These are the steps to high-level learning and performance: Delve into the essential aspects of a small pool of basic information that is foundational to your chosen topic or field and do so in a manner that is in keeping with your unique learning style. Building on this base, devote yourself to exploring new, ever more advanced sets of information and technique that lie at the outer edges of your ability or understanding. Alternate such periods of pushing yourself to your limit with periods of rest and relaxation that foster recovery and creativity.

By approaching learning in this way, your internalized knowledge will lead to bursts of insight and discovery, which you can expand further by breaking down the mechanics that led to your achievements. Eventually, you will come to recognize the feeling that a refined and integrated body of knowledge produces in you and you will be able to target the re-creation of this feeling as you pursue new subject areas.

In Josh’s Words:

Listen:

“I have talked about style, personal taste, being true to your natural disposition. This theme is critical at all stages of the learning process. If you think about the high-end learning principles that I have discussed in this book, they all spring out of the deep, creative plunge into an initially small pool of information. In the early chapters, I described the importance of a chess player laying a solid foundation by studying positions of reduced complexity (endgame before opening). Then we apply the internalized principles to increasingly complex scenarios. In Making Smaller Circles we take a single technique or idea and practice it until we feel its essence. Then we gradually condense the movements while maintaining their power, until we are left with an extremely potent and near invisible arsenal. In Slowing Down Time, we again focus on select group of techniques and internalize them until the mind perceives them in tremendous detail. After training in this manner, we can see more frames in an equal amount of time, so things feel slowed down. In The Illusion of the Mystical, we use our cultivation of the last two principles to control the intention of the opponent—and again, we do this by zooming in on very small details to which others are completely oblivious.
The beautiful thing about this approach to learning is that 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. Once you know what good feels like, you can zero in on it, search it out regardless of the pursuit.”

“When I think about creativity, it is always in relation to a foundation. We have our knowledge. It becomes deeply internalized until we can access it without thinking about it. Then we have a leap that uses what we know to go one or two steps further. We make a discovery. Most people stop here and hope that they will become inspired and reach that state of “divine insight” again. In my mind, this is a missed opportunity. Imagine that 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 ten or twelve levels in. Then you have a creative burst….In that moment, it is as if you are seeing something that is suspended in the sky just above the top of your pyramid. There is a connection between that discovery and what you know—or else you wouldn’t have discovered it—and you can find that connection if you try. The next step is to figure out the technical components of your creation. Figure out what makes the “magic” tick.”

Further reading, Chapter 19, Bringing It All Together

From THE ART OF LEARNING by Josh Waitzkin. Copyright © 2007 by Josh Waitzkin LLC.
Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc