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March 14, 2019 - Dr. Oz Podcast

39:00

The Value of "Losing to Win"

Josh Waitzkin is an American chess player and martial arts competitor. In this interview, he reveals to Dr. Oz the importance of learning to deal with failure in a productive way. He also dives into the importance of finding our “internal compass” to navigate our life’s path. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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	For example, if a kid comes back with a good grade, you say, I'm so proud of the work you did.
	Or, I'm so proud of how hard you worked on this project.
	This kind of thing.
	As opposed to, you know, you're brilliant at math.
	Parents often think saying, you're so smart at math, you're brilliant at math.
	That's a positive thing to say because it's encouragement.
	But in fact, if you tell a kid that he's succeeding or she is because she's brilliant, then when they fail, it must be because they're stupid.
	and kids make that connection in their minds.
	Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
	Today's guest did two things.
	He became one of the world's best chess players.
	And he also became one of the world's best martial arts competitors.
	Both, by the way, performing in world championships and winning them.
	So he's not someone who's actually learned how to do things right in one area.
	He's been able to broach in topics as far away as you can possibly imagine.
	I guess I don't even know what's further away than those two from each other.
	His name is Josh Waitzkin.
	Some of you may know him because of his chess prowess.
	And there are actually movies based on Josh.
	So Josh, welcome to the show.
	Thanks, great to be here.
	Give me, just in the very beginning, what...
	It's sort of starting this whole thing off.
	You're six years old.
	You glance at a chess set somewhere in New York City.
	I guess it was your father carrying you around?
	No, I was with my mom walking through Washington Square Park.
	With your mom?
	We were going to play in the monkey bars.
	In the monkey bars.
	And you're sort of intrigued by this game of chess.
	Walk me through how that evolved into a possible career path for you.
	Well, the first time I saw the game, it was an amazing experience.
	I was just walking with my mom again to play on the monkey bars, and in that southwest corner of the park, there were all these chess boards set up, and I remember watching these two hustlers playing, and something drew me into the game.
	I broke away from my mom, I ran over, and I watched for two, three minutes.
	Then a crowd formed around my mom, pulled me away, and we went on to the monkey bars.
	But I was thinking about the game, thinking about the way the pieces were moving.
	And a couple days later, we were walking through again, and I had watched a couple kids playing in class that day, in school.
	And again, I broke away from her.
	I was six years old at the time.
	And I ran over to this old man with this big gray beard, and I said, you want to play?
	And he said, sure.
	And my mom told him I didn't know how to play, and we sat down.
	We kind of started duking it out, and it was an amazing experience.
	The way I can describe it is it felt like I was discovering a lost memory.
	Very strange.
	I felt this connection to the game.
	How'd you learn to make the moves?
	Well, I watched a couple people playing, and the patterns made sense to me on some level.
	And of course, you know, he was a serious player.
	I was just a little kid trying to figure it all out, but he saw that I had some talent for the game, and a big crowd gathered around.
	People started saying things, and I was really lost in the game.
	And afterwards, he buckled down, and he beat me in the game, and then he asked me my name.
	And he wrote it on a piece of paper and he said, Josh Waitzkin, I'll be reading about you in the paper someday.
	Is that right?
	And that was my first game of chess.
	And after that I really fell in love with the game I started playing in Washington Square.
	So my first teachers were the hustlers down there.
	You know, by the age of nine you were competing on...
	You know, in the U.S. Scholastic national chess scene and winning all kinds of junior championships, at the age of 11 you drew a game with Gary Kasparov, who was at the time, I guess, the best player in the world.
	Yeah.
	What did he say to you, what did people say to you when you're drawing with the best person in the world and you're only 11 years of age?
	Well, that particular game, that was a simultaneous exhibition.
	He was playing a number of games at the same time, and I managed to draw.
	I mean, it was a pretty exciting experience for me.
	But, you know, my career at that point had really...
	It had some flow to it.
	I was 11. I had won a bunch of national championships.
	But going back a little bit, it's important to note that I lost my first national championship.
	A lot of the time, people, when they've looked at my life and they've seen Searching for Robbie Fisher, and they kind of equate me with that early success.
	When I was 8 years old, I played my first national championship, and I lost the last round on the first board.
	And I think that was the most defining experience of my life.
	What does that mean, losing on the first board?
	Throughout the tournament, I won my games.
	In the last round, I was on the first board, playing for the first place.
	It was me and one other guy tied for first place.
	And it was an amazing experience for an eight-year-old kid.
	You've got your national championship glories on the line.
	You're on this pedestal, camera on you alone in a room, thousands of people watching it upstairs.
	And it was a heartbreaking loss for me.
	But I think that it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
	Why?
	You read about this in the book.
	Talk about the benefit of learning from loss.
	Yeah.
	I think the reason was because up to that point in my chess career had been smooth sailing.
	I had some talent for the game.
	I actually don't think I had that much talent for the game, to be honest.
	The people who I competed with later on international stages I felt were more talented than me often.
	It was my work and my love for the battle which distinguished me.
	But at that point I was eight years old.
	I was just flying.
	And it's very easy when people tell you you're a winner, you're a winner, you're a winner because you win.
	And when you lose to become a loser in your mind.
	There's that brittle reality if you associate your success with talent.
	And I guess if I had won that first That first championship, there was the danger of that happening.
	And I think losing it was tremendous for me.
	Because that year between 8 and 9, I fell into, at first, an 8-year-old's existential crisis.
	I had to really examine, as best I could at that age, why I was doing this thing.
	And then I came back to playing chess for the love.
	And I really came to have a deep appreciation for the art and for the internal growth that came out of it.
	And then I won the following year in the national championship.
	And that's the actual arc of the years of searching for Bobby Fischer, and many people overlook the fact that that big loss happened in the middle of the thing.
	You know, and you talk about the value of losing to win, which you call it in the book.
	Again, we're talking to Josh Waitzkin, the author of The Art of Learning, A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence.
	All of us face loss, and I do think it's what defines a winner.
	Certainly in surgery, it's the case.
	It's not someone who does the case effortlessly without problems.
	It's someone who gets into trouble and can get out of it, or worse, gets into trouble at Big trouble loses the patient so they can bounce back in the second operation of the day.
	Because remember, the second family doesn't really care about the first family at that moment.
	They're compassionate for them, but they want their loved one taken care of.
	And that patient shouldn't care about the first patient anymore.
	But you do.
	It's still in the back of your mind.
	How do you, even today, deal with failure?
	Because stuff happens sometimes not even your own fault, but it causes you to fail and leads to frustrations.
	Forget about the self-worth issues.
	After a while, it can beat you down.
	A lot of folks listening right now have faced their share of failure.
	Right.
	Well, I think often when people look at those on pedestals or people in society places on pedestals, they focus on the external success and as if the road was not bumpy.
	And the truth is, when I think about my life, every success that I can think about has its roots in big disappointment, in failure, you could call it, or a big loss, or a heartbreaking experience that I learn lessons from.
	I really examine myself.
	You know, I think that we tend to really grow at the point of resistance.
	You know, when we're pushed to our limits, something in us is exposed and maybe a little weakness comes up or a psychological foible or something that we've swept under the rug in our learning process.
	And I think that those are the experiences that really give tremendous potential growth So, you know, for me, losing my first national championship came back and won my next national championship when I was 17. I was competing in the under-18 World Chess Championship in Seget, Hungary.
	And this was the most painful loss of my life.
	I was, again, last round I cruised through the whole field.
	I was on the last, every country sends their national champion.
	I was competing against the Russian guy on the first board in the last round.
	And he offered me a draw about 20 minutes into the game.
	So all I had to do to share the World Championship title was shake hands.
	Shake hands and world champion.
	And I declined.
	I pushed for a win in my style.
	That's kind of how I always played.
	And I lost.
	And it was a devastatingly painful loss, you know, inches from a world championship.
	But it's interesting because three months later, when I was finally able to sit down and study the game very deeply, I came to understand it.
	It's actually really fascinating because the lesson learned from tens of hours of study of that game ultimately are what manifested and helped me win the 2004 World Championship in the martial arts.
	And when I think about it, and that's kind of an interesting story about how that works.
	Tell it, tell it.
	That's like, what fascinates me most about you, and I suspect for many of the listeners it will be the same, is your ability to extrapolate from one form of competition into another.
	Because that's what brilliance is all about in many ways, right?
	If you look at some of the things that, I mean, Einstein's concepts of relativity evolved from concepts that were completely in a different field.
	And it's true for so many billion people.
	So how does that happen?
	Before he goes into mixed martial arts, would you have taken the draw now?
	No, no way.
	You wouldn't go back and take it?
	I never have taken it.
	It's been my style since I was a little boy, and it still is to climb the draw, push for the women.
	I've always pushed for the top.
	And if I get there, great.
	And if I don't, then the lessons learned are what are going to define me.
	So you'd rather lose than tie?
	Yeah.
	You know what it is?
	I think a lot of the time we can get into this habit of getting up to a certain moment.
