The Power of Habit Summary

Written by Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Charles Duhigg, 2012 New York

Times bestseller The Power of Habit boasts a ubiquity on recommended book
lists that few works from the past few years can match. Because some books
age like wine, and some like milk, I usually let books alone a little longer to
see how time will judge their value, but the truths and techniques within
these pages are too valuable to wait.
The Power of Habit recounts a number of useful illustrations of the role of
habits in individuals, organizations, and societies, and follows up with
practical techniques to recognize and consciously direct the things that really
control our behavior and our results. The power of habit is the ability to
automate willpower, turning a painfully scarce resource into an infinite one.
Put this book’s subject matter into practice, and the change in your results
will be profound.

Part One: The Habits of Individuals

Chapter 1: The Habit Loop: How Habits Work

The book begins with the story of Eugene Pauly, a 71-year-old man
who lost the medial temporal lobe of his brain to viral encephalitis. The
rest of Eugene’s brain remained perfectly intact, and he had no
problem remembering anything that occurred prior to 1960 – but
suffered from total short-term memory loss, unable to retain
knowledge of any new event for more than a minute and constantly
repeating his words and actions from a minute before. Eugene had no
memory of his grandchildren, and couldn’t even tell you where his
kitchen or bedroom was located, even when he was sitting in his own
home.
However, in an effort to make sure Eugene got some exercise, his
wife had begun taking him on a walk around the block each day. She
became frantic one day when he disappeared, only to show up 15
minutes later after taking the walk by himself. He couldn’t draw a
simple map of his block or even tell you where his house was, but he
began taking that same walk around the block every day. Eugene had
demonstrated what scientists had suspected but never before proved:
that habits are formed and operate entirely separately from the part of
the brain responsible for memory. Later tests confirmed that we learn
and make unconscious choices without having to remember anything
about the lesson or decision making.
 Your brain is constantly seeking new ways to save effort, and is
always “chunking” sequences of actions into automatic routines.
Backing out of the driveway, for example, requires over a dozen
separate actions, but many of us do it daily without a second thought.

The habit process consists of a three-step loop:

1. Cue. A trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode, and
which routine to use.
2. Routine. Physical, mental, or emotional behavior that follows the
cue.
3. Reward. A positive stimulus that tells your brain that the routine
works well, and is worth remembering.

Simply understanding how habits work make them much easier to

control. By learning to observe the cues and rewards, we can change
the routines.
 Chapter 2: The Craving Brain: How to Create
New Habits
It might surprise you to learn that in early 20th America, hardly
anyone brushed their teeth; in fact, so many recruits during World War
I had rotting teeth that government officials declared poor dental
hygiene a national security risk. That all changed, however, when a
marketing genius by the name of Claude Hopkins was convinced by an
old friend to apply his skills to hawking toothpaste.
Claude was the man responsible for taking unknown products like
Goodyear and Quaker Oats and turning them into household names.
His signature tactic was to tap into the habit loop by anchoring the
product to a specific trigger, regardless of how preposterous the
connection. Quaker Oats, for example, owes its success to Claude
being able to convince America that it provided 24-hour energy – but
only if you ate a bowl every morning.
Claude chose a similar cue to turn toothpaste into a national habit. His
ads read, “Just run your tongue across your teeth. You’ll feel a film –
that’s what makes your teeth look ‘off color’ and invites decay.” After
giving people the cue, he continued with images of beautiful white
smiles and the statement, “Note how many pretty teeth are seen
everywhere. Millions are using a new method of teeth cleaning. Why
should any woman have dingy film on her teeth? Pepsodent removes
the film!”
The claim was downright false; the “film” is a naturally occurring
membrane, and toothpaste doesn’t do anything to remove it.
However, the cue was universal and easily apparent, and people
bought the connection to the reward (beautiful teeth). Within a
decade, toothpaste usage had expanded from 7% of the population to
65%.
The author contrasts this success with the abysmal failure of P&G’s
Febreze when it first came onto the market. It was a legitimate
technological marvel that worked like a charm; the problem was the
phenomenon of the human olfactory system that causes people to
become used to any smell and lose the ability to detect it. The lady
with nine cats and a house odor to match had no cue sufficient to
induce her to use the product that would probably transform her social
life.
P&G executives were about to axe the product when the product
management team discovered what scientists already knew: that a
habit is only formed when the brain begins to anticipate and crave the
reward the moment the cue is introduced, before the routine is even
completed. You can’t sell a product that provides scentlessness
because there is no cue available for the brain to anticipate.
Febreze sales went through the roof once P&G began marketing the
product instead as an air freshener – a product to be used as the final
step of a cleaning routine to make the room pleasantly aromatic. Once
people tried the product, they began to crave the clean smell from that
finishing spritz of Febreze. Only later did P&G begin to mention the
real value of the product – the breakthrough chemical formula that
actually eliminates odors, rather than just cover them up.
It is here that the authors reveal that Claude Hopkins’ techniques
really had little impact on the sales of Pepsodent toothpaste. Plenty of
other toothpaste companies were using similar techniques long before
Pepsodent came along. In reality, that particular toothpaste’s success
was completely accidental. Without foreseeing the impact of the
choice, Pepsodent had included citric acid, mint oil, and other
ingredients that created that now-familiar cool, tingling effect. That
feeling created a cue – people missed the feeling when they forgot to
brush their teeth. The tingling serves absolutely no purpose other than
to let people know the product is working. (The foam in today’s
toothpaste is similarly unnecessary from a functional point of view.)

