The Tim Ferriss Show - #375: Josh Waitzkin — How to Cram 2 Months of Learning into 1 Day

Episode Date: June 26, 2019

"From my perspective, the goal is unobstructed self-expression." — Josh WaitzkinJosh Waitzkin, author of The Art of Learning, is an eight-time US National Chess Champion, a two-time World Champion in Tai Chi Chuan Push Hands, and the first Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Black Belt under nine-time World Champion Marcelo Garcia.For the past 12 years, Josh has been channeling his passion for the outer limits of the learning process toward training elite mental performers in business and finance, and to revolutionizing the education system through his nonprofit foundation, The Art of Learning Project. Josh is currently in the process of taking on his fourth and fifth disciplines, paddle surfing and foiling, and is an all-in father and husband.The audio and video were recorded at The Sohn Investment Conference in the David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.The Sohn Conference Foundation is dedicated to supporting innovative initiatives to cure and treat pediatric cancer. The Sohn Conference Foundation raises its funds through a unique strategy: Wall Street's most successful investors offer their expertise on stage and inspire large audiences to give to the foundation's cause. You can learn more about it at sohnconference.org.Click here for the show notes for this episode.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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for the Performing Arts in New York City. The event was the Sohn Conference, S-O-H-N, which is dedicated to supporting innovative initiatives to cure and treat pediatric cancer. The Sohn Conference Foundation raises its funds through a unique strategy. They invite Wall Street's most successful investors to offer their expertise on stage, and you get to hear all sorts of interesting theses, different positions, and so on. And they use these presentations and this insight to inspire large audiences to give to the foundation's cause, which is supporting, curing, and treating pediatric cancer. You can

learn more about it at sownconference.org. That's S-O-H-N conference.org. Please welcome to the stage, Tim Ferriss, everybody. Let's go! Thank you so much. I appreciate it. That's Macho Duck, 1979. You can look it up. Please enjoy. Thank you all for sitting around after bio break to listen to the conversation I'm about to have

with my good friend Josh. Thank you, Graham, for having us. And I'm going to jump into it. I usually use a much more embarrassing intro for Josh when we're recording something in private, so I'll use something a little less embarrassing. Josh Waitzkin has perfected learning strategies that can be applied to anything,

which I've seen him do many times, including his loves of chess, Brazilian jiu-jitsu. He's a black belt under phenom and multiple-time world champion Marcelo Garcia. Tai Chi push hands. He's been a world champion. And now paddle surfing and foiling. Josh spends his time coaching many of the world's top performers in many different fields. And he is the author of The Art of Learning. Please welcome to the stage, Josh Waitzkin. All right.

Hey, everybody. Alright, let's get to it, shall we? That song was my trigger song for the 2004 World Championship in Tai Chi Push-Ins and Graham thought it would be fun to jack up my physiology walking out. It's amazing how well it works. I just hear two bars of that song and I'm ready to fight like ten dudes. So, here we are. You can pick them out,

anybody volunteering? I listened to that in the three months of training camp for the worlds. And then during the, during the competition and then between the finals and the sudden death playoff, the worlds. And so, which was the wildest state of my life, maybe. So it has a powerful triggering impact. So you are really a master of triggers and cues and systems. I mean, you, more than perhaps anyone I know, has spent a high percentage of your life in what I think people hear and what I would consider the zone. And you said something to me yesterday when we were catching up a bit, which was, you feel like you've been cramming two months of learning into each day recently, which sounds incredible, sounds almost unbelievable, especially knowing you as well as I know you, because it's

not like you just sit around watching paint dry all day. So why and how is that? How could that be? Yeah, my training recently has been super exciting. So I fell in love with surfing a few years ago and really took it on all in, but I was living in New York City, so it was difficult. And so I had to figure out how to take on surfing in a really intense way living here. So the first thing I did is I hadn't spent a life skateboarding or snowboarding or going sideways forward at all. And so I had to, so the first thing I did is I got a one wheel electronic skateboard with a big wheel in the middle. It's an amazing invention. And I, that's how I started getting around New York city. So I spent about a year and a half, maybe 2,300 miles of one wheeling, 20 to 25 miles an hour through New York

traffic, which was a lot of fun, had some amazing wipeouts. But that was how I just initially got used to burning in the experience of being in surf stance and moving forward. And it was really powerful. And then a year and a half ago, my wife was game and moved my family down to really my favorite place on earth, beautiful place in Latin America where the jungle meets the Pacific Ocean. And took on stand-up paddle surfing and foil training all in. Initially, it was just stand-up paddle surfing, and recently it's been foiling. And so in the past, this past fall, so late August,

