Quotes About Waitzkin

#1. A key component of high-level learning is cultivating a resilient awareness that is the older, conscious embodiment of a child's playful obliviousness.

Josh Waitzkin

#2. Growth comes at the point of resistance. We learn by pushing ourselves and finding what really lies at the outer reaches of our abilities.

Josh Waitzkin

#3. In my experience, successful people shoot for the stars, put their hearts on the line in every battle, and ultimately discover that the lessons learned from the pursuit of excellence mean much more than the immediate trophies and glory.

Josh Waitzkin

#4. One idea I taught was the importance of regaining presence and clarity of mind after making a serious error.

Josh Waitzkin

#5. One thing about the business and investing world that I connect to very intimately is that there is little room to deny the harsh realities of your mistakes. A bad call can lose you many millions.

Joshua Waitzkin

#6. One of the most critical strengths of a superior competitor in any discipline - whether we are speaking about sports, business negotiations, or even presidential debates - is the ability to dictate the tone of the battle.

Josh Waitzkin

#7. In the end, mastery involves discovering the most resonant information and integrating it so deeply and fully it disappears and allows us to fly free.

Josh Waitzkin

#8. One of the main focuses of my training sessions is to help individuals find their unique voices in the learning process. We all have our strengths, our weaknesses, our styles of learning, our personalities. Developing introspective sensitivity to these issues is critical to long-term success.

Joshua Waitzkin

#9. Not only do we have to be good at waiting, we have to love it. Because waiting is not waiting, it is life.

Joshua Waitzkin

#10. The human mind defines things in relation to one another - without light the notion of darkness would be unintelligible

Josh Waitzkin

#11. Just about every error has a technical and psychological component: get good at discovering those connections

Joshua Waitzkin

#12. Maybe it's better not to be the best. Then you can lose and it's OK.

Joshua Waitzkin

#13. He landed on cheap shot, but I knocked him out of the tournament.

Josh Waitzkin

#14. My coach and my parents both had this relationship to what I was doing, which was allowing me to express myself with chess. And so I could love it. I had a passion for it. I was expressing myself through chess, and I was learning about myself through chess.

Joshua Waitzkin

#15. To walk a thorny road, we may cover its every inch with leather or we can make sandals. Anger.

Josh Waitzkin

#16. The key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not to live in a shell of static, safe mediocrity. Usually, growth comes at the expense of previous comfort or safety.

Josh Waitzkin

#17. I believe 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.

Joshua Waitzkin

#18. It is rarely a mysterious technique that drives us to the top, but rather a profound mastery of what may well be a basic skill set.

Joshua Waitzkin

#19. In chess you might find a good move. Then you might find a better move. But take your time. Find the best move.

Josh Waitzkin

#20. Everyone at a high level has a huge amount of chess understanding, and much of what separates the great from the very good is deep presence, relaxation of the conscious mind, which allows the unconscious to flow unhindered.

Josh Waitzkin

#21. But as with all skills, the most sophisticated techniques tend to have their foundation in the simplest of principles. As

Josh Waitzkin

#22. Each loss was a lesson, each win a thrill. Every day pieces of the puzzle fell together. Whenever

Josh Waitzkin

#23. In America, people focus on the end result; they focus on the star.

Joshua Waitzkin

#24. Of course the sad truth is that if we are not present to the moment, our true love could come and go and we wouldn't even notice.

Joshua Waitzkin

#25. I have never considered myself a prodigy. Others have used that term, but I never bought in to it.

Joshua Waitzkin

#26. I tend not to dwell on the parallels between chess and business, chess and the martial arts, or any two things for that matter, because the truth is that all pursuits are connected if we gain an eye for the thematic links.

Joshua Waitzkin

#27. I was unhindered by internal conflict - a state of being that I have come to see as fundamental to the learning process.

Josh Waitzkin

#28. Of course there were plateaus, periods when my results leveled off while I internalized the information necessary for my next growth spurt, but I didn't mind.

Josh Waitzkin

#29. The learning principle is to plunge into the detailed mystery of the micro in order to understand what makes the macro tick. Our obstacle is that we live in an attention-deficit culture.

Josh Waitzkin

#30. Our minds are all different and I believe cultivating a keen introspective sensitivity is absolutely essential in discovering our potential.

Joshua Waitzkin

#31. At the very core of my relationship to learning is the idea that we should be as organic as possible. We need to cultivate a deeply refined introspective sense, and build our relationship to learning around our nuance of character.

Joshua Waitzkin

#32. The moment we believe that success is determined by an ingrained level of ability as opposed to resilience and hard work, we will be brittle in the face of adversity.

Joshua Waitzkin

#33. When uncomfortable, my instinct is not to avoid the discomfort but to become at peace with it.

Josh Waitzkin

#34. Very gifted people, they win and they win, and they are told that they win because they are a winner. That seems like a positive thing to tell children, but ultimately, what that means is when they lose, it must make them a loser.

Joshua Waitzkin