Chapter 3: The Golden Rule of Habit Change:

Why Transformation Occurs
Tony Dungy changed the game of American football with a
counterintuitive coaching approach: instead of trying to outmatch his
opponents with thicker playbooks and complex schemes, Tony drilled
his team on only a few key plays. He did everything he could to get his
team to stop thinking, and react based on habit instead.
Tony knew that habits can’t usually be overcome; instead, a habit can
only be changed if a new routine is successfully inserted into the
process with the same cue and the same reward. He trained his team
to automatically link the cues they already knew to different on-field
routines – ones that involved less complexity, fewer choices, and more
subconscious reactions. In succession, with this approach Tony turned
two abysmal teams into championship contenders.
Perhaps the most famous and widespread example of successful habit
change is the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. The author is
fascinated by how a physical addiction with psychological and genetic
roots is frequently conquered by an unscientific, unstructured, and
largely arbitrary system that addresses neither the psychiatric or
biochemical factors that experts say are the foundation of alcoholism.
The first key is that AA inserts a new routine into the cue/reward
sandwich by identifying what need the alcohol is fulfilling (escape,
relaxation, companionship, anxiety relief, etc.) and providing a similar
type of relief through the AA group.
However, this alone isn’t sufficient to keep alcoholics (and you and I)
from falling off the wagon when the stresses of life boil over beyond a
certain point. There is one other crucial element: belief. While current
scientific knowledge of the mechanisms of belief is severely limited,
the fact nevertheless remains. Belief is an ingredient and a skill that
makes habit change possible, and even begins to spill into other areas
of life. (See chapter 2 in my summary of Think and Grow Rich for more
on the importance of the nebulous concept of belief.) Belief in the
intervention of a higher power was a common theme in research into
AA’s success, but other people likewise play a large role. The author
quotes Todd Heatherton, one of the authors of a 2005 UC Berkeley,
Brown, and NIH study of the power of AA’s method: “Change occurs
among other people. It seems real when we can see it in other
people’s eyes.”
 Part Two: The Habits of Successful
Organizations

Chapter 4: Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of

Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most

In October 1987, Paul O’Neill stepped on stage to deliver his first

speech to investors as the new CEO of Fortune 500 manufacturer
Alcoa. New CEO’s usually followed a fairly standard script about costs
and profits, the evils of government interference, and promises to
implement various business buzzwords. Instead, to his audience’s
great perplexity, Paul opened with, “I want to talk to you about worker
safety.” He expounded on his goal of making Alcoa a zero-injury
workplace before proceeding to point out the fire exits in the room and
instruct his audience on their use in case of emergency. More than one
audience member questioned his sanity.

Paul was immensely successful in his stated safety goals; by his

retirement eleven years later, Alcoa went from having about an
accident a week at each plant to boasting a worker injury rate that
was one-twentieth the national average. More interestingly, however,
Alcoa’s income had risen 500%, and its market capitalization had
increased by $27 billion.

When O’Neill took the job, Alcoa was criticized for poor quality and a
slow workforce. His predecessor tried to mandate quality
improvements, and the result was a 15,000-employee strike. Looking
back, O’Neill explained, “I knew I had to transform Alcoa, but you can’t
order people to change. That’s not how the brain works. So I decided I
was going to start by focusing on one thing. If I could start disrupting
the habits around one thing, it would spread throughout the entire
company.” He used what the authors call a “keystone habit” – a habit
that causes a chain reaction of habit disruption. During his time as a
government employee, Paul had learned to recognize how institutional
habits governed processes, with suboptimal results.

Paul instituted a better habit loop at Alcoa. Whenever there was an

injury (cue), the unit president was required to provide Paul with an
injury report, as well as an action plan to ensure that type of injury
never happened again, within 24 hours (routine). Promotion was
dependent on compliance with this requirement (reward).

For a unit president to meet the 24-hour deadline, he needed to hear

about the injury from his VP as soon as it happened. The VP had to be
in constant communication with the floor managers, and the floor
managers had to rely on the workers for safety suggestions so they
would have an answer for the VP when he asked for a plan. As these
patterns shifted to meet the safety requirements, other aspects of the
company also began to change. Better safety quickly translated into
increased quality and efficiency.

There are many other keystone habits in various areas of life that lead
to wider shifts in behavior. For example, people who begin an exercise
habit typically find that they start naturally eating better, being more
productive at work, and feeling less stressed. There is a vast chasm,
however, between understanding this principle and actually applying
it. Identification of a relevant keystone habit requires a trial-and-error
approach, with the goal of finding what the authors call a “small win”:
a minor advantage that sets into motion patterns that have a much
larger impact.

For example, a 2009 weight loss study found one such “small win”
when the researchers instructed one group of participants to make no
lifestyle changes other than keeping a daily food log about what they
ate. The participants naturally began to identify patterns, which made
them want to do a better job of planning ahead for their meals, which
in turn led to healthier food. The group that kept the food log lost
twice as much weight as the other study participants.
Chapter 5: Starbucks and the Habit of
Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic

Scientists have known for many years that willpower is an essential

ingredient for success, even more so than intelligence. In one famous
Stanford study from the 1960s, researchers sat down four-year-olds at
a table with a single marshmallow, and told them that they could
either eat it immediately, or wait until the researcher came back 15
minutes later and earn an extra marshmallow. The researchers later
tracked down the kids when they were in high school, and found that
the ones who could maintain their self-control long enough to earn two
marshmallows as four-year-olds now had better grades, SAT scores,
and social success. (The book The Marshmallow Test is titled based on
this experiment, and is a great read itself.)

We also know that we all have a limited supply of willpower. In a Case

Western study from the 1990s, researchers instructed a group of
undergraduate students to skip a meal, then sat them down together,
each one in front of two bowls. One bowl contained fresh, delicious
chocolate chip cookies, while the other held somewhat less appetizing
radishes. Half were told to eat only the cookies, and the others were
told to only eat the radishes. The researchers then gave the students
an impossible puzzle to complete.

None of the students knew that the puzzle was impossible, but the
students who had just consumed the radishes gave up far sooner than
the students who had just eaten the cookies – an average of eight
minutes, as compared to 19 minutes of perseverance for the cookie
eaters. This 60% disparity was caused by the depletion of the radish
eaters’ willpower when they had to resist the cookies. (This is why you
don’t want to waste your willpower in the morning on tedious,
unimportant tasks like writing emails.)

In addition, numerous studies have shown that by exercising willpower

in one area, like exercise or academics, you will increase your reserve
of willpower and be able to apply it to other areas of life. However,
none of these things are enough to consistently exercise sufficient
willpower. The key is something that has been integral to the success
of coffee chain Starbucks: methodical planning of a routine for those
inflection points (cues) where pain and temptation are the strongest.

Starbucks’ training systems guide employees through the identification

of inflection points (such as when an angry customer is yelling because
they got the wrong drink), and matching of the inflection point to one
of the company’s dozens of routines. By choosing a certain behavior
ahead of time, willpower becomes a habit, and employees are able to
provide the high level of service that makes customers keep coming
back for expensive lattes.

Another key to Starbucks’ success is the way the company encourages

employees to use their own intellect and creativity. In a study at the
University of Albany, students were put in front of a tray of cookies.
The researchers nicely asked half the students not to eat the cookies,
explained to them the purpose of the experiment, and thanked them
for contributing their time. The researchers told the other half not to
eat the cookies without explaining the experiment’s purpose or
thanking them. In an unrelated standard computerized focus test
afterward, the first group significantly outperformed the second.

While scientists may not completely understand the mechanisms of the

process yet, it is clear that people perform far better, and have much
greater willpower, when they feel like what they are doing is a
personal choice, and when they understand the purpose. When people
are just following orders, willpower becomes much more difficult.
Chapter 6: The Power of a Crisis: How
Leaders Create Habits Through Accident and
Design

The author contends, “There are no organizations without institutional

habits. There are only places where they are deliberately designed,
and places where they are created without forethought.” All companies
have unspoken routines that make it possible to operate; otherwise,
firm leaders would never be able to keep up with all the new
permutations of decision-making that front-line workers deal with
every day. While an organization may think it is making deliberate
decisions via formal research and development processes, in reality
dozens of convergent habits, processes, and behaviors are
responsible.

If some new colleagues asked you how to succeed at your company,

it’s unlikely that you would refer them to the policy handbook. You
might educate them instead on the informal rules, truces between
company divisions, and lines that should not be crossed. If you work at
a successful organization, it is probably because company leaders have
cultivated organizational habits that provide a balance of power and
keep the peace, but also make it clear who is in charge.

In the early 2000s, Rhode Island Hospital was considered to be one of

the nation’s leading medical institutions. However, a toxic culture
created by arrogant doctors who mistreated nurses and rejected their
input led to a series of tragic operating room mistakes, fines, and
negative publicity. The hospital became the poster child for medical
mistakes, targeted by both local and national media. It was a genuine
crisis, and the new Chief Quality Officer used the situation as an
opportunity to implement changes that had previously been proposed,
but blocked.

Video cameras were installed in operating rooms, checklists were

mandated for every surgery, and an anonymous reporting system was
implemented. Changes like these, in addition to new training systems
that emphasized better teamwork, empowered the nurses to prevent
operating mistakes. As a result, the hospital has since earned several
prestigious awards for the quality of its care.