September, I fell in love with foiling, and that's when things really went to overdrive for me. I've been using this invention called an e-foil, which is, so foiling is, I'm not sure if you've ever seen it, imagine like a five-foot surfboard with a 29 and a half inch mast going down, and there's a wing, and so when you're in wave energy, or you're moving forward quickly, you're, all that's in the water is the wing, and so you're, it's frictionless, it's way faster than surfing, it's incredibly intense. Yeah, Graham asked me to put together a little video, this was from a few days ago, just so you could see what foiling is. So you see the board is above the water.

This is in one of my favorite spots. And you're going 25, 30 miles an hour. And the wing is all that's touching the surface. And it's crazy intense feeling. But this device I'm using, an e-foil, is really incredible. It's made by this company called Lyft, the guy Nick who runs it is a real pioneer in the foil world

and he's built this thing called a folding prop and so what I'm using is entering the wave under power as a propeller but then once in wave energy the propeller folds and I'm just foiling as if, just purely wave energy so what it opens up is the possibility of of entering waves under power like as if you're being towed in by a jet ski.

And this kind of moment is hairy, because if the wave, like after the entry, this wave catches you, here it's like near wipeout and then adjusting back up. If the whitewater catches you, it's like getting shot out of a cannon, and then you're on top of a guillotine. And so you don't want to have,

or you have to dial in the brake falls, like with one wheeling and so what's been interesting is that as opposed to having two to four minutes of wave time a session surfing I'll have 54 minutes or so of wave time at faster speeds and what's what's interesting is it also opens up the ability to do deliberate practice in surfing it's really difficult to similar to an investing you have to be really creative in surfing. It's really difficult to, similar to in investing, you have to be really creative in how you create deliberate practice in the surf world

because the ocean is so unpredictable. It's really difficult to replicate sections, to hit the same thing 10, 15, 20 times. In martial arts, you can just say, I'm going to drill this thing 30 times today or 100 times or 200 times, whether it's a throw or a technique, a submission, and then you can try it in training.

In surfing, it's very difficult to replicate the same condition once, even a couple times in a few months. So the foiling is really interesting because it allows me to enter, the e-foil allows me to enter the wave, and then prop folds, and I'm just foiling the wave, and I'm 20 to 30x-ing the amount of wave time per session. But it also allows me to do really interesting things with deliberate practice. Like, for example, when you're under speed on a foil

and you go over a big boil and you're in a big wave, a boil is like a huge just upsurge of water pressure. If it hits the wing or hits one side of the wing, you get catapulted out of control. So most people, if they're foiling, you don't have many chances to train at boils, and when they happen, it's just catastrophic. It's a massive wipeout. Now, I did a session, I did two sessions where I went over 200 boils at top speed. It's doing tons of reps of boils or tons of reps of steep sections. The learning curve is incredible. And it feels physiologically like between one and two months of training per session. Afterwards, I feel like I have to lie in a dark room with my eyes closed for 10, 15 minutes,

just to process. The brain feels like it was plugged into the matrix. It's really intense. So it's kind of, the foiling is at the cutting edge of the surf world, and the e-foiling with folding props is at the tip of the tip of the spear. And it's really powerful to feel

what the brain feels like doing that and how fast the learning curve can be. I love it. And how well the brain responds to intentional, well-structured practice. And one thing I've observed with you since we met eons ago in these different disciplines is how well you think about the, in a sense, sort of the micro practice, like per session, let's call it, the mezzo practice, maybe on a weekly basis, and then the macro practice, how that then can evolve and be programmed over many months. We're going to get into how people can structure their days, how you structure your day. But what I'd love to ask you about is perhaps to reiterate a story

that you've told me before that relates to deliberate practice and skiing. I don't know if you know what I'm referring to, but the most important portion of a run or the most important run when skiing. Do you know what I'm referring to? Yeah, way back in the day, I had some fun days skiing with Billy Kidd, who was a just brilliant Olympic champion many decades ago.