	We're challenging ourselves up to a certain level and we can reach a certain point.
	And then we reach that moment where the final push at trying to summit Everest or something.
	That final push is where you are really tested deeply.
	Of course, sometimes making that push in the wrong moment, as we've seen, can be tragic.
	But when you're dealing with internal growth, I think that that's the moment where the really remarkable leaps come.
	So when I think about my life from when I was a little boy on, it's declining that draw and testing myself in that final battle at the very end.
	Isn't there some hubris in that, though, too?
	And that often leads to destruction.
	There could be.
	But it's not based on a sense of immortality.
	I mean, I have a very...
	One thing about being a competitor your whole life in different fields is that you know losing.
	I know losing intimately.
	It's been part of my road every day.
	And right now I'm training for the world championships of my third discipline, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
	Completely different art.
	And I'm training every day on the mats with 250-pound guys who often are...
	I take a lot of pain.
	You win, you lose.
	It's part of the everyday experience.
	So I don't really...
	I think that real competitors, people who really put themselves, or real performers, people who put themselves on the line, like yourself, every day.
	I mean, there's this healthy sense of your own fallibility and your own mortality.
	You get very comfortable making mistakes.
	And admitting them, right?
	Yeah.
	The joke in medicine is you're often in error, never in doubt.
	Right.
	So you make mistakes and you just keep going.
	Your biggest enemy is indecision.
	I would think in that chess analogy, if he offers you the draw and you can't decide to take it or not, that's the biggest problem.
	Right.
	And that happens a lot.
	Often people offer draws in order to plant the seed in a critical moment of a game.
	Somebody will offer their opponent a draw so that that question of whether or not I should take the draw is kind of rippling through their mind while they're trying to make this critical chess decision.
	So if I'm in a slightly worse position and you have a difficult decision to make, I might offer you a draw.
	So you should decline the draw.
	You know that.
	So you feel guilty about accepting it, but the question is lingering in your head while you're calculating the variation, or the position, and it can really, so setting in that kind of uncertainty into the opponent's mind.
	So in that World Championship game, when you were age 17, did you think you had a superior position?
	No, no, I thought it was an unclear, interesting position, and I wanted to fight it out.
	You know, what actually happened in the game, you asked me about the connection.
	We're not going to do that now, we'll do it when we come back.
	Oh, okay, sounds good.
	We've got a lot more questions to get to, but first, a quick break.
	Josh Wieskin has done many things.
	He's won national championships, internationally recognized also as a brilliant chess player, but he's also been a competitive force and a world champion in martial arts.
	And he just continues to go into different fields and to test himself.
	And we're talking a little bit about the implications of that for all of you as we can teach you about what it means to win and what it means to deal with loss.
	You're going to walk me through how that analysis of the chess game that you lost at age 17, when you could have drawn but you didn't, taught you enough to be able to win a world championship in martial arts a decade later.
	Well, it's interesting, you know, one thing I've observed over time is how, you know, I always study my losses.
	The losses are often when young chess players or, you know, young artists in any field, they always want to focus on their wins or their best moments, but the growth comes from the study of the worst moments.
	And what I've always done in my careers Both in chess and martial arts has done a very deep study of moments where I've shown a little glitch because very often the technical and the psychological are somehow interconnected.
	So there's a technical manifestation of an error and there's usually a psychological manifestation which is parallel to it.
	And the connections between those two are really at the core of how I connect disparate arts, like for example a physical for a mental discipline.
	So in that moment I was 17 years old, was competing in the last round of the World Championship against this guy, Peter Svidler, who's a very strong Russian Grandmaster.
	And in the critical moment of the game, I had a slight, slight, slight advantage.
	But if you play chess at all, one side of the board is called the queen side, the other is the king side.
	I was kind of building a positional advantage on the queen side, and he had this king side attack.
	And if you lose the king, of course, you lose the game.
	So that's a very decisive thing.
	And he's a brilliant attacking player, absolutely wild tactician, creative, fantastic attacking player.
	And that was my style as well, to be aggressive.
	And in this moment where he had this kingset attack on the piece that I cannot lose that was beginning, and there was this critical moment in the game, and I studied for 10, 15, 20 hours afterwards, about three months after I'd lost the game.
	And I realized that what I had to do in this moment, and it was completely outside of my conceptual scheme in the moment as a chess player, was I had to make this move, retreat my knight on F3 to D2, which basically means that I had to take my final defensive piece away from defending my king.
	Which seems counterintuitive, because that's a piece which is defending my king.
