They have had the majority in the voting field for years and they continue to elect men to the offices of political power and proceed to beg them to consider a woman’s needs.

Charlie

Josh Waitzkin

Josh Waitzkin was an eight-time National Chess Champion in his youth. As a young adult, Waitzkin switched from chess to martial arts, becoming a Tai Chi Chuan world title holder.

Waitzkin’s leap from the cerebral world of chess to the physical world of martial arts might seem a remarkable transition, but to Waitzkin, success in any field is built on the same foundation — the ability to learn.

Personal asked Waitzkin to share what he has learned about learning…
You’ve proved yourself to be an extraordinary learner. What do you think is the best way to learn?

There is no one set path for everybody to follow. I believe the single most pervasive error in the learning process, and in our educational system, is that teachers and other authority figures tend to jam students into cookie-cutter molds which just don’t fit them. The result is a disconnect from the growth process.

People become passive receptors for information instead of creative learners. If I’ve gleaned anything from a lifetime of competition, it’s that at a high level, those who succeed are the ones who have built games, repertoires and styles around their unique nuance of character.

They are relentlessly introspective, always taking on their weaknesses and learning in a manner that is tapped into the way their mind works best.

With this approach, the walls break down between play and work, which leads to a fully engaged performer… and a learner who loves every step of the journey.

What advice do you have for maximizing learning?
I believe in learning the macro from the micro. Instead of tackling everything at once and drowning in complexity, plunge deeply into a small pool of information.

Spend days, weeks or even months gaining a feel for the operating principles of a limited amount of material. Once you feel those principles deeply, you can take on more complicated material armed with an understanding of what makes it tick.

The same axioms that govern wild complexity can be explored in relative simplicity, and so it is better to learn one thing with quality than 100 things without quality. But do not confuse finding quality with perfection.

What’s wrong with perfection?

I think the concept of perfection is terribly dangerous. It paralyzes learners. When we believe that we have achieved perfection, we lose our beginner’s mind — our willingness and ability to absorb new information.

We stop acknowledging our mistakes and instead justify our decisions against all evidence. This can be disastrous on both a personal and a cultural level.

You’re not saying that we should want to lose, are you?
No. I think we should always try our very hardest to succeed, but we should do so with a healthy understanding of the long-term growth process.

Losing my first National Chess Championship as an eight-year-old was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. It was a heartbreaker, but it made me who I am today.

Had I won, I might have associated success with natural talent. Because I lost, I came to associate winning with hard work, loving the game and overcoming adversity. In my book, I talk about “Investment in Loss” — releasing our strengths and being willing to look bad for a while in order to take in new information.

We often need to lose to win, but we are not investing in loss unless we really invest ourselves in what we are doing.

Personal interviewed Josh Waitzkin, a former national chess champion who now is a martial arts world champion, New York City.

His childhood years as a chess prodigy were chronicled in the book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. He is author of The Art of Learning (Free Press). http://www.joshwaitzkin.com.

I read your blog yesterday about time travel. I showed it to Adam he just smiled and walked away. It always amazes me how he can be so absorbed in the history of a planet and not be particularly concerned about the present state of that planet.

His only interest in a planet’s present state he says is in the predictability of that state based on its past behavior. And the future state of that planet based on the TAO’s interference in its Present.

He has charts that he uses to predict future behavior. It seems that Adam is a scientist researching anomalies. An anomaly is an event that occurs when one interferes with a Past or Present event of a planet.

If he can discover how to prevent anomalies he will be able to show the TAO how to use a planet’s past to aid its future. And how much the TAO can tamper with it Present before a catastrophic anomaly would occur.

Adam is studying how to identify the beginnings of an anomaly and all the complicated stuff about the how, why, what, one does or does not do.

So, while I am enjoying the show, he is tracking the implications of changing events. Not so much as to change the Past, as it is to discover the presence of an anomaly if we change the future by changing an event in the Present.

Like Michelle allowing democrats to win that would have lost if the republicans had their way. What anomalies will occur and to what extent would the planet suffer or benefit?

We do not actually travel to the past. I mean if what you mean by traveling to the past is that we can interact with the individuals. That would be too dangerous because of the possibility of creating an anomaly that would destroy the planet’s present as we knew it.

If that happened we couldn’t get back. Adam says it would be like traveling on a freeway that no longer exists as to its destination or construction in the first place. In their “movies” for example vampires would be beings that traveled into a planets past and was trapped their because they changed the time period from which they came and hence could not travel back along that line to reach their point of origin.

That would occur if a material part of the planet’s Past was changed as to alter the Present period from which we traveled to this point. Think of traveling across a bridge spanning the Grand Canyon.

If when you reached the other side and the bridge was destroyed, you wouldn’t be able to return to the other side using that route or the vehicle you used to travel it. Hence if an interaction between you and a being of that Past caused the bridge not to be constructed, you could not return.

If it caused it to be constructed but along a different route, you would have to find the location of that route and attempt to repeat your vector to your original destination. It would be like trying to find the exact line you drew in the sand if the wind blew away your original. You would be lost in the desert of time never being able to reach your destination.

Time quakes would occur to destroy that part of the Past/Present/Future that no longer exist. Only those on the planet’s surface would survive. As soon as the time wave hit the ship it would cease to exist because it never left a point of origin that no longer exist. Only those on the planet’s surface and now part of the planet’s new Present would exist.

They would live for the life of their suits. The life they made for themselves would depend on their survival skills in utilizing their mental and physical superiority to the social inhabitants.

What about me you say? Well Adam says that since I no longer existed past my murder, plucking me from my time period just before my demise and allowing it to appear that I was murdered was okay as long as I was removed from that period.

According to Adam, as long as I was not returned into the population until he returned to his point of origin no anomaly would have been created.

So you see when we travel to the Past we do so to view the Past, not to mingle with its inhabitants.

How do we do it you ask?

Adam says we find a view that we like and match its light speed. When we are viewing the image as it occurs, we accelerate a fraction of a second faster and enter its Past and allow its light speed and the physical forces created by it to drag us into its sphere. Now we are experiencing what we see as we are seeing it.

Once inside the light show if we don’t exit into the solid plane of the light, but remain in the bubble of the beam itself. We can observe the events as they happen without being seen or heard.

We are seeing things through a prism that shows in one lens a fraction of a second after they have occurred and in the other a fraction of a second before they have occurred. This simultaneous viewing allows us to be there and not be there at the same time. Hence we become part of the light in which the event(s) is happening.

AH