Chapter 7: How Target Knows What You Want

Before You Do: When Companies Predict (and
Manipulate) Habits
As companies have begun to rely more heavily on big data over the
past twenty years in order to better predict consumers’ buying habits,
they have realized that most purchasing decisions are made the
moment a customer sees a product. Despite a shopper’s intentions,
habits are often stronger than pre-written grocery lists. From a
retailer’s perspective, however, there is a difficult problem: these
habits are unique to each person. If you want to take advantage of
this knowledge about how people buy products, you can’t use one-
size-fits-all sales or marketing techniques.
As a solution, companies like Target have been collecting
individualized shopping data for the past decade or so, using credit,
loyalty, rewards, and frequent shopper cards. Combined with data that
can be easily purchased about your age, marital status, location,
ethnicity, and so on, retailers have an incredibly detailed picture of
who you are and what is going on in your life.
If you purchase a box of popsicles about once a week around 6:30 on
a weekday, as well as megasized trash bags each July and October,
Target knows that you probably have kids, stop for groceries on your
way home from work, and have a lawn that you need to mow in the
summer and rake for leaves in the fall. The algorithms will see that
you buy cereal but not milk, and calculate that you must be
purchasing your milk somewhere else. You’ll then get coupons for
milk, school supplies, lawn furniture, and so on, while your single
neighbor in an apartment across the street will receive completely
different coupons.
Companies that use these advanced data mining techniques also found
something else that is absolutely crucial to their marketing success:
when people go through major life events, they often change their
purchasing habits. As a result, these corporations are extremely
interested in identifying when you experience a job change, move,
relationship change, or birth of a child – and they are very good at it.
It didn’t take long, though, for these companies to realize that people
don’t always take it well when they receive a coupon booklet filled with
baby products, sometimes before they’ve even told their families
they’re pregnant. Now, when Target deduces that you’re pregnant,
you’ll get coupons for diapers and maternity clothes intentionally
sandwiched between unrelated ads for lawn mowers and beer.
Radio stations today use a similar technique to introduce and
popularize new songs. Back when OutKast’s tune “Hey Ya!” first aired,
it was a complete flop. Music executives loved the song, and their
algorithms confirmed their intuition – the data gave the song one of
the highest scores ever. When the song was aired, however, nearly a
third of listeners would change the station within 30 seconds.
At the time, the music industry was beginning to realize a
fundamental truth about how people relate to songs. While most
people will tell you something different, they care more about the
familiarity of a song than its quality. In the early 2000s, male listeners
told industry researchers they hated Celine Dion, but whenever radio
stations played Celine Dion songs, they stayed tuned. The areas of the
brain that process music naturally hone in on patterns and familiarity.
In other words, our musical preferences don’t dictate what we listen
to; our subconscious habits do.
With the industry beginning to realize this fact as “Hey Ya!” was
released, radio stations recognized that the song was probably failing
simply because it was unlike other tunes played in the Top 40. They
began to sandwich the song between two other familiar, popular songs
– the more bland and unoriginal, the better – cementing OutKast’s
track as part of the already existing habit loop in listeners’ minds. “Hey
Ya!” went on to win a Grammy, drive 5.5 million album sales, and earn
radio stations millions.
The lesson here is not simply to be suspicious of industry’s
manipulation of your habits; instead, realize that it is a supremely
powerful tool to sandwich a new habit you wish to nurture between
your already existing routines.

Part Three: The Habits of Societies

Chapter 8: Saddleback Church and the
Montgomery Bus Boycott: How Movements
Happen

At 6:00 on Thursday, December 1, 1955, American hero Rosa Parks

uttered her now-famous refusal to give up her seat on the bus.
(Contrary to the commonly held belief, she wasn’t even in the “white
section,” and there were already three open seats for the white man to
choose.) Mrs. Parks wasn’t the pioneer of this act of defiance; in fact,
within the past few months two similar incidents had already occurred.
It was Rosa Parks, however, who sparked the civil rights crusade, and
as you might have guessed, it was habits that were responsible.

Rosa was deeply involved in her community, belonging to dozens of

religious, social, charity, and hobbyist groups that usually didn’t come
into contact with each other. It all started when the former head of the
Montgomery NAACP and a white lawyer, both friends of Mrs. Parks
through her various activities, posted her bail and asked her
permission to use the incident to mount a legal challenge to the city’s
segregation laws. By the end of the day, news of her arrest had
already spread throughout the community (a much more unusual
phenomenon in those pre-Twitter days), and an influential
schoolteacher’s group had already suggested a boycott on the day of
Rosa’s appearance in court four days later.

These various groups immediately printed and began distributing

flyers, and within 24 hours, word had spread even further. It wasn’t
just the leaders who knew Rosa; hundreds of individual group
members considered her a friend. People who only months before
patiently endured the gross indignities of a hideously racist legal
system and largely ignored similar injustices heaped upon strangers
now responded to the call in Mrs. Park’s defense.
It wasn’t that the civil rights hero had thousands of close friends; she
simply had what sociologists call “weak ties.” As Malcolm Gladwell
discusses in The Tipping Point, weak ties are more important, in many
ways, than close friends. For example, they tend to be more valuable
in connecting us to jobs, because they connect us to groups and
information that we otherwise wouldn’t know. Our close friends usually
run in the same groups we do, so they’re unlikely to be able to connect
us to much outside of our own sphere.
In the case of the Montgomery bus boycott, weak ties were powerful
because they created peer pressure. Most people won’t jump to
seriously inconvenience themselves for a loose acquaintance, but Mrs.
Park’s web of connections created peer pressure. You risked losing
face and social standing in the community if you didn’t participate, just
like you or I would lose standing in our social circles if you refused to
help out a friend of a friend with a résumé referral. When the town
newspaper printed an article about how the black community was
planning to boycott the buses, the city took it as social proof that
everyone was doing it. The boycott became a new social habit that
spilled into larger social habits of peaceful protest, jumpstarting the
civil rights movement and eventually leading to the Civil Rights Act of
1964.

Chapter 9: The Neurology of Free Will: Are We

Responsible for Our Habits?
In 2010, a cognitive neuroscience researcher discovered something
fascinating when he used an MRI machine to compare the brains of
pathological gamblers against merely social gamblers. When they
watched slots roll on a video screen, there was some difference in how
excited the pathological gamblers’ brains were when a winning match
displayed. More interestingly, however, the social gamblers correctly
registered the near misses as losses, while pathological gamblers
registered them as wins.
This is a crucial difference in the habit loop. After the cue of the near
miss, the pathological gambler’s mind provides a reward, creating a
habit loop that leads to more gambling. The same cue in a social
gambler’s mind only leads to a reward when he or she stops gambling,
and escapes the loss of money. This subtle difference in habit loop is
responsible for the gambling industry’s profitability, and the ruining of
countless lives.
The author questions the morality of holding pathological gamblers
responsible for their actions, but comes to the conclusion that no
matter how strong a habit is, as long as you are aware the habit exists
you have the ability to decide to change it. He recounts a story told by
author David Foster Wallance. “There are these two young fish
swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the
other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the
water?’” The young fish swim on for a bit before one finally asks the
other what “water” is. Like the fish, many of us live our lives
swimming through a world permeated with habits without even
realizing it.

APPENDIX
A Reader’s Guide to Using These Ideas
The Power of Habit is perhaps unique among books in that its
appendix is the best chapter. Now that you realize you’ve been
immersed in habits your whole life, you can begin to shape them to
your will. There are infinite habits and thousands of formulas for
changing them, but you can find what you need by following this
formula:
1) Identify the routine. Though it’s not always obvious, the easiest
part is usually identifying the behavior you want to change.
2) Experiment with rewards. You can then fill in the “routine” part
of the habit loop, but to pinpoint the cue you first have to experiment
with rewards. Try out a new reward each time you feel the urge to
complete the routine. For example, if you find yourself eating junk
food every afternoon, try eating an apple instead, or drinking some
coffee, or chatting with a friend for a few minutes. Then set a 15
minute timer, and when it goes off ask yourself if you are still feeling
the same urge. If you are, you haven’t yet identified the cue. Keep
experimenting, and you’ll eventually figure out if you were actually
hungry (in which case the apple would work), if you were tired (in
which case the coffee should help), or if you just needed a break
(which your friend should provide).
3) Isolate the cue. Once you’ve determined the reward that satisfies
the cue, there is still work to be done to understand exactly what the
cue is. Most habitual cues will fall into five categories:

 Location
 Time
 Emotional state
 Other people
 An immediately preceding action

If you have a habit you’re serious about changing, keep a log of your
location, the time, your emotional state, the people around you, and
the action you take immediately prior to your habit. After a few
repetitions, you’ll probably be able to see the pattern.
4) Have a plan. Once you’ve recognized the precise routine, reward,
and cue, it should be easy to design a different routine that provides
the same reward after the same cue. Stay alert for the cue (or set an
automatic alert if it’s time-based), and act out your pre-planned
routine. If it works, you’ve confirmed that you found the right cue and
reward, and your habit will then be easily moldable.

Conclusion
It was a revelation to me that habits dictate nearly everything I do,
and after reading The Power of Habit I realized that success in
personal growth and in most endeavors of life is completely dependent
on my ability to identify, reshape, and build my habits. Aristotle is
credited with the quote, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence,
then, is not an act, but a habit.”
The more you understand habits, the less importance you will assign
to willpower, goals, and any number of other facets of life over
which much of the “self-improvement” crowd obsesses. Willpower can
and should certainly be increased through exercise, and goals are
indeed useful in focusing your efforts and judging your progress;
however, it is much more efficient to automate willpower, and much
more effective to focus on a habit of doing pushups for 10 minutes
every day at 7:00 a.m. than it is to establish a goal of losing 5 pounds
of body fat by next month.
Fans of Malcolm Gladwell will enjoy this book’s narrative style, and
those of you looking for practical, ready-to-implement techniques
won’t be disappointed. This book contains the key to shedding the
things that hold you back and jumpstarting your potential.
 Money Master the Game
Summary
Tony Robbins isn’t the first person you’d think would be the one to write a
book on money, but on Tim Ferriss’ recommendation I picked up a copy. As
a finance major with an MBA to my name, I was skeptical that I could learn
much about money from a “feelings” guru like Tony. I was wrong – this book
might have given me more useful lessons in finance than my entire formal
education.
Tony began building this book by interviewing a litany of investment
titans – Warren Buffett, Charles Schwab, Carl Icahn, Ray Dalio –
pretty much the entire investing all-star team. Most of us would never
get the chance to gain access to any of these masters’ knowledge, but
Tony used his conversations with all of them to synthesize a money
manifesto.

Section 1: Welcome to the Jungle: The Journey

Begins with This First Step
The first chapter is an introduction to classic Robbins psychology. Tony
begins by lamenting that money is somewhat of a taboo subject, asserting
that money is an essential part of our holistic well-being, and explaining how
he went about building the book by interviewing the best of the best. His
first conclusion is that it’s very difficult to earn enough money through your
job to have financial freedom, so you need to save and invest. Develop the
mindset of an investor, rather than being only a consumer. The only way to
overcome ingrained human psychology and actually save is to create a plan
and automate your investing, so set up the automatic withdrawals and
forget about them.

Section 2: Become the Insider: Know the Rules

Before You Get in the Game
Because money is such a misunderstood topic, especially by those who think
they know what they’re doing, Tony goes into the nine financial myths that
have to be busted in order to start building a correct understanding of how
money works.
Myth #1: The market can be beat. Only a few gifted people can beat the
market’s returns consistently, and neither you nor your financial advisor are
one of them. Less than 4% of actively managed mutual funds beat the
market, which is far, far worse than a coin toss. You’re much better off
buying a passively managed index fund, which simply matches the overall
market.

Myth #2: People are telling the truth about fees. The average cost of
owning a mutual fund is 3.17% a year when you include all the hidden fees
– expense ratio, transaction costs, cash drag, unseen taxes, etc. That may
not sound like much, but for each 1% increase in fees, 20% of the final
value of the typical retirement portfolio is eaten away. The end result is that
even though the percent looks small, it can result in (literally) most of your
savings ending up in someone else’s pocket. Again, investing in index funds
with fees around 1% will make an enormous difference in your financial
storehouse.

Myth #3: People are telling the truth about returns. A core truth about
investing is that it is much more important to avoid losses than to get gains.
Why? If you have $100 in your portfolio and you lose 50% the first year, you
then have $50. If you then gain 50% in the second year, you end up with
only $75. Your average (time-weighted) return was 0% (up 50%, then down
50%), but your real (dollar-weighted) return was negative 25%. Which type
of returns do you think mutual funds like to report?

Myth #4: Your broker is on your side. Most brokers are perfectly good
and honest people. However, most of them also probably don’t understand
the three myths we’ve just covered. On top of that, the broker model is a
serious conflict of fiduciary duties. Your broker has a responsibility to
increase your money as well as a responsibility to increase his company’s
money, and the two duties are mutually exclusive. A much better decision is
to go with a registered investment advisor (RIA), who gets an annual fee
from you rather than commissions from the mutual funds, to manage your
investments. Go to the National Association of Personal Financial
Advisors or Stronghold Financial website to find an RIA.

Myth #5: Your 401(k) will set you up for retirement. In my mind
before I read this book, I had a mental image of the 401(k) as some kind of
timeless bastion of classic investment best practice. Not so – the 401(k) is a
(failed) social experiment that has only been around for 30 years. The
unique bull market conditions of the 80’s and 90’s blinded society to a point
where we believed that the 401(k) system was effectively setting people up
for retirement, but with the recent financial crisis, it became more apparent
that the system is a failure. The factors listed in Myths 1 – 3 severely limit
the growth of your retirement portfolio, and taxes on withdrawals will slash
your nest egg further. On top of that, the 401(k) doesn’t do anything to
protect against the unfortunate retirement timing that left many people with
a fraction of their savings after the financial crisis.

Hopefully you’ve already avoided the traditional 401(k) or IRA in favor of

a Roth, in order to solve the tax problem. You can use an IRA instead of a
401(k) to avoid the factors in Myths 1 – 3, but IRAs have much lower
contribution limits, and don’t let you take advantage of matching
contributions from your employer. Tony recommends that you go to the
online fee checker here, which will show how much you’re really paying in
fees in your company’s 401(k), and then approach your employer with the
results. Because of a new law passed in 2012, employers are legally required
to compare their 401(k) plans to make sure the fees are reasonable.
Hopefully this combination of information will be enough to convince your
employer to consider offering low-cost index funds in your plan.

Myth #6: Target date funds are a good way to allocate your
investments. Since ordinary investors have no idea how to diversify their
investments, many choose a “target date” fund where their mix of
investments changes based on their age. The point is to get higher returns
when you’re young and can afford more risk, and then to preserve your
capital when you’re getting closer to retirement (typically less in stocks and
more in bonds). While it’s a helpful idea in theory, the “experts” who put
these plans together operate under two gravely mistaken assumptions: that
bonds are safer than stocks, and that bonds and stocks move in opposite
directions. We’ll cover more on that later.