	But the idea of it is very interesting, which is that, in fact, his attack needed my defense, like fire needs fuel to burn.
	And by removing this defensive piece, he had this empty space that he'd fall into, and his attack had nothing to bite into.
	And in fact, it had no way to materialize into something real.
	So it was meeting aggression with empty space, the power of empty space.
	The irony is, you know, my chess career went on for four or five years after that moment.
	Then I moved into Tai Chi.
	I got involved in Taoist philosophy, Buddhist thinking.
	I moved away from chess.
	And the essence of Tai Chi, which is the martial embodiment of Taoist philosophy, is using empty space to defeat aggression.
	Now, I wasn't aware of the psychological connection between that moment when I was 17 and this art.
	I didn't realize it until quite recently.
	So then I went on You know, to compete in national championships, world championships.
	And again, I lost in 2000 my first world championship.
	In 2002, I took third.
	And finally, in 2004, I was in Taiwan in this incredibly hostile stadium.
	This is now, by the way, martial arts world championships.
	Let's be clear on which world championships you're talking about.
	I'm sorry.
	Yes, you're right.
	This is the Tai Chi push-ins world championships.
	So basically the rules are that points are scored for throwing someone on the floor out of a ring.
	So it's a very fast, dynamic, aggressive, intense martial art.
	It's a beautiful art.
	A lot of it is moving with the opponent's intention, learning how to read and control the intention.
	Just in this final match, which was the most brutal experience of my life, the most challenging of my life, against someone who was a wildly intense, brilliant martial artist, I was on the edge of defeat.
	And what I had to do fundamentally to win the thing was to use his power, his aggression, his strength, all of that, And I was able to find ways of turning the ferocity of his attack against him in an incredible way, which was basically a manifestation of this lesson learned when I was 17. And it's so interesting how, in my life, Losses have always given birth to insight, which ultimately helped me down the road.
	Sometimes in ways that I was conscious of, often in ways that I was unconscious of.
	For example, I moved into this discipline, Tai Chi Chuan, which was in some sense the embodiment of the biggest disappointment of my chess career.
	Did you stop playing chess after that loss?
	No, no, no.
	I played for four or five years.
	Afterwards, I had a lot of rich years.
	Why did you switch from chess to Tai Chi?
	Well, this is interesting from an educational perspective.
	There were a couple of different elements.
	One was that the film Searching for Robbie Fisher came out about my life when I was 15, 16. And that immediately made things complicated for me.
	Because before, I had been...
	At that time, I was a seven or eight-time national champion in the chess world.
	I was the top-rated player for my age in the country.
	I had a lot of momentum.
	But then suddenly, when I'd go to tournaments, I'd have tons of fans, groupies, asking me to sign autographs and take pictures.
	And I had this difficult thing happen, which was that slowly, over the ages of 17, 18, 19, 20, little by little I was becoming externalized.
	My love for the game was being challenged by these external...
	By watching myself think from across the room, by thinking how I looked to all the fans by the television cameras.
	But there was this other element of it which I think was, in fact, more insidious.
	I think it was more decisive as well.
	When I was in my late teens, I began working with this Russian coach who...
	I was a very aggressive, creative chess player.
	My strength lay in creating chaos on the chessboard and finding hidden harmonies.
	I thrived in stormy conditions where things were wild and my opponents were searching for clarity, but I was at peace in the unknown.
	That was what my style was.
	And this coach was a much more conservative, quiet, positional player.
	His style was called prophylaxis, where you basically are stopping the opponent's ideas before they've even thought of themselves.
	And it's kind of like playing like an anaconda, squeezing the breath out of opponents.
	This wasn't my style.
	I was a charismatic, aggressive guy.
	And he had me playing in the style of Anatoly Karpov, who was this kind of positional chess player.
	He had me studying Karpov's games for years.
	And he urged me to think when I'd play a chess game, instead of thinking, what would Josh do here?
	What would I do?
	What would Karpov play here?
	And, you know, this had a very profound effect on my love for the game and on my relationship to it because I slowly became disconnected from my natural passion for creative attacking chess, from my natural voice, from my intuitive voice as an artist.
	And then what happened over time was that this disconnect, I lost my internal compass over the chessboard and in life, and so that made it increasingly difficult for me to handle these external pressures.
	And in truth, That realization is a big reason why I wrote my book, and I've recently opened a non-profit educational foundation.
	I'm doing a lot of work with parents and teachers, training them around educational ideas I've come to, because I feel that this experience that I had towards the end of my chess career, I see it manifesting in the classrooms everywhere, which is that students are being boxed into cookie cutter molds they don't naturally fit into.
