Welcome to the world of Josh Waitzkin.  If you ever read the book or saw the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer you will be familiar with Josh’s story, a prodigy chess player that learned the game at the young age of 6 by playing street hustlers in New York City’s Washington Square Park.  By the age of 9 Josh had already snatched his first national title, and then moved on to win seven additional national championships for various age groups and became and international master by the age of 16.

But what is amazing about Josh is that later in life he was able to master a completely new discipline and was able to again reach a level of performance that most people can only dream of reaching in just one area.  Josh took Tai Chi at the age of 21 and six years later had won two world championships.  According to Josh, the secret of his success is that he mastered the art of learning.

Josh has synthesized his experiences and his thoughts on reaching exceptional achievement in the book The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence.  The book is full of inspirational lessons and words of wisdom that combines Eastern philosophy, autobiography and personal psychology into a powerful combination of complex thoughts turned into simple to understand performance enhancing concepts.

Here are a few examples of the ideas relayed by Josh in his book:

1. Incremental learning – this is the same idea explained in the article How Mindset Influences Success.  Intelligence and talent are not fixed elements that you have or don’t have.  They are instead something can be developed through training and hard work.
2. Number to leave numbers – the idea here is that you should master the fundamentals and leave them to your subconscious mind so that you can use your conscious mind to focus on more creative tasks and more detail.
3. Learning from your mistakes – this is a well known concept, but Josh takes it one step further, teaching how to turn weakness into strength.
4. The soft zone – this is about reaching an effortless state of performance by mastering tension and stress so that you don’t lose focus.

There are many more powerful concepts in the book.  In order to capture the true essence of what Josh is trying to convey I recommend purchasing a copy of The Art of Learning and studying it.  That is exactly what I am doing right now.