Key Takeaways from the Chapter 'Making Smaller Circles' - The | Golden Books™

Key Takeaways from the Chapter "Making Smaller Circles" - The Art of Learning

"My search for the essential principles lying at the hearts of and connecting chess, the martial arts, and in a broader sense the learning process, was inspired to a certain extent by Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I’ll never forget a scene that would guide my approach to learning for years to come. The protagonist of Pirsig’s story, a brilliant if eccentric man named Phaedrus, is teaching a rhetoric student who is all jammed up when given the assignment to write a five-hundred-word story about her town. She can’t write a word. The town seems so small, so incidental—what could possibly be interesting enough to write about? Phaedrus liberates the girl from her writer’s block by changing the assignment. He asks her to write about the front of the opera house outside her classroom on a small street in a small neighborhood of that same dull town. She should begin with the upper-left hand brick. At first the student is incredulous, but then a torrent of creativity unleashes and she can’t stop writing. The next day she comes to class with twenty inspired pages."

The heart of pursuit for excellence lies in the theme depth over breadth. Understanding the essence, and plunging to the deep mystery behind the scenes is very mandatory to mix ourselves with our subjects and feel it inside.

Taking the author's experience on how he mastered chess, given that he started to learn formally by keeping two or three pieces on the board and playing game endings rather than remembering classic game opening techniques, one can clearly see how he had the chance to understand the true potential of each pieces individually before using them together for a strategic attack.
In every skill set, it's mandatory to break each component to the tiniest detail, go in depth through it and get a clear understanding of its essence. One should avoid unnecessary abstractions and cover ups, which usually happen for the sake of saving time or get to the results quickly, if they want to truly master what they desire. The author summarizes this in the following words,

"I believe this little anecdote has the potential to distinguish success from failure in the pursuit of excellence. The theme is depth over breadth. 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. We are bombarded with more and more information on television, radio, cell phones, video games, the Internet. The constant supply of stimulus has the potential to turn us into addicts, always hungering for something new and prefabricated to keep us entertained. When nothing exciting is going on, we might get bored, distracted, separated from the moment. So we look for new entertainment, surf channels, flip through magazines. If caught in these rhythms, we are like tiny current-bound surface fish, floating along a two-dimensional world without any sense for the gorgeous abyss below. When these societally induced tendencies translate into the learning process, they have devastating effect."

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