	For example, if a teacher learns one way, they'll often teach the students that same way, as opposed to bringing out the natural shine of a student.
	And if there's anything that I've learned through my lifetime of competition and learning, it's that we really, in moments where we're pushed to our absolute limits, if there's anything that we haven't genuinely, introspectively addressed in our learning process, again, if we've swept anything under the rug, if we haven't taken ourselves on, then it'll come out under pressure.
	And the ones who really shine, in my opinion, in all fields, are the ones who are basically expressing their personalities naturally and seamlessly through their discipline.
	They're just being themselves over the board or on the mats or in whatever discipline, whether they're painting, whether they're doing anything in the arts or sciences or mathematics or business.
	They're learning and they're performing in a manner which is tapped into their unique minds.
	And I think that's an issue which is neglected tremendously in school systems.
	And it has a devastating effect because kids are disconnected from what they're doing.
	They're not in love with the learning process.
	We've got four kids.
	I have discussions very similar to this, not as artfully, poetically expressed as you are expressing them.
	But, you know, it's the common classic parental question, you know, what should I be when I get older?
	My dad.
	Yeah.
	And the answer I've always given, and by the way, when they come up to me with ideas and they'll say, I want to start a, you know, I don't know, candy cane making factory.
	Why?
	To make money.
	I think the appropriate response at a very superficial level is do what you love.
	Beautiful.
	Forget about the money.
	Forget about the fame, the glory, anything else.
	Do what you love.
	If you love it and it doesn't work, you still loved it.
	And if you don't love it and it works, you're 50% of the way there.
	But how do you actually get kids in a school system when teachers now are being graded in how these kids do on standardized tests?
	Not an unreasonable thing to do, by the way, because kids do need to know how to read and write.
	I mean, simple stuff's got to happen or else they can't compete.
	You've got to learn the fundamentals in chess.
	You have to know how the pieces move on the board before you start talking about subtleties and whether they're attack players or prophylaxis players.
	How do you actually get that mindset across to kids?
	And more importantly, how do their parents who are listening to the show right now do that as well?
	Well, it's a great question.
	I mean, I think that fundamentally teaching a child to do what they love is, as you've said, the most important thing.
	And that involves being liberated to focus on the process involved in, first of all, discovering what they love and then pursuing it.
	Now, there are some fundamental ideas.
	For example...
	We're all primarily visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners.
	We all basically have a primary function which works best in terms of processing imagery, visual imagery, or the way things sound, or the way things feel.
	Very often if you have teachers or parents who are auditory thinkers, for example, and they are speaking an auditory language to a visual thinker, they'll alienate that thinker, or to a kinesthetic thinker.
	So first of all, listen to your students.
	I think teachers should always, and parents should listen first.
	Listen to the way their kids' minds work.
	If kids describe the way something sounds, then they're talking to an auditory thinker, or the way things feel, or the way things look.
	And tapping into that reality can really help us learn how to both bring out the natural shine of the child, and...
	Kind of learn how to speak to the child in a way that they'll really understand, that they'll vibrate with them.
	But, you know, in terms of parents, I think that having process-oriented feedback is tremendously important.
	There have been all these studies on different theories of intelligence which kids have.
	Carol Dweck has done great research, a developmental psychologist, on entity versus incremental theories of intelligence, where entity theorists or fixed-trait theorists are kids or people, adults, whoever.
	Who associate success with an ingrained level of ability.
	Kids will use language like, I'm smart at this, or I'm dumb at this.
	I'm smart at math.
	That kind of thing.
	While kids who are incremental theorists will tend to have process-oriented relationship between mastery and themselves.
	And what it takes to become great is hard work.
	And they'll use language like, you know, I worked really hard at that.
	And they'll tend to enjoy the process more.
	What's amazing is how much more brittle that fixed-trait entity theory of intelligence is.
	There have been so many studies on it.
	And it's absolutely a critical issue.
	And this can be dealt with very easily at the home by parents having feedback to their kids, which is focusing, again, on the process.
	For example, if a kid comes back with a good grade, you say, I'm so proud of the work you did.
	Or, I'm so proud of how hard you worked on this project.
	This kind of thing.
	As opposed to, you know, you're brilliant at math.
	Parents often think, saying, you're so smart at math, you're brilliant at math, that that's a positive thing to say because it's encouragement.
	But in fact, if you tell a kid that he's succeeding or she is because she's brilliant, then when they fail, it must be because they're stupid.
	And kids make that connection in their minds.
	Like praising a winner, telling a kid he's a winner, is actually very dangerous because when they lose, that must make them a loser in their minds.
	So having process-oriented feedback, I think, is a tremendously important one.
	And learning how your kid's mind works is very important.
	My mom always told me, like you said, to follow my dreams, to do what I loved.
	And, you know, this question of money is a real one because these standardized tests and this kind of bottom-line culture we're getting into, kids are focusing on the grade.
	It's all about the result.
	But when it's all about the result, first of all, you're following this brittle, fixed-rate theory of intelligence, and you're separating yourself from enjoying the little moments, having being present to the little ripples of the learning process, which I think are what things get really, really beautiful.
	There's less more to come after the break.
	We're back.
	It's Dr. Oz here with Josh Waitzkin, good friend, author of The Art of Learning, A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence.
	Josh is, among other things, a character upon which The Search for Bobby Fitcher was written, the movie about the young kid who's a great chess player and works out a lot of issues in life, which is exactly what Josh Waitzkin did as well.
	He's turned that experience, as well as his experience, winning world championship competitions in In Tai Chi, into a wonderful book that talks a little bit about how we learn, how we deal with loss, and how we prosper through all that.
	Tell us a tiny bit more about your foundation.
	Specifically, what does it seek to accomplish in the teaching of kids about the art of losing?
	Losing to win is a great way of thinking about it, but really it's about what you do in your life when you lose.
	My kids always say I'm a bad winner because it's part of the competition.
	I do want to teach them to compete.
	I've seen you win on the basketball court.
	You seem like a pretty gracious winner to me.
	I'm not being a bad winner on purpose.
	I'm being a bad winner on purpose, but I'm doing it in part to teach them to compete.
	I don't want them to ever think it's okay to walk away from the competition.
	And I'm not sure that's the right thing to do, by the way.
	But my personality is of that nature, and I don't want them complacent.
	And Josh, you said this earlier on, and I was curious about why you didn't take that draw when you were 17. You could have been the world champion, because we wouldn't do anything.
	Well, I would have been shared world champion.
	I know, but no one's going to say that.
	The average person would say, and now the world champion of chess, you know, the junior world champion, John Whiskey, come on in.
	No one's going to say the shared word chess.
	That's not how the mind works.
	But I was thinking about what you said, and it's very true about why you didn't take that, because you learn the most about yourself.
	at the very extremes.
	And the extremes don't happen when you're about to summit and you say, yeah, I'm not going to summit this time.
	I got up far enough.
	I can see the top of Kilimanjaro or whatever you're trying to summit, Everest, and I'll come back again.
	It's that last little bit.
	When you talk about working out, it's the last 5%, 10% where you get most of the benefit.
	Right, absolutely.
	So I want the kids to compete.
	I compete because I want to know how I perform in that setting.
	And I actually don't do it to win or lose.
	I'd much rather win because it reflects that I've learned a bit more from the last time I lost.
	But it's not the most important thing to me.
	Not competing is the most important thing to me.
	And I make it competitive for the kids because I want them to taste the joy of competition.
	Because it is fun, I think, to compete, to test yourself.
	Not to beat the other person.
	I don't want the other person losing when I win.
	I want to learn about myself.
	It's not about them.
	Well, I think a lot of kids are paralyzed by the idea of competition and teaching them to have a healthy relationship to it, to feel liberated, to feel free-flowing within it, to feel like they're expressing themselves within it, and to be liberated by the idea that if they win, that's great, but if they lose, which is what the main fear is, that there'll be great growth that'll come out of it.
	And I think that for a lot of role models in our world to open up and to describe, you know, the honest kind of the guts of their journey and describe their losses, their pain, what it's taken, if our culture focused more on that, on those roads, which often involve tremendous disappointments, then I think people would feel more free to put themselves on the line.
	You know, and that's a lot of what I'm working, you asked me, my foundation, the JW Foundation.
	I'm doing a lot of work in school systems with public school systems, urban youth groups, gifted organizations.
	I've got all sorts of programs working, a lot of teacher training, parent training.
	I guess the core of the vision of my foundation is to help teachers and parents and educational groups bring out the natural shine of their students.
	I think that, again, you've got all of these kids being boxed into an educational system which isn't listening to the nuance of their minds.
	And it's very easy to observe a student and let a student just shine naturally.
	And kids are very close to that.
	A lot of us, as we get older, we're step by step becoming more and more disconnected from our natural flair for the learning process, our natural passion for it.
	When you think about a two and three and four year old child, they want to learn everything.
	They're hungry for it.
	Everything they want to play with, they want to explore, that natural sense of adventure.
	That's a beautiful thing and that can come out.
	I've done a lot of work over the years teaching in the public schools, teaching chess.
	I worked at PS116 in New York City.
	Is that right?
	Oh yeah, I taught when I was 17. Can you imagine having Josh Wisky teach you chess?
	I started working with a group of kids when they were in first and second grade when I was 17 years old.
	For four years I worked with them and they ended up winning city and state championships and took second in the nationals.
	It was an amazing experience.
	And the way it would work is we'd have, say, 12 kids in a classroom.
	And I'd be teaching a chess position up on a demo board.
	And I wouldn't just be teaching the chess position the way I thought about it.
	I'd be kind of giving a simultaneous exhibition of teaching differently to all the different minds.
	And so, because these kids were such different personalities.
	Some were very quiet, introverted.
	Some were crazy, always wanted to run around.
	But the way it would work is that I'd be teaching this position.
	I'd be looking, I'd look one kid in the eye and I'd describe it in the language that he would understand.
	And the next in language that she would understand.
	And the next in language that this other boy would understand.
	And so I'd be teaching it realistically four or five or six different ways of the same chess position that would tap into their natural relationship to chess.
	The beauty of chess, and that frankly, I think this is true in any art, is that the ones who succeed are the ones who play in the style which suits them.
	You know, for many years, the two greatest players in the world were Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov.
	Karpov was a quiet, positional, conservative, prophylactic chess player.
	Kasparov is this charismatic, blood-boiling, wild, attacking, aggressive chess player.
	Politically, they couldn't have been more different personality-wise.
	Over the chessboard, couldn't have been more different.
	They were the two best in the world.
	The reason is because they both brought out their natural strengths to the absolute limit.
	And this is a metaphor, I think, for all of us to think about in whatever we're doing.
	We have to be ourselves.
	Because if we box ourselves into the mold of someone else, then that wasn't designed for us.
	And ultimately, when it comes to it, we're going to feel a little bit inorganic in the learning process.
	A lot of the work that I do When I'm training people is try to break down the disconnect between the conscious and the unconscious mind so that they can have a working relationship with their intuition and use it to fuel their creativity and then use that creativity that comes out of the intuition to raise their technical foundation.
	So they're building games around their natural style.
	And one way of thinking about that, you mentioned in the beginning that we have to all learn the basics.
	We have to all learn the foundation, which I completely agree with.
	But what I've learned is that we can learn the same information virtually any way.
	In other words, if I want to teach somebody this one chess lesson, there's hundreds of ways of teaching that same chess lesson.
	And if I want to teach someone a martial arts technique, that martial arts technique can be taught with so many different kinds of language and focusing on different elements of it depending on what the student's natural strengths are.
	So I think that the way I often approach these arts teaching, whether I'm teaching the basic foundation or anything else, is I listen to what in this discipline attracts the student most.
	And you think about like dropping a pebble in the middle of a pond.
	And that's like the central focal point.
	And then you teach everything else about the art in expanding concentric circles, like ripples expanding from that central point.
	So you learn the art, the foundation of the art, and then the deeper and deeper levels of the art, always in relation to what naturally drew you to the discipline at first.
	So you always have this connection to your own personal connection to that discipline.
	And it's highly personalized.
	You know, that makes a lot of sense.
	I must say, you can see why teaching kids is such an art form.
	And why being a good teacher is not just about being liked by the kid.
	It's about being able to tap into these creative energies.
	Being able to teach, I must say, in surgery...
	You have to know the fundamentals.
	You have to know the anatomy or you're going to get lost and do a lot of damage in there.
	But if you try to teach the anatomy as a static, tedious topic, you won't allow the creative genius of surgeons to prosper.
	And too often, because we're not taught to teach in medicine, it's one of the reasons it's hard to pass the art form along.
	Historically, when we would pass on trades, and we still do it in sports a little bit, you'd mentor people, right?
	You'd take someone who was young, they'd watch you.
	They were probably attracted to you a little bit because they were a little bit like you.
	And then, you know, they'd modify what you were doing to their own...
	When we try to make it modular, And you go from person to person to person to person.
	You don't actually have the mentorship systems anymore.
	And today's educational system is a throwback to the 1830s agrarian society in which it was created.
	And we have modified it and morphed it and changed it now into an educational system that may not deal well with the intellectual and creative needs of a 21st century child.
	I just had this heartbreaking experience.
	I went in to visit Dennis Dalton, who is my favorite college professor, the most important professor of my life.
