When I read a book I have the habit of highlighting certain passages I find interesting or useful. After I finish the book I’ll type up those passages and put them into a note on my phone. I’ll keep them to comb through every so often so that I remember what that certain book was about. That’s what these are. So if I ever end up lending you a book, these are the sections that I’ve highlighted in that book. Enjoy!
Whenever I had an idea, I would test it against some brilliant professor who usually disagreed with my conclusions. Academic minds tend to be impatient with abstract language–when I spoke about intuition, one philosophy professor rolled her eyes and told me the term had no meaning.
A student must initially become immersed in the fundamentals in order to have any potential to reach a high level of skill.
Over time the intuition learns to integrate more and more principles into a sense of flow. Eventually, the foundation is so deeply internalized that it is no longer consciously considered, but is lived. This process continuously cycles along as deeper layers of the art are soaked in.
Thinking about a “C” while playing Beethoven’s 5th Symphony could be a real hitch because the flow might be lost.
Performing has become a way of life. Presence under fire hardly feels different from the presence I feel sitting at my computer, typing these sentences.
Each loss was a lesson, each win a thrill.
They wanted my relationship with the game to be about learning and passion first, and competition a distant second.
Confidence is critical for a great competitor, but overconfidence is brittle.
I learned at sea that virtually all situations can be handled as long as presence of mind is maintained.
Entity Theorists – kids who have been influenced by their parents and teachers to think in this manner see overall intelligence or skill level at a certain discipline to be a fixed entity, a thing that cannot evolve.
Learning Theorists – “I got it because I worked very hard at it” or “I should have tried harder”
Dweck’s reserach has shown that when challenged by difficult material, learning theorists are far more likely to rise to the level of the game, while entity theorists are more brittle and prone to quit.
Learning theorists are given feedback that is more process-oriented. After doing well they hear things like “Wow, great job!” after doing bad the hear things like “Study a little harder for the next one and you’ll do great!”
It is clear that parent and teachers have an enormous responsibility in forming the theories of intelligence of their students and children–and it is never too late.
The key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not to live in a shell of static, safe mediocrity.
Successful people shoot for the stars, put their hearts on the line in every battle, and ultimately discover that the lessons learned from the pursuit of excellence mean much more than the immediate trophies and glory. They are also the ones who are happier along the way.
As chess struggles become more intense and opponents put up serious resistance, they start to lose interest in the game.
Danny’s Mom finds her own sense of well-being fluctuating with Danny’s wins and losses. Danny’s Mom can help him internalize a process-first approach by making her everyday feedback respond to effort over results. She should praise good concentration, a good day’s work, a lesson learned. When he wins a tournament game, the spotlight should be on the road to that moment and beyond as opposed to the glory. Also remember, it is okay for that person to enjoy a win. Enjoy the win fully while taking a deep breath, then exhale, note the lesson learned, and move on to the next adventure.
On losses – don’t say it didn’t matter. If it didn’t matter, then why should he try to win? Empathy is a good place to start. When a few moments pass, in a quiet voice, ask the person if they know what happened in the game/performance. They will have an idea about the psychological slip and taking on that issue will be a short-term goal in the continuing process. Through these dialogues the person will learn that every loss is an opportunity for growth.
A heartfelt, empathetically present, incrementally inspiring mom or dad or coach can liberate an ambitious child to take the world by the horns.
There will be nothing learned from any challenge in which we don’t try our hardest.
The first obstacle to overcome is being distracted by random, unexpected events. First, we learn to flow with whatever comes. Then, we learn to use whatever comes to our advantage. Finally, we learn to be completely self-sufficient and create our own earthquakes.
Learn to be quietly, intensely focused, apparently relaxed with a serene look on your face, but inside all the mental juices are churning. The Soft Zone is resilient, like a flexible blade of grass that can move with and survive hurricane-force winds.
You can’t count on the world being silent, so the only option is to become at peace with the noise.
In the past, we I got angry, I was thrown off my game. The solution to this type of situation does not lie in denying our emotions, but in learning to use them to our advantage. When uncomfortable, the instinct should not be to avoid the discomfort but to become at peace with it.
When I play say gin rummy, I rarely arrange my hand. I leave the melds all over the place and do the organization in my head.
Remember the importance of regaining presence and clarity of mind after making a serious error. The first mistake rarely proves disastrous, but the downward spiral of the second, third, and forth error crates a devastating chain reaction.
If you have an advantage, make an error, and then still cling to the notion that you have an advantage, then when you calculate a variation that looks equal, you will reject that line of thought because you incorrectly believe it is moving you in the wrong direction. What results is a downward spiral where the foundering player rejects variations he should accept, pushing, with hollow overconfidence, for more than there is. At a high level, pressing for wins in equal positions often results in losing.
The distance between winning and losing is minute.
There are ways to steal wins from the maw of defeat.
Beware of the downward spiral. Being present at critical moments of competitions can turn losses into wins. Sometimes all the kids needed was to take two or three deep breaths or splash cold water on their faces to snap out of bad states of mind. I would occasionally leave the playing hall and sprint fifty yards outside. It served as a complete psychological flushing, and I returned in a brand new state of mind.
It’s amazing how many hundreds of hours I spent laboring my way through Dvoretsky’s chapters, my brain pushed to the limit, emerging from every study session utterly exhausted.
Taoist teachers who might say “learn this from that” or “learn the hard from the soft”. In most everyday life experiences, there seems to be a tangible connection between opposites. Consider how you may not realize how much someone’s companionship means to you until they are gone – heartbreak can give the greatest insight into the value of love.
I have found that if we feed the unconscious, it will discover connections between what may appear to be disparate realities. The path to artistic insight in one direction often involves deep study of another.
When the horse is very young, we gentle it. The horse is always handled. You pet it, feed it, groom it, stroke it, it gets used to you, likes you. You get on it and there is no fight, nothing to fight. So you guide the horse toward doing what you want to do because he wants to do it. You synchronize desires, speak the same language. If you you walk straight toward a horse, it will look at you and probably run away. Approach indirectly, without confrontation. When riding, if you want to move to the right, you move to the right and so the horse naturally moves right to balance your weight. Ride and animal feel like one.
In William Chen’s tai Chi form, expansive (outward or upward) movements occur with an in-breath, so the body and mind wake up and energize into a shape. He gives the example of reaching out to shake the hand of someone you are fond of, waking up after a restful sleep, or agreeing with somebody’s idea. Usually, such positive moments are associated with an in-breath – in the Tai Chi form, we “breathe into the fingertips” Then with the out-breath, the body release, and de-energizes.
A large obstacle to a calm, healthy, present existence is the constant interruption of our natural breathing patterns. A thought or ringing phone or honking car interrupts an out-breath and so we stop and begin to inhale. the result is shallow breathing and deficient flushing of carbon dioxide from our systems, so our cells never have as much pure oxygen as they could.
I have long believed that if a student of virtually any discipline could avoid ever repeating the same mistake twice–both technical and psychological–he or she would skyrocket to the top of their field. Of course such a feat is impossible–we are bound to repeat thematic errors. So, the aim is to minimize repetition as much as possible, by having an eye for consistent psychological and technical themes of error.
It is essential to have a liberating incremental approach that allows for times when you are not in a peak performance state. We must take responsibility for ourselves, and not expect the rest of the world to understand what it takes to become the best that we can become.
We are bombarded with more and more information on TV, phones, video games, and the internet. When nothing exciting is going on , we might get bored, distracted, separated from the moment. So, we look for new entertainment, surf channels, flip through magazines. If caught in these rhythms, we are like tiny current-bound surface fish, floating along a two-dimensional world without any sense for the gorgeous abyss below.
Making Smaller Circles is the idea of condensing the external manifestation of the technique while keeping true to its essence. Over time expansiveness decreases while potency increases. Subtle internalization and refinement is much more important than the quantity of what is learned. Surely many of my opponents knew more about Tai Chi than I did, but I was very good at what I did know.
Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential.
I’ll spend a week doing soft, quiet work on timing. After these periods of reflection, I’ll almost invariably have a leap in ability because my new physical skills are supercharged.
Most intelligent NFL players use the off season to look at their schemes more abstractly, study tapes, break down aerial views, etc. When they return, they play at a higher level.
I have heard quite a few NFL quarterbacks who had minor injuries and were forced to sit out a game or two, speak of the injury as a valuable opportunity to concentrate on the mental side of their game.
I realized that whenever I could control two of his limbs with one of mine, I could easily use my unoccupied arm for free-pickings. Whether speaking of a corporate negotiation or Tai Chi, if the opponent is temporarily tied down qualitatively or energetically more than you are expending to tie it down, you have a large advantage.
I had an idea that I might be able to keep my right side strong by intense visualization practice. I did a daily resistance workout routine on my left side, and after every set I visualized the workout passing to the muscles on the right. It worked.
In my martial arts life, every time I tweak my body, well-intended people suggest I take a few weeks off training. What they don’t realize is that if I were to stop training whenever something hurt, I would spend my whole year on the couch. Almost without exception, I am back on the mats the next day, figuring out how to use my new situation to heighten elements of my game. that said, there are times when the body needs to heal, but those are ripe opportunities to deepen the mental, technical, internal side of my game.
You have to make obstacles spur you to creative new angles in the learning process. You should always come off an injury or a loss better than when you went down.
It is all too easy to get caught up in the routines of our lives and to lose creativity in the learning process and think that excellence can be obtained by going through the motions. If we do that we lose presence.
The unconscious should navigate a huge network of subtly programmed technical information, so that the conscious mind is free to focus on certain essential details. The conscious mind for all its magnificence, can only take in and work with a certain limited amount of information in a unit of time. The conscious mind, focusing on less, can then rev up it’s shutter speed from 4 FPS to 300.
The trained mind is not necessarily working faster than an untrained mind–it is simply working more effectively, which means that my conscious mind has less to deal with.
Refined martial artists can sometimes appear mystical to less skilled practitioners–they have trained themselves to perceive and operate within segments of time that are too small to be perceived by untrained minds.
A life or death scenario kicks the human mind into a very narrow area of focus. Time feels slowed sown because we instinctively zero in on a tiny amount of critical information that our processor can then break down as if it is in a huge font.
The key, of course, is practice.
If an opponents movement is quick,
then quickly respond;
if his movement is slow,
then follow slowly.
If the opponent does not move, then I do not move.
At the opponent’s slightest move, I move first.
Imagine the condensing process of Making Smaller Circles applied to the observation and programming side of this interaction. What can really happen is that our wrists meet and I apply the tiniest amount of pressure conceivable. My opponent holds his ground without his conscious mind even realizing that he has responded. He is already set up to be thrown with a one-two combination because his reaction to the one is already predictable. I will move before his two. taking this one step further, if my first movement is condensed enough, it will hardly manifest physically at all. My two appears to be a one. At the opponent’s slightest move, I move first.
Put your weight in your left leg. Now, imagine somebody is standing on your left side and pushes into your body and up through you left arm with a lot of force. how are you going to keep you balance? Well, you have to lift up your right leg, so with the momentum, and then replant your right foot a couple feet away and land – no problem. Now, put all your weight in your right leg. If someone were to push you from your left shoulder, you would have a much bigger problem because your right leg is stuck to the ground. A fundamental principle of maintaining balance while moving fast is that your feet should never cross.
If an NFL running back can get the defender to put weight in the wrong place at the wrong time, then he can blow on by and leave the guy tripping over himself.
there is nothing mystical happening, I just read his intention to blink and then controlled his intention by determining when he would unconsciously place his weight into his forward leg.
If both players are aware of a tell, then it will be neutralized, made ineffective, and others will have to be unearthed and exploited. The game goes on.
In competition, the dynamic is often painfully transparent. If one player is serenely present while the other is being ripped apart by internal issues, the outcome is already clear. The prey is no longer objective, makes compounding mistakes, and the predator moves in for the kill.
In the absence of continual external reinforcement, we must be our own monitor, and quality of presence is often the best gauge. We cannot expect to touch excellence if “going through the motions” is the norm of our lives. On the other hand, if deep fluid presence become second nature, then life, art, and learning take on a richness that will continually surprise and delight. Those who excel are those who maximize each moment’s creative potential. Presence to the day-to-day learning process is akin to that purity of focus other dream of achieving in rare climactic moments when everything is on the line. The more present we are at practice, the more present we will be in competition. Presence must be like breathing.
Looking back over my games, I saw that when I had been playing well, I had 2 to 10 minute crips thinks between moves. When I was off my game, I would sometimes fall into a deep calculation that lasted over 20 minutes and this often led to an inaccuracy. When using the LGE recovery system, if I started to falter, I would release everything for a moment, recover, and then come back with a fresh sate. Then, when faced with a difficult chess position, I could think for 30 or 40 minutes at a very high level, because my concentration was fueled by little breathers. It wasn’t just one long continuous strain of focus that would lead to me being tired out.
Players who are able to relax in brief moments of inactivity are almost always the ones who end up coming through when the game is on the line. Pete Sampras had a strangely predictable routine of picking at his racket between points, whether winning or losing the exchange, while rivals fumed at a bad call or pumped their fist in excitement. Tiger Woods would always stroll to the next shot with a relaxed focus in his eyes. Michael Jordan would sit on the bench, towel on his shoulders, letting it all go for a 2-minute break before coming back into the game. The more these guys could let things go, the sharper they were in the next drive.
The notion that I didn’t have to hold myself in a state of feverish concentration every second of a chess game was a huge liberation. The better we are at recovering, the greater potential we have to endure and perform under stress.
Cardiovascular interval training can have a profound effect on your ability to quickly release tension and recover from mental exhaustion. In time, with consistent work, rest periods can be incrementally shortened even as muscles grow and are stressed to their larger healthy limits.
Ultimately, with incremental training very much like what I described in the chapter Making Smaller Circles, recovery time can become nearly instantaneous. And once the act of recovery is on our blood, we’ll be able to access it under the most strained of circumstance, becoming masters of creating tiny havens for renewal, even where observers could not conceive of such a break.
Instead of just swimming until you are exhausted and then quitting, push yourself to your healthy limit, then recover for a minute or two, and then push yourself again. With time and practice, increase the intensity and duration of your sprint time, and gradually condense rest periods.
This is what my entire approach to learning is based on – breaking down the artifical barriers between our diverse life experience so all moments become enriched by a sense of interconnectedness.
If you are reading a book and lose focus, put the book down, take some deep breathes, and pick it up again with a fresh eye.
Now that your conscious mind is free to take little breaks, you’ll be delighted by the surges of creativity that will emerge out of your unconscious. You’ll become more attuned to your intuition and will slowly become more and more true to yourself stylistically.
As children, we might be told to “concentrate” by parents and teachers, and then be reprimanded if we look off into the stars. (I need to encourage looking off into the stars more)
Not only do we have to be good at waiting, we have to love it. Because waiting is not waiting it is life. Too many us live without fully engaging our minds.
Our true love could come and go and we wouldn’t even notice. And we will have become someone other than the you or I who would be bale to embrace it. I believe an appreciation for the everyday–the ability to dive deeply into the ordinary and discover life’s hidden richness–is where success, let alone happiness emerges.
Example starter routine for relaxation:
- Eat a light consistent snack for 10 min
- 15 min of meditation
- 10 min of stretching
- 10 min of listening to Bob Dylan
- Play ball (The actual activites that brings feels of joy and clam and presence)
The point to this system of creating your own trigger is that a physiological connection is formed between the routine and the activity it precedes. Dennis was always present when playing ball with his son, so all we had to do was set up a routine that became linked to that state of mind. Once the routine is internalized, it can be used before any activity and a similar state of mind will emerge. Then, the system of Making Smaller Circles and condensing the routine comes in. The key is to make the changes incrementally, slowly, so there is more similarity than difference from the last version of the routine. The above routine could be condensed to 12 min and was more potent that ever.
