Top lessons and thoughts from The Art of Learning 🧠

Below are the highlights from the post I just published. To read the full post with highlights from the book go here

Lessons

• If you want to achieve greatness you must learn to lose. To improve you need to compete at your level or above. When you do that losses are inevitable and you need to accept them and learn from them. (Chapter 2)
• Don't rush the process. Keep the learning incremental, focus on short-term goals (Chapter 4).
• Practice, practice, practice. It's good for any reason, but things especially useful is ingraining the learning deep in your brain, to the point where the skill the second nature. Now you don't even have to think about it. (Chapter 13 and Chapter 15)
• Learn to disregard any destruction by entering the Soft Zone. This is a state where you embrace the destruction and instead of fighting them, you roll with them. Easier said than done, many will say. This is how to learn to enter the soft zone. First, realize there is a distraction that is confusing you. Try accepting it. After that seek out that distraction in your learning process to get accustomed to it. This will help both with this exact distraction, but it will also make you better at dealing with any other distraction. (Chapter 5)
• You can gain a huge boost to your cognitive and physical performance by learning efficient recovery techniques. In other words, you need to regularly undergo hard physical exercises, for example riding a bike at max speed for a minute. Every time you do this, your heart rate will increase by a lot, but each time it will get much better at reducing the heart rate after the exercise is done. This exercise will teach your body to quickly recover from physical and cognitive overload. (Chapter 16)
• Learn to enter the zone by creating a routine (Chapter 17). This is a simple process:
  1. Observe your life and find the moments/activities where you feel the best/most focused.
  2. After you found it attach small quick exercises before that activity (for example, quick snack, 5min meditation, and a 5min light exercise)
  3. Repeat this over and over
  4. At some point those small exercises (snack, meditation, etc.) will become a trigger for you to enter "The Zone".

My Thoughts

Fantastic book. I enjoyed reading it a lot. It feels a little different from the other books we read nowadays. Most (non-fiction) books are filled with facts and arguments to support those facts. In this book, however, Josh takes us on a journey of a lifetime, literally. We get to see how Josh was like when growing up and becoming a chess master, all the way to his adulthood where he was mastering the art of Tai Chi. Through those stories, we get to learn what does it take to become a great learner.

I'm not saying this book is unique in the sense that we get to hear stories (there are many autobiographies out there), but rather that the way Josh tells those stories. There are parts in this book that I couldn't stop reading and was just consumed by the story that was happening. To those who have read the book, I'm referring to the puma store. Still is stuck with me.