	And he's a Barnard and Columbia professor who teaches political theory.
	And he teaches this political theory series and then also a series on Gandhi and nonviolence.
	An amazing man.
	And I went in to listen to this lecture.
	It was one of his final lectures of his career because he's retiring.
	And it was in this amphitheater with about 350 students.
	And I was sitting in the back listening to this guy.
	And he's one of the most brilliant minds of our generation.
	And I was shocked, because I hadn't been in a college classroom for many years, and there were all these computers open, and I thought everyone at first would be taking notes.
	But then what I started to observe was that there were literally hundreds of kids surfing Facebook, buying things on Amazon, going shoe shopping on J.Crew and UrbanOutfitters.com.
	What were they buying?
	Shoes.
	I mean, this one girl was putting her credit card information, buying shoes, and this incredible moment where Dalton was describing the Amritsar Massacre in India, where these colonial soldiers opened fire on all these...
	Yeah.
	Families trapped in a square.
	And it was horrifying when this woman was putting in her credit card information, buying shoes.
	And it just broke my heart.
	And this is happening all in college classrooms throughout the country.
	In law schools, in University of Chicago Law School, Harvard Law School, colleges all...
	I mean, I've been researching and I've actually just wrote an article about this.
	It's...
	Devastating.
	The kids are so disconnected from the learning process that they're multitasking just because they feel like they have to...
	I think the root of it is they're looking at learning as being purely informational.
	They feel like if they can take in the information, that's all that matters.
	So often they're recording the lecture on their computer and they're typing in facts and they're not listening to the deeper meaning or to the resonant themes, not letting it settle into their being.
	And this is a heartbreaking thing when you really think about it because...
	When you go back to your college career, right?
	I mean, I'll speak to myself and tell me if you agree.
	I mean, you don't really remember so many facts so much as the ideas which touched you very deeply and ultimately shaped you as a human being.
	Sometimes there's three or four critical ideas from a teacher, right?
	That's right.
	The facts are just the very beginning, the superficial outer layer, but that's what we're focusing on in our educational system.
	And I think that part of that is because kids are disengaged from learning.
	I think the reason they're disengaged is because teachers, from when they're at a very young age, aren't listening to their natural minds.
	They're not listening to how the student's mind works.
	And they're not learning how to bring out that natural strength.
	And so kids aren't feeling listened to, so they're shutting off their minds.
	Well, I think it's both ways to look at it.
	I mean, without question, it's very difficult for...
	Unless you're a great teacher, to hear the voice of the child.
	And we have this sometimes with our kids too.
	They'll have imposed upon them the belief systems of the teacher.
	And you mentioned this earlier.
	An auditory learner is not going to benefit from a visual teacher.
	Certainly if you're kinesthetic, which is what I am.
	I had very difficult times listening to aridite teachers describe With flowery metaphor things, unless they brought alive with their language things in a way that I could actually almost touch them.
	And that becomes the big challenge we face.
	On the other hand, without question, the kids have gotten so used to continuous, unending, tactile input.
	Intellectual input at every level, touching all those different ways of learning, that they'll seek that out.
	But part of it might be, Josh, and I'm curious what you think about this concept, it might be that in fact we should go back to a model of teaching where you only have that one or two or three professional role, the mentor model, where people do get to know you well enough.
	And they can play a creative role.
	Because parents historically did that, and they should still be able to do that.
	But it's tough, because this is complex stuff.
	And a lot of you out there listening are thinking, my goodness, you know, Josh Wiskin, who describes this stuff so beautifully, but then again, he's a world champion chess player and martial arts expert.
	Of course, he's going to be able to describe this well.
	Well, I don't really think...
	First of all, I agree with you about the mentor idea.
	I think it's beautiful for...
	For teachers and students to become very deeply involved with one another and to learn about how their minds work.
	I think the mentors have to be very astute.
	They obviously have to be beautiful at what they do.
	But listen, I mean, I'm just a regular guy.
	I mean, my relationship to learning has just come with putting myself on the line, taking myself on, learning lessons, and just consistently being honest with myself about these things.
	And a lot of what I've done with my book is kind of laying my heart on the line.
	I described often...
	I focused on the most painful moments of my life, maybe more than the successes, because I think those are what we're most defining.
	And I don't believe that this is something that is terribly difficult to do, learning to listen to how your child's mind works.
	I think that just the idea that we all think differently.
	And that's okay.
	I think it's hard if you get stuck in your mind.
	Our guest today has been Josh Waskin.
	Just wonderful and very compelling discussion about what education, learning, winning, and even losing are all about.

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