And he asked me, what were the three most important turns of the ski run? And it's an interesting question to sit with because most people will think it's the middle where it's most in like where you know it's most intense most speed or the beginning to get your rhythm he talks about the last three turns before you get on the lift um which is where most people are sloppy most people kind of lift up they their their body mechanic it relaxes that they're but the thing is the last three turns are what you're going to be internalizing unconsciously on the lift right up it's true with martial arts training my whole life always finishing strong always finishing executing a technique very well um whether it's reps drilling or a strong sparring

session or foiling surfing always finishing strong so that the last thing you do is what's gonna probably burn into you most deeply overnight. So harnessing unconscious learning is a huge part of what I do and what I train people to do and that's something I think it's really important to be deliberate about. Another thing you're really good at is making the the subconscious to the unconscious or just the hidden conscious and a big part of your learning, as I observe it, is mastering feedback and measurement. So before we get to how people can structure things, because this informs it, what types of biomarkers do you track in your coaching clients? Because I think it's very common for people to think of, say, chess as a mental

pursuit, to think of something like foiling as predominantly, or jujitsu especially, as a physical pursuit. But that's really a false separation. So what type of biomarkers do you track on your coaching clients, whether they're in the investment world or elsewhere? Well, I've experimented with a lot over the past decade, and what I've come to focus on most deeply is heart rate variability. I have a brilliant HRV specialist, Dr. Leah Lagos, on my team, who works really closely with all of my teams. And so she does HRV training with, if I'm working with a team of top decision makers, for example, with everyone on the team, ideally.

And HRV is a really powerful way of training someone to get into a state of deep concentration relaxed deep concentration away from stress very quickly and then tracking people's HRV tracking people's sleep patterns we of course also track nutritional patterns physical training patterns for me it's really interesting to just I don't like bringing technology out into the water very much but I from time to time I do and and just track wave time, heart rate, different situations. I've been playing, I had a really interesting period a month and a half ago where I was foiling this big wave

that I've discovered in offshore reef break, and it's sort of like a nonstop drop. It just keeps on going. It mounts up, and then you're just accelerating for 30 seconds straight. And your body has this innate physiological, it feels like an evolutionary response to bail out because you're going so fast you're accelerating your body wants to jump out so i started doing hrv breathing um to my resonant frequency while um accelerating

down this way could you just explain what that means to your resonant frequency what does that mean everyone has a unique resonant frequency um that that if you're doing heart rate variability breathing and you're breathing to your resonant frequency it'll maximum to your unique frequency in your physiology it will have the biggest impact in that raising alpha waves relaxing relaxing your body moving you from a stress state to a deep state of relaxation so the ideal way to train an HIV is to work with a brilliant specialist and find out what your frequency is and then do breath work 20 minutes twice a day at that rhythm.

And over time, it's incredible what it can do. And then you get to a place where you can just take a breath and be in resonance. And I did a lot of meditation work for years before this and a lot of trigger work before this. But the HRV I found to be... What was that? Trigger work.

