Being at the pinnacle in other people’s eyes had nothing to do with quality of life. Eight national championships, more fans and recognition than I could dream of — and none of it was helping my search for excellence, let alone happiness.
Entity vs Incremental
Two theories of intelligence produce two completely different responses to failure:
Entity theorists believe intelligence is fixed. They consider themselves winners because so far they have won. They focus on what comes easy and ignore what is harder. When they lose, it is a crisis — proof of inadequacy. On the playground, they use “I wasn’t trying” after missing a shot. Someone stuck with an entity theory is like an anorexic hermit crab: starving itself so it doesn’t grow, to avoid having to find a new shell.
Incremental theorists believe intelligence is developed through effort. Losing is information, not identity. They put themselves out there and reap the lesson, win or lose.
This is the-will-to-think in its developmental form: entity theorists stop when an answer “sounds right” because going deeper risks discovering they are wrong. self-acceptance is impossible for the entity theorist because every failure threatens the fixed identity — the mask that says “I am smart” cannot survive evidence of not-smartness.
They claim to be egoless, to care only about learning, but really this is an excuse to avoid confronting themselves. They wanted to win before the battle began. I loved the struggle that was the heart of chess.
From Child to Adult to Child Again
This journey — from child back to child again — is at the very core of my understanding of success.
The child plays naturally. The adult learns technique, form, discipline — and often loses the play in the process. The master returns to the child’s spontaneity but now with the adult’s depth integrated. Jackson Pollock could draw like a camera but chose to splatter paint that pulsed with emotion. He studied form to leave form.
This maps onto the-hero-within: Orphan → Wanderer → Warrior → return. And onto impro: education kills spontaneity, but the master recovers spontaneity through — not despite — technical mastery. The five stages: not knowing → knowing → using → using well → making it your own. The final stage looks like the first stage to anyone watching — but the depth is invisible.
Depth Beats Breadth
Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential.
The conscious mind can only process limited information per unit of time. When presented with too much, the font shrinks and you cannot see details. When used for a much smaller amount, you see every detail — and time feels slowed down. Profoundly refined martial artists appear mystical because they perceive and operate within segments of time too small for untrained minds.
The mechanism: converting surrounding information into unconsciously integrated data instead of ignoring it. This is predictive-processing in action — the expert’s top-down model compresses so much context that the remaining conscious bandwidth is spent on the critical delta. Depth provides this compression naturally: reworking the same material until it is unconsciously integrated is what makes the expert’s perception appear supernatural.
Waiting Is Life
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 of us live without fully engaging, waiting for the moment when our real lives begin. The sad truth: if we are not present, our true love could come and go and we wouldn’t notice.
An appreciation for simplicity, the everyday — the ability to dive deeply into the banal and discover life’s hidden richness — is where success, let alone happiness, emerges. Rainwater streaming on pavement teaches a pianist how to flow. A leaf gliding with wind teaches a controller how to let go. A housecat teaches how to move. The sides of the mountain sustain life, not the top.
Making Sandals
A man wants to walk across thorny land. One option: pave the road, tame all of nature into compliance. The other: make sandals. The sandals are the fruitional view: rather than arranging life to have as few limitations as possible, commit to being embodied with whatever arrives.
In order to grow, you need to give up your current mindset. You need to lose to win. Those locked up by the need to be correct cannot receive teaching — they explain and justify instead of listening. Protected periods for cultivation are necessary: there are times when a performer is soft, in flux, broken-down, and learners in this phase are inevitably vulnerable.
The biggest roadblock to releasing tension during breaks: the fear of whether we will be able to get focus back. If getting focused is hit or miss, how can we give it up once we have it? The zone cannot be grasped — but it can be practiced: fourteen-minute cycles of deep thought, then release, then return with a fresh slate.
Common Misread
The dimwit take is “just practice more and you’ll get better.”
The midwit take is “talent matters more than effort — deliberate practice is overrated.”
The better take is that the art of learning is not about accumulating more but about integrating deeper — and the integration requires willingness to be vulnerable, to lose, and to return to the child’s openness after earning the adult’s discipline. The entity theorist avoids this vulnerability because it threatens identity. The incremental learner embraces it because growth IS identity.
Main Payoff
We are built to be sharpest when in danger, but protected lives have distanced us from our natural abilities to channel our energies. The real test of nonviolence is not in a flower garden but when confronted by hostility. The real test of learning is not in a classroom but in unfamiliar terrain where the world is stacked against you.
No matter how much preparation we do, in the real tests of our lives, conditions will not be calm or reasonable. This is when we have to perform better than we ever conceived of performing. And we can — if we have made the journey from child to adult and back to child again.
References:
- Josh Waitzkin, The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance