1. What are your thoughts on the idea of numbers to leave numbers or form to leave form? How would that idea translate to your occupation?
The path to artistic insight in one direction often involves deep study of another—the intuition makes uncanny connections that lead to a crystallization of fragmented notions. The great Abstract Expressionist painters and sculptors, for example, came to their revolutionary ideas through precise realist training. Jackson Pollock could draw like a camera, but instead he chose to splatter paint in a wild manner that pulsed with emotion. He studied form to leave form. (p85)
It is important to understand that by numbers to leave numbers, or form to leave form, I am describing a process in which technical information is integrated into what feels like natural intelligence…All chess players learn that the pieces have numerical equivalents - bishops and knights are worth three pawns, a rook is five pawns, a queen is nine. Novices are counting in their heads or on their fingers before they make exchanges. In time, they will stop counting. The pieces will achieve a more flowing and integrated value system… What was once seen mathematically is now felt intuitively. (p74)
2. Josh Waitzkin describes himself as an attacking player in chess. How would you describe your style at work?
I was a gifted attacking player who should not be bulied away from my strengths. (p84)
My style was to make the game complex and then work my way through the chaos. When the position was wild, I had huge confidence…while my opponents wanted to win in the openings, right off the bat, I guided positions into complicated middlegames and abstract endings. So as the game went on, their confidence shrank and I became a predator. Noticing these tendencies, Bruce started calling me “Tiger.” He still calls me Tiger today. (p12)
3. Have you found your trigger to get into the zone quickly?
Dennis knew that some professional athletes have routines that consistently put them into a good frame of mind before competition. (p188)
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 (p190)
4. Have you discovered or used methods to utilize unconscious part of your mind?
Along the same lines, in my chess days, nearly all of my revelatory moments emerged from the unconscious. My numbers to leave numbers approach to chess study was my way of having a working relationship with the unconscious parts of my mind. I would take in vast amounts of technical information that my brain somehow put together into bursts of insight that felt more like music or wind than mathematical combinations. Increasingly, I had the sense that the key to these leaps was interconnectedness—some part of my being was harmonizing all my relevant knowledge, making it gel into one potent eruption, and suddenly the enigmatic was crystal-clear. (p136)
5. How would studying chess openings or game endings translate to your field? Have you approached learning differently than the norm?
I studied the endgame while other young players focused on the opening… For children who focus early on openings, chess becomes about results. Chess becomes one dimensional - winning and winning fast. Children who begin their chess education by memorizing openings tend to internalize an entity theory of intelligence. (p34-36)
6. What kind of recovery routines do you have?
Dave sat back, scratched his head, and asked me whether or not I believed the quality of a chessic thought process was higher if it was preceded by a period of relaxation. This simple question led to a revolution in my approach to peak performance. (178)
7. Where in your life are your circles still big and what would ‘smaller circles’ actually look like there?
In Making Smaller Cirles 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 nearly invisible arsenal. (p225)
8. Waitzkin applies lessons from chess to martial arts and beyond. What is a skill or mindset you’ve developed in one area of life that could be applied to another?