Trigger work, what's that? Trigger work would be essentially using something like a song, like Lose Yourself, Eminem song. So one thing I started doing decades ago would be getting myself into a peak performance state and then attaching a trigger to it, like a song or a scent. So then ultimately I could, as opposed to doing a 30-minute or 40-minute routine,

which I might have had to do back in the chess days, being able to listen to a couple beats of a song or smell something or take a breath and enter into a peak performance state. I learned this lesson from a lot of years in competition where you can't predict when you're actually going to have to fight. And so you might have to do a... I remember going to a world championship in 2000

and I thought I knew it was going to... It's a long story, which I've actually... You and I have discussed before. But long story short, I thought I would have a 30-minute warning before I competed, and then this is in a world championship in Taiwan, and everything changed, and I was after, I was like eating lunch, and then they changed the rhythm, and I had to compete like one minute later, and it really taught me I had to learn how to enter a peak performance state with a breath, like instantly. So HRV is is really powerful and i've been playing

with it in this steep wave and it's fascinating how quickly it takes me from the state of like needing to bail to just complete calm while making that steep drop and then your baseline rises and then you can keep on just getting acclimatized to more intense conditions what type of tools do you use for tracking these days hrv that is is. Do you have a preferred tool for... You know, Dr. Lagos has experimented with a lot of things, and that's sort of her terrain. I've played with a lot of different tools. I haven't actually found, to be perfectly frank,

the software that I think is A++, and so I'm thinking about building some of my own. But I don't, at this point, feel like there's the ideal peak performance training HRV software out there for a bunch of reasons. Nothing has exactly what I want. So people can DIY the search for a tool that as a stopgap measure might help. but let's translate it to, say, the world of investing. How would someone use their HRV to inform how they plan their day, for instance? Might they, like an athlete, wake up and look at their HRV and their sleep pattern and say, wow, I am not recovered, whatever that means. I'm going to defer, to the extent possible, important decisions for today? Or would they use it to, like you said,

track if they are in a sort of sympathetic fight or flight state and then moderate that before taking a particular phone call or whatever it might be? How do you take that data and translate it into the world of, say, investing? Well, you know, the way I personally relate to biofeedback or any kind of technological tool is to use it to train my own somatic ability to feel where I am. And so, like, I don't personally want people to become dependent on technology.

I want them to use technology to develop the ability to feel. So if you're sitting, like, you know, I started meditating when I was 18 years old, and it's very difficult to have feedback. Then in the meditation process, someone might start thinking for eight or 10 minutes before they can realize they're thinking. One thing that's really great about using biofeedback is that you'll have something tell you that you're starting to slip and you're focused. But ultimately, from my perspective, the idea is to train your intuition, your somatic introspection, to feel when your quality of presence, your quality of energy is slipping from like a 10 to a 9. When I start working with people, with top mental performers, very often they could go from a 10 to

a 2 before they even feel the slip. So really, I like to use these tools to train someone to sharpen their intuition, to sharpen their somatic sense for where they really are. And then, for me personally, in my training, that's what I go with. I go with how I feel. In chess, for example, you have to make so many decisions and your physiological state is always changing. And you can't take a break and take a look at what a machine tells you, how you're doing.

But you can use the machine to train your ability to feel where you are. And for investors or decision makers, chess players, poker players, anyone who's in a really high stakes, intense, time-sensitive discipline, you want to have the ability to feel where your performance state is and adjust it on your own, independently.

This is so important. And I'm glad we ended up exploring this because it applies to a lot, right? It really applies to a lot. And I've seen this in, for instance, the exploration of dietary ketosis and using devices like the Precision Extra during times when it doesn't matter. Let's just say on weekends or during vacations. So you're able to see that, I won't get into ketosis right now, you guys can look it up, but it's very interesting for a number of reasons.

And you realize, oh, at 0.5 millimolars on this device, I feel like this. And then at 1.5 millimolars, I feel like this. And you get to a point where you're no longer dependent on the device. And you have that sensitivity so that you can say, you know what, what i'm feeling cranky i'm probably not yet working off of fat and i'm a low blood sugar probably shouldn't send that really sensitive email right now right because i'll do damage control for the next week yeah uh how do you think about structuring a performer's

day and and you could give examples from any field but how should someone think about that because you are to me and I as a job I guess interview top performers in different fields you are so exceptional at focusing and crafting your days and weeks and months in a way that you can focus what suggestions or examples might you describe for people who are looking to better structure their days? Yeah, it's a really important question. I mean, first thing I'll say is that everything that I do in a coaching capacity is individualized. So the essence of what I, if I'm working with someone who is a world-class decision maker in some realm, by definition, I have to know them so intimately before I start making suggestions to what

they do. Because I think that the entanglement of genius and eccentricity or brilliance and madness is so complex and so critical for people who are in the top 0.1% or so of what they're doing. And so I've seen, there are so many dysfunctional habits that I've seen drive brilliant creations. And then there are so many people who are doing things by the book who are just mediocre. So that's one initial caveat that I'll say is that if I'm training somebody one-on-one, I will understand them with tremendous nuance before I'll start tweaking what they're doing.

That said, there are some core principles around day architecture that I think are really important and that are really challenging to embody in this technological age where everyone is distracted, everyone is just constant inputs, everyone's so busy, everyone feels that they should be so busy and everyone's pulled into the external all the time. And people find it very challenging to structure their days or do what they want to do because of an internal relationship to their creative process as opposed to how it will look from the outside. And so I think that a proactive day architecture versus a reactive one is hugely important. I think most people will have lots of meetings scheduled and then maybe they'll try to jam thinking in between the meetings.

So they'll have like two minutes of thinking time in between, which is, from my perspective, disastrous because people are, their brilliance comes from thinking. So I'll block out time, thinking time, in someone's calendar, and then meetings we put in between this, an alignment of peak energy periods. With peak creativity work, like thinking time is hugely important.

Usually it's the reverse. People will do their thinking on the walk back from lunch when they're a little bit lethargic, as opposed to do their thinking first when they wake up in the morning when their energy and their creativity is most intense. How do people identify their peak high energy? up in the morning when their energy and their creativity is most intense. How do people identify their peak high energy? I have people, I mean, I find in my diagnostic process, I find pretty consistently people are right about, I ask people to rate one through 10 how their energy levels and creative

state is at different parts of the day. And then, of course, I examine it. But people tend to have a pretty good sense for this. I think it's really important. You know, one of the things that I have, every one that I do, and I've been doing my whole life, is ending my day thinking about the most important question

and what I do, and then waking up in the morning first thing, pre-input, and brainstorming on it. This is an incredibly powerful tool that I learned from my dad, who's a great writer, in his creative process when I was, you dad, who's a great writer, in his creative process when I was, you know, seven, eight years old, and Hemingway wrote about it in his writing process.

It's been a huge part of my life for decades. Focusing the mind, ending the day strong, like I mentioned before, and focusing on what matters most, and building the musculature of focusing your being on not all this ancillary stuff that just comes at you, but what really matters the most. Releasing it, not stressing out about it all night, sleeping well. And then first thing in the morning, pre-input, not after checking the news or checking Bloomberg or checking Twitter or checking stock prices, pre-input, brainstorming on it. Because what you're doing that way is you're systematically opening the channel between the conscious and the unconscious mind. And that's something that is something

you can do it systematically, day in and day out, rhythmically. So let's give a specific example, and it could be a real world example from your life, could be a hypothetical, could be a composite. What time, give the example, and when you would write it down, you put it at the top of a page in a notebook

before dinner and then put it away. What does it concretely look like? Again, I think that the expression of it is individualized. Some people will write it down on a piece of paper and write it down. Some people will write it in their Evernote and return to it. I wake up usually around 4.30

and I journaled for many years physically but then I had so many journals and it was so difficult to get through them. I actually now use Evernote myself and I just pop it open and start riffing on it. This is something that you can, like, you know, I use this term making smaller circles that initially when we do something

we do it in this big way and then we can kind of refine it, make the circles tighter and tighter and tighter. It's sort of a reference to, in the martial arts, you learn to, a body mechanic in a big motion, then you learn to condense it and make it more and more potent. So this is the kind of thing that you can do at night and then in the morning, but then ultimately, I think, throughout the day, it's very important to do this. Before you go to the bathroom, pose yourself a question. And then don't check your phone while walking to the bathroom. Release your mind. And then come back from it. And then think

about, return your mind to the question. Because what you're doing this way is you're training your ability to focus on what matters most. This is what I call the MIQ, most important question. And I have, you know, I think that MIQ training is one of the most important things that a decision maker can do. Because the best way to train an analyst in a discipline is to train them in knowing where to look, what matters most. And so there's a system that emerges from this day architecture. Imagine the evening, morning rhythm, and then three or four reps of it throughout the day. And then imagine you have a team where you've got a leader who's, say, is at a higher level in a certain discipline, and you've got a group of analysts beneath,

if you have the system I call MIQ gap analysis, where everybody is doing this most important question training, initially one rep, but then multiple reps throughout the day, there's transparency throughout the team, and then there's a periodic review. You talked about feedback. This is a really powerful way to bring in healthy feedback in an organization or in your own internal structure

There's a review of what you if you're doing it on your own What was what did you think the MIQ was now and then a week later two weeks later from this elevated perspective? If you've done much more work, what do you think the MIQ was and then the gap is often where you'll do your you'll devote your work And in the team structure you can have somebody overseeing the MIQs of a group of analysts, and then sometimes tweaking it, sometimes making suggestions, and then team training, deliberate practice, can be focused on the gaps that emerge, where they become

clear between what seemed like the most important question then and what later on became the most important question. So if we're looking at the most important question, this MIQ, is it always, or does it tend to be something very specific? Like how do we mitigate risk

or how can I mitigate risk in position X or whatever it might be? Or are there, when in doubt or when unsure, are there other types of most important questions that people can ask, such as, I'm not really even sure, where might I be neglecting risk? Or something like that. Are there broader questions that you find are very useful

when someone isn't sure on a very specific level where to focus for a most important question? If someone's, say, struggling to come up with the MIQ? I mean, I use this tool for big thematic meta questions. I sometimes will use it for tactical questions. I'll use it sometimes to get a clear read on how I intuitively feel about somebody. Sometimes the MIQ, so I can ask myself,

do I intuitively feel that this is an ethical person? Right? Or if someone is interviewing a leader of a company, you know, what's my intuition about, you know, the quality of his or her thinking? Or it can be a much more tactical question. It can be, I study video of a surf or foil session I had, and then I might leave the whole question in my mind and just sleep on it and then emerge like what feels most like what what's the biggest lesson to be taken out of this or I might look at one thing and and drill in um like a very specific technical idea and try to refine it I used to do this with opening theoretical opening questions in in the

chess world where often I would be stuck and there'd be an area of stuckness most great thinkers I find are like a knife through butter do most things, but then there's one or two places they're stuck. Those areas of stuckness are a really powerful place to focus this tool. And it's really breathtaking what happens. I mean, you just get into the rhythm of waking up with the solution and you get used to, after you do this, you might have three or four times a day, the kind of crystallization, miraculous realizations in your creative process that you might have had once every two, three months otherwise. And you said letting go as part of this process.

Does that mean that in your case, I know it's individualized, but that you're not doing it right before bed, you're doing it earlier in the day? How do you do that? It's not right before bed, and that's a great point. Hemingway used to end his writing session leaving something left to write.

It was his version of it. Like mid-sentence or mid-paragraph. Mid-sentence, mid-paragraph, mid-theme, mid-story, mid-something. So not being a writer who just writes everything. It's interesting to look at that idea through the internal versus external framing. Sometimes people feel, because they feel guilty if they don't do everything they could possibly do, so they finish, they blow it out. As opposed to Hemingway always

finish leaving something left to go. So leaving a sense of direction, like activated. And then he would drink wine, he'd release, he'd relax. Maybe I would recommend doing, you know, meditating, working out, having a great night's sleep, listening to some music, enjoy. Don't stress out about the question all night. Don't think about it in bed. And then waking up first thing in the morning and then returning your mind to it. So you really are releasing your conscious mind from it. And the art of letting go is a big one. I think it's one that people in this industry have not taken on as intentionally as they should. This is an industry which people are on all the time. Constant inputs. People are on their phones all the time. People are listening to you while looking at their phones, learning to release that, to focus extremely deeply on what you're doing.

And then, one more point. If you look at the greatest competitors in the world, greatest physical athletes, Marcelo Garcia, who I trained with for many years, who I own a jiu-jitsu school within the city, he's probably the greatest grappler to ever live. And if you watch Marcelo in a world championship he would be sleeping literally minutes before a Mundial's semi-final or final, sleeping

but you've never seen anyone turn it on more intensely and if you look at great fighters people think fighters are like jacked and tense but they're not, they're actually very relaxed the greatest fighters are super relaxed when they're not fighting but when they're in the battle, you wouldn't believe the intensity. And even to deconstruct that further, if you watch a great, for example, boxer, the relaxation before a strike is delivered is incredible.

So it's just the undulation. Most people in high-stress decision-making industries are always operating at this kind of simmering six or four as opposed to the undulation between just deep relaxation and being at a 10. And being at a 10 is like millions of times better than being at a six. It's not, it's just a different universe. Same, same as being all in on a discipline is millions of times more intense than being, you know, 98 or 99%, let alone, you know, I could take it or leave it. Yeah. And just having observed you, observed Marcelo, certainly heard stories about, say,

Floyd Mayweather before gigantic fights. And I heard a friend of mine who knows him said, he walked into his dressing room after Floyd was like, yeah, sure, come on in. He's like, I don't want to interrupt you. You must be prepping. And he's like, no, I'm either ready or I'm not. And he was just sitting down watching some TV. That it's, in a way, your ability to avoid the simmering six directly affects your ability to then ratchet up to turn on to the 99% or the 100%. And if you're always at a simmering six,

you're just at 50% battery all the time. 100% and 50% intensity. And you cannot, you have no idea what your 10 is. And you have, as you mentioned earlier, moved to Latin America. I was convinced as someone kind of born and bred here, I thought the Waitzkin clan, like a group of hobbits, was just going to live in this little corner of Manhattan for forever, as long as the human race would survive. And yet, you moved to a very remote location,

and you have in many areas now in a very clear way, it created a lot of slack and sort of white space for deep work. How would you sell that? Not necessarily moving to the jungle, but how would you train or how do you train some of your performers to stay away from the siren song of FOMO, fear of missing out, the sort of temptation to distraction, because you're very good at deliberately blocking it out.

What do you say to people who are tethered to phones, locked in front of a Bloomberg, who have trouble creating those broader blocks of time? Yeah. Well, the art of saying no, which you and I have spoken about a lot, is a really important one to take on. I mean, in my life today, I'm training as intensely as I've ever trained. I'm training, but the goal is virtuosity,

not a world championship. But I'm training as intensely as if I was training for a world championship. So my ocean training is maxed out intensity, four or five hours a day. And I love the work that I do with my core partnerships in the decision-making space. And it's really beautiful to feel how my game and all of it has risen as I've moved away from everything. I think I was pretty good at saying no before living in New York,

but New York is just so much incoming. But now I'm so far away. And it's been, you know, this is a principle that I've cultivated for many years, but that I feel like I've only begun to see the potency of in the past couple years since I've experienced the power of the empty space. So much of what we're trying to do as idea generators is get away from the thought constructs, the group think, the group biases, you know, where everyone is clustered. And it's really interesting to get away from it all. And like for me coming into New York City, I've lived much of my life in New York, but now coming into New York City after not having been

here for three, four months and living in a place which is just so different. I'm listening to monkeys and ocean sounds and rain falling. You know, it's amazing how much I feel here that I didn't feel before, because living in a city, you have to close down a lot of your pores because of the ambulance sounds, the technology, just the constant noise. So living here, you have to shut a lot down. It's very interesting if you open your pores, getting away from it, then coming in, how much more receptive you are. I think it's true mentally with ideas. I think that if you get away from a lot of the noise, it's much easier to take that 30,000 foot view and see what really matters and see the core patterns that are operating. It's like that idea, you know, that great David Foster Wallace discussion around this is water, built around the metaphor of a fish swimming in water,

it doesn't know what water is. I mean, it's very important to see what our water is. And I think getting away, or structuring a day. I mean, meditation is an incredibly powerful internal tool for cultivating this. If you're meditating 30 minutes or an hour in the morning, and then again later on, and I have some dear friends in this industry who are, it's like that. It's like that.

