The art of learning

What Hacker News says

1. simianparrotOct 2025
   Came here to write this. To add to that, the book "The Art of Learning" is a great example of this; Joshua Waitzkin tells how his approach to learning saw him reach the pinnacle of both Chess and Tai Chi. From the outside it might just seem like a "genius" who just so happened to have innate talents for both of these highly disparate forms of competition, but his story paints a different picture.

   My own approach to learning is very similar, and that's before I read this book. But it was not an approach that came naturally to me. I was never good at school. I was never good at paying attention to things I didn't see a _reason_ to pay attention to. But I realized early on that my propensity for "hyperactive behavior" (as they called it at school in the early 90's) meant I couldn't rely on the "standard" way of learning to work for me, and that if I wanted to learn the things I did care about, I needed to find my own way.

   This is in no way me trying to brag, but to give some context to why I challenge this kind of mindset whenever I'm faced with it, including (and without much success) in my own mother who keeps bringing up "I wonder who you inherited this skill from" whenever I learn something new, let me list some of the activities other people tell me I'm talented in:

   * Software architecture and design

   * Indie game development, including 2D and 3D engines from scratch in multiple languages as well as game design

   * Graphic design

   * Playing the piano

   * Multilingualism (Norwegian, English, German, Dutch, Japanese)

   * Videogames -- I'm particularly good at Smash Bros. Melee

   * Hiking

   * Body control - I can do push-ups while hand standing

   * Conversation and hanging out - I make people laugh and have a good time because I have a lot of topics of interest to keep conversation flowing, and I set aside my ego to make sure the group has fun as a whole

   Again, I'm not bragging, because I'm not a master in any of these disparate activities, and I also firmly believe this is something almost everyone can do. There is no "genetic" or inherited talent here. I was terrible at all these things and had to apply myself and experiment with constantly adaptive reinforcement techniques to get good at every single one of them. I grew up with asthma, but started practicing martial arts in spite of it. If I have a talent, it's simply curiosity. Everything else was an uphill struggle where I spent longer getting _OK_ at every single activity than most, but because I kept at it, I eventually got better than the average.

   And one of the major factors of that is increasing my practice surface area in everything, which often ends up overlapping existing knowledge in surprisingly deep and fascinating ways, which in turn keeps me interested and curious. It's a feedback loop of learning.

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2. jraby3Sep 2025
   Josh waitzkin breaks this down really well in his book the art of learning.

   He's a chess champion and push hands champion and discusses how to learn. Basically as you become and expert in something you learn to pay less attention to the surrounding environment and only focus on what matters, which allows you to see it in "slow motion". This applies to chess champions where masters eye movement focuses on a much smaller part of the board than a beginner, and also in push hands or BJJ where experts fighting for a tiny bit of grip change is what matters but a novice might just see the whole body not moving or doing anything that matters.

   Very worthwhile read.

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3. JSeymourATLApr 2023
   Tangential…

      The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence

   By Josh Waitzkin > https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/857333.The_Art_of_Learni...
   thread
4. seanhunterJan 2023
   This, specific deliberate practise is likely to yield the best results.

   For learning in general, I highly recommend reading "The Art of Learning" by Josh Waitzkin. He was a chess prodigy and GM, (subject of the movie and book "Searching for Bobby Fischer") who then became a world champion at martial arts, so has an interesting perspective on learning really diverse skills.

   Fun fact: I met Josh at a dinner party in 2020-ish and when he heard I was in tech he spent the whole conversation wanting my opinion on where AI was going to go next, what DeepMind were going to do etc.

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5. orzigOct 2022
   Books:

   - Deep Work, and anything by Cal Newport (You can get a taste of most of his ideas for free on his blog and podcast)

   - The Art of Learning. Note that he “jumped around“ at the peak of his original career, but ended up finding a common thread. To your dilemma, a major take away is that single domain can have nearly infinite novelty if you keep looking deeper

   - moonwalking with Einstein: this will seem unrelated, but really listen for how The author ends up falling in love with this weird hobby. Can you find that love for anything in your life?

   - Misbehaving (Richard Thaler): A young economist bumbles around for years until it starts to come together into a coherent research direction.

   - The age of Wonder (Holmes): biographies of romantic scientists, know how different they all are, and also how many different phases of life they each have. I guarantee you you will see yourself in one of them, I just don’t know which

   Though I do not have a book for it, my final piece of advice is to except that even the “right“ path will have some boring or even painful stretches. I don’t have a clear cut decision rule for when to stick with it, but it’s definitely not “quit immediately”. I think there’s a book called The Dip about that. Also like Adam Savage YouTube channel where you can see essentially endless hours of the sky who is definitely doing what he is passionate about, but also gets frustrated all the time when things break and such. He’s making physical things, even successful projects take many tedious hours. But there’s no question in his mind that he is going to power through.

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6. kryogen1cJan 2022
   > I think rote memorization is less useful in engineering than critical thinking/problem solving

   i think this is exactly the right take in entirely the wrong direction.

   proficiency and mastery are about committing more and more complex things into sub- or un- concious action; muscle memory as it were. grandmaster chess players dont think about solving puzzles that stump novices, they absorb whole board states and many/all permutations instantly. BJJ black belts dont have to think about arm bars, they anticipate complex possibilities of moves and countermoves that a novice simply cannot fathom. this is as true in engineering as any other field. a simple litmus test: is there a difference between a college grad and a 40-years experienced engineer? of course there is

   I think GPs point is exactly right. there is a certain lost magic to simply smashing your brain into something and absorbing as much as possible. big eyes, big ears, ego to attempt but humble to fail. one might call such a person a hacker.

   edit: see The Art of Learning, Waitzkin

   https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0743277465/

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