I now handle the unpredictability of martial arts tournaments with ease. In fact, the more adverse the environment, the better off I feel, because I know my opponents will not deal with the chaos as well as I will.
If you have optimal conditions, then it is always great to take your time and go through an extended routine. If things are less organized, then be prepared with a flexible state of mind and a condensed routine. IF you have this condensed routine, and are suddenly confronted by a potentially dangerous situation, you are then trained to perform optimally on a moment’s notice.
I believe that this type of condensing practice can do wonders to raise our quality of life. Once a simple inhalation can trigger a state of tremendous alertness, our moment-to-moment awareness becomes blissful. We see more as we walk down the street. The everyday becomes alien and absurd as we naturally soak in the lovely subtleties of the ordinary. All experiences become richly intertwined by our new vision, and then new connections begin to emerge. Rainwater streaming on a city pavement will teach a pianist how to flow. A leaf gliding easily with the wind will teach a controller how to let go. A housecat will teach me how to move. All moments become each moment. Presence has taught me how to live.
Emotions are part of our lives. We would be fools to deny such a rich element of the human experience. But when our emotions overwhelm us, we can get sloppy.
It is easy to speak of nonviolence when you’re in a flower garden.
The first step I had to make was to recognize that the problem was mine, not Frank’s. There will always be creeps in the world. Getting pissed off would get me nowhere in life.
You have to recognize the relationship between anger, ego, and fear.
If someone got into my head, they were doing me a favor, exposing a weakness. They were giving me a valuable opportunity to expand my threshold for turbulence.
Feelings of anger and fear and elation emerge from deep inside of us and I think blocking them out is an artificial habit. In my experience, competitors who make this mistake tend to crumble when pushed far enough.
The only way to succeed is to acknowledge reality and funnel it, take the nerves and us them. IF we rely on having no nerves, when the pressure is high enough, or when the pain is too piercing to ignore, our ideal state will shatter.
His failure to get in my head had consumed him, made him crazy, and as he got more and more heated he lost track of the technical side of the game.
True masters have control. Some very powerful skills really can be developed and it is true thatthe greatest secrets are kept for a very select circle.
If you think about the high-end learning principles that I have discussed in this book, they all spring out of deep, creative plunge into an initially small pool of information.
The learning process is summed up as follows: Laying a solid foundation by studying positions of reduced complexity. Then apply the internalized principles to increasingly complex scenarios. Take a single technique or idea and practice it until we feel its essence. Zoom in on very small details to which others are completely oblivious Then we gradually condense the movements while maintaining their power, until we are left with an extremely potent and nearly invisible arsenal. After training in this manner, we can see more frames in an equal amount of time, so things feel slowed down.
Once we have felt the profound refinement of a skill, no matter how small it may be, we can then use that feeling as a beacon of quality as we expand our focus onto more and more material.
Imagine you are building a pyramid of knowledge. Every level is constructed of technical information and principles that explain that information and condense it into chunks. Once you have internalized enough information to complete one level of the pyramid, you move on to the next. Say you are 10 or 12 levels in, then you have a creative burst and realize there is a connection between that discovery and what you already know (or else you wouldn’t have discovered it).
Something about this type of brooding, ominous buildup in the sky clicks me into a highly efficient place. I was on fire with ideas.
When hit with surprises, if you have a solid foundation, you should be fine. Tactics come easy once principles are in the blood.
This was the second dirty trick and the matches hand’t even begun. Typical, but there was nothing to be gained by getting worked up about it.
I’m up 3-0! But I smelled the finish line and charged, overextended, and he put me down. Two points, 3-2. He’s back in it.
There is no such thing as a fixed recipe for victory or happiness. If my approach feels right, take it, hone it, give it your own flavor. In the end, mastery involves discovering the most resonant information and integrating it so deeply and fully it disappears and allows us to fly free.
@joekotlan on X