It's like moving to the jungle in some sense. You have the ability to just see through so much of the crap and focus on what matters most. And what matters most, we don't have a whole lot of time left, but I think is your ability to determine what matters most is affected by your ability to identify

your zone of genius in a way, right? And that also your excitement about or predilection to go from zero to 100 is also dependent on operating in your zone of genius. You've been very, very good at that. How do you suggest or do you have any words of wisdom for people who are trying to determine in their world, whether that's sports, investment,

you can pick one or it could be general, like how they determine where that zone of genius is? Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I've started writing 15 years, I wrote The Art of Learning 15 years ago, and I just started writing again recently. And it's been beautiful to kind of re-enter that terrain. And a lot of what I've been starting is this question of why self-expression? Because a lot of what I'm writing about is a life of how to live a life of self-expression, which is what you're asking about. And then why self-expression, and then how do we get there? And I think that learning who you are as a learner is incredibly difficult. I think,

obviously, it's great to have an ecosystem around you that can help you understand it. If you've got people who can really take you for who you are, as opposed to putting their own constructs on you, which is very difficult because people are trying to maintain, to justify their own decisions, so they're trying to box you into those. I think that, I mean, there's so many frames in order to understand who we are. I mean, are we a visual, kinesthetic,

or auditory processor? Most people don't even ask this question. Do you love mountains or ocean or city? Do you like the rain? Do you like to control things or let things rip in a more relaxed way? What are the patterns behind your greatest successes? What are the patterns behind your biggest errors? I like to look at that personally, professionally, technically, and psychologically.

In other words, breaking down the boundaries between your personal life and your professional life um and think breaking and looking at things both in terms of technical specific errors and and brilliant creations and more thematic and psychological um kind of meta manifestations of that tactical um example what are the things that have driven our greatest insights and what are the things that have locked us up most in life and understand understand those and look at what the seeds of each one of these. And this is a big part of what I do in my work. And I think it's so important to be patient with this process. I think that it's very easy for people to follow the mental models of others or follow the paths of others.

And it's usually disastrous. From my perspective, the goal is unobstructed self-expression. So first we have to understand what self-expression is and who we are as a learner. We have to embrace every little, you know, element of our funk and build around it. And I tell you, like, it's such a beautiful thing that happens. And I think that a big part of being all in on something and falling in love with something so deeply that you're just, you're eating it, you're breathing it, you're sleeping it. You wake up in the morning wanting to do it. You want to train at it. Being just on fire,

stoked out of your mind on the thing is feeling like you're expressing yourself through what you're doing. Like if you're a writer or a chess player, or you're writing books and doing brilliant podcasts like yourself, if you feel like you're expressing the core of your being through what you're doing, then it's beautiful. If you feel like you're living in someone else's model, or even if I'm taking on an art like surfing and I'm doing it in a way that someone else tells me to do it versus a way that expresses the core of my being, it's a different world. So it's not so easy to get to know ourselves, but I think the art of introspection psychologically, somatically, is one of the most important that we can take on.

And I just want to thank you personally, we're out of time, but for helping me to take the snow globe of life and just to put it down long enough

to let it settle so that you can see more. I think that's one, I wouldn't say a gift that you have. I mean, it is a gift in a sense, but it's a talent

and a skill you've developed. It's like putting the snow globe down long enough so that you have. I mean, it is a gift in a sense, but it's a talent and a skill you've developed. It's like putting the snow globe down long enough so that you can see through it. And thank you for making the time, coming out of your reclusive jungle habitat and sharing with us today. Thank you, man. And I want to thank Graham Duncan,

who's co-chairing this. He's a dear friend of mine. And I think I've been observing this event for so many years. It's an important cause. And I think it's awesome what you guys are doing. And Graham, much love, man. All right. Thanks, everyone. Thank you, guys. Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me?

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