The Art Of Learning...

Self-help books? Pile of old bollocks more like where the author helps himself to your hard-earned cash by reiterating the blindingly obvious disguised as some pseudo scientific gobbledy-gook.

I have become a bit more open-minded of late, though, after reading some decent martial arts-type theory stuff. And now The Art Of Learning: An Inner Journey To Optimal Performance by Josh Waitzkin has nearly got me convinced that some of them even have the potential to be very good. Perhaps even useful.

Waitzkin is a former chess child prodigy and multiple US national champion who left that game behind to compete in the highly esoteric and sometimes quite brutal world of tai chi chuan. And this is the competitive version where it's about flinging your opponent out of a ring or throwing him over on his arse rather than making pretty patterns in the park of a morning.

In his book Waitzkin charts his life as a chess wunderkind and the pressures that lead him to leave his chess career behind before embarking on a journey into competitive martial arts. In terms of a potted biography it's quite a nice read but it really comes alive when the author starts to examine the processes of how he learnt to soak up information and improve in both spheres and the steps he had to go through to compete at the highest levels in both fields.

Waitzkin doesn't really reveal anything earth-shattering in his book and anyone who's looking for the secret key to unlocking the genius inside themselves will be sorely dissappointed that there's no quick-fix solution to attaining greatness. The lesson clearly stated here is that high-level success requires hard work. And lots of it. Constantly.

But the book is very strong when Waitzkin dismantles the mechanics of his learning processes and breaks them down and makes the connections between his chess learning and development and his martials arts learning and development and compares and contrasts the two. You can almost see the lightbulb go on in his head when you're reading the book.

It's good stuff, a good read and written with real clarity. As a martial artist currently stepping up his game with a black belt grading on the horizon it's good to have old lessons, such as 'investing in loss' and 'learning form to forget form', reiterated.

I'm still a long way from buying anything by Paul McKenna yet, though.