Myth #7: Annuities are bad. Conventional wisdom will tell you that
annuities as an investment class are overpriced and a bad investment. While
this is true in general (largely due to exorbitant fees that are even worse
than mutual funds), it would be unwise to paint this entire investment class
with the same brush. At least one type of annuity (the tax-free fixed indexed
annuity) is an invaluable investment tool. We’ll revisit that soon, as well.
(Side note: If you already own a bad investment like a variable rate annuity,
ask your advisor about using a feature called a 1035 exchange to switch it
for a good annuity without having to pay taxes.)
Myth #8: You have to take big risks to get big returns. One of the
most important rules of investing is to risk a little for the potential to make a
lot. Some easy ways for the individual to do this are structured
notes, market-linked CDs, and fixed indexed annuities, which all share the
common feature of protecting your invested principle but also giving you
access to upside potential if the market moves the right way.

Myth #9: Success is determined by something beyond our

control. We take a detour here for some more classic Tony Robbins
psychology, applied to money: a change in mindset is necessary to succeed.
With these myths busted, you don’t have any excuse not to turn around
your financial life for the better.

Section 3: What’s the Price of Your Dreams: Make

the Game Winnable
The book continues with the contention that no one actually wants money;
rather, we all want what money can provide. Precisely what is sought is
different for everyone, but it all falls under the six basic human needs of
certainty/comfort, uncertainty/variety, significance, love/connection, growth,
and contribution. Though money is an essential part of our lives, by knowing
what it is that you’re really after, you’ll have better clarity about how to get
where you want to go.

Once you know where you want to go, you can calculate a precise number,
which will probably turn out to be less than you think. For example, if one of
your wilder dreams is to buy your own private jet, it will cost you about $65
million, plus fuel, maintenance, crew wages, etc. Instead, you could just
charter someone else’s private jet – it will cost you about $5,000/hour to
rent the same jet, or $500,000/year if you use it for 100 hours. Even with a
seemingly unreasonable goal like a private jet, you can often get what you
want for a fraction of the money you thought you’d need. Define what you
want from the money, rather than the money itself, and you’ll realize that
your own goals are more achievable than you thought.

To do even better at defining what you want from money, Tony suggests
you establish and calculate a series of five goals. By having different levels
of financial success to aim for, your goals will become significantly more
achievable and motivating. (For more on this, read my review of Think and
Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, the manifesto on priming yourself to become
rich.)

1. Financial security. If you can save enough so that the monthly returns
on your investment portfolio will pay for your monthly housing, food,
utilities, transportation, and insurance, you’ve covered 65% of the average
American’s monthly costs. If you hit this mark, you can choose a job you
love instead of the high-paying one you hate. You could launch the startup
you’ve been dreaming about, or take any number of “risks” that you wanted
to take but couldn’t because you didn’t have enough in the bank to feel safe
taking them.

2. Financial vitality. If you can also save enough to cover half of your
monthly clothing, entertainment, and “small luxury” costs (golf dues,
manicures, etc. – whatever makes you happy), you’ve reached the halfway
point to truly never having to work again.

3. Financial independence. Add the rest of your necessary living expenses

(which shouldn’t be too much more), and you have what you need to never
have to work again.

4. Financial freedom. Add the monthly payments for two or three

significant luxuries (boat, vacation home, exotic car, etc.) to your number.

5. Absolute financial freedom. Now dream big – what do you need

(things/experiences, not their dollar values) to have everything you want?
This is where you find your limits – and they might surprise you. If you’re
honest with yourself, there is no way that something ridiculous like a private
skyscraper coated in gold is something you actually want. There is no way
that it would give you enough happiness to be worth the time it would take
to actually get it, or the other things that an equivalent amount of money
could get you. It would also probably be less fulfilling than you think it
would, especially if you already have all kinds of other luxuries. On top of
that, you would probably feel a bit guilty using $1 billion for something along
those lines, when that amount of money could feed 100 million hungry
children for a year.
Remember, the goal is to achieve what you actually want from money, not
the money itself. If you actually sit down and calculate the number, you’ll
probably realize that it’s a lot less than what you thought – probably around
$500,000 – $5 million of annual income. That might never be within reach,
but once you know the upper limit of what you want, you’ll realize how
happy you can be just by getting close.

Now that you’ve taken the time to write down what would actually make you
happy, you can revisit some life choices that you made on autopilot, thinking
you wanted them only to realize that they aren’t really making you happy
enough to justify their cost. The act of going through this exercise, together
with the motivation provided by the five concrete goals listed above, may
help you save more, earn more, reduce fees and taxes, get better returns,
or change your lifestyle in other ways – by moving to a cheaper geographic
location, for example.
An easy way to go through this exercise is to use the app at the link here.

Section 4: Make the Most Important Investment

Decision of Your Life
In a word, the most important investment decision is allocation. Tony goes
through a long list of the characteristics of different investment options, but
since these are readily available elsewhere, I’ll gloss over this portion of the
book. Tony advocates a division of your assets into security, risk/growth,
and “dream” buckets to provide a balance of asset protection, asset growth,
and emotional juice to keep you going.

Section 5: Upside Without the Downside: Create a

Lifetime Income Plan
Tony’s pièce de résistance comes here: a peek into the portfolio allocation of
Ray Dalio, who is possibly the greatest investor in history. (Ray isn’t taking
new investors right now, and when he was, you needed a minimum of $100
million to invest with him and get access to his knowledge. Tony got it for
free and included it in the book, which is pretty cool.) A core belief
underlying this allocation is that market prices reflect all known information
– at least to the extent that normal people would be able to tell. As a result,
the only way prices move is when there is a surprise. The only two ways that
overall market prices move are unexpected inflation/deflation and economic
growth. (Overall market prices are what matters if you’re properly diversified
within each asset category.) It’s easier to visualize with this chart:
Tony and Ray were also good enough to include a chart showing which types
of investments do well when each kind of surprise happens.

The point of portfolio diversification is to be invested in different asset

classes so that when one class drops, the other class rises, and your
investment is protected. Most people, including most financial professionals,
use the allocation of about 50% stocks, 50% bonds as a benchmark for their
allocation. (There is also typically a small portion allocated to U.S.
Treasuries, gold, and other so-called “low-risk” investments.) The allocation
of stocks vs. bonds is supposed to be weighted more in favor of stocks if you
want more risk and more return, and weighted more in favor of bonds if you
want less risk, such as when you are nearing retirement. This widely
accepted approach operates on the two mistaken assumptions discussed in
Section 2: that bonds are safer than stocks, and that bonds and stocks move
in opposite directions. As you can see in the chart above, it is a bit more
complex than that.
Here is where things get difficult to follow if you’re not a finance expert, so
you might have to read the next paragraph twice.
When you diversify your investment portfolio, the point is to diversify
your risk, which in the context of investment is just another word for
variability. Different asset classes (stocks and bonds, for example), have
different levels of variability. Therefore, since stocks are riskier (more
variable) than bonds, if you want a balanced portfolio where the risk is equal
on both sides, you have to have more bonds than stocks. It is the risk you
are balancing, not the assets attached to the risk. If you follow this logic,
you will understand that the traditional method of allocation (i.e. by
percentages of assets, rather than risks) is completely nonsensical. It’s
measuring apples in order to find out how many oranges you need.

When you match the direction each asset class moves in each type of
market situation with the relative risk/variability of each of those asset
classes, you get a portfolio, courtesy of Ray Dalio, that looks more like this:

With this portfolio over the past 30 years, you would have solidly beat the
market (9.72% annual return, net of fees), and the worst annual loss you
would have seen was 3.93% in 2008 (when the market was down 37%).
You would have only lost money in four of those 30 years. The 30 year
period is most relevant, but if you want to go back 75 years, only ten years
were losing years, and your worst loss is still the 3.93%. In contrast, the
market was negative 18 times, and the largest loss was 43.3%.
By structuring a portfolio the right way, you’ve done the impossible by
consistently beating the market in both risk and return. You can adjust the
portfolio to fit your own needs, but there is no better benchmark.

After dropping that bombshell, Tony goes on to point out that growing your
investments is only half the battle. You’ll need to know what to do going
down the mountain – when you’ve grown your assets sufficiently to attain
the lifestyle you want, and it’s time to simultaneously preserve and enjoy
what you have. Traditional low-risk investments like treasuries and CDs are
horrible ways to protect your capital due to abysmally low returns. On top of
that, it’s highly likely that advances in medicine will soon increase your
expected lifespan far beyond the ~80-year mark, meaning that the old math
of a ~15-year retirement won’t work.

(For more on the likelihood of substantially increased lifespans in the near

future, read The Fantastic Voyage by Ray Kurzweil and Ending Aging by
Aubrey de Grey.)

For these reasons, Tony loves fixed indexed annuities, which provide
complete protection of your capital (no downside) with the ability to also
enjoy market gains. “Complete protection” really does mean complete
protection. In the U.S., each state has FDIC-style protection for insurance
companies, ranging from $300,000 – $500,000. If your insurance company
goes bust, the state will guarantee your capital. (This is incredibly rare, by
the way – while 140 banks went under in 2009 alone, not a single insurance
company closed its doors.) Unless there is a zombie apocalypse, you’re safe.
FIAs also give you no tax on the growth of your capital, a guaranteed
lifetime income stream, tax-free withdrawals, and zero management fees.
Make sure to use an advisor who knows how to structure the FIA correctly
and add the proper riders to get all these benefits.

Tony also touches on private placement life insurance (PPLI), which allows
unlimited deposits, no tax on the growth of your capital, no tax on
withdrawals, and no inheritance tax. Basically, you’re using an insurance
policy to shield your capital, then taking free “loans” out of the policy
whenever you want without having to pay them back. This is nothing like
regular life insurance, which is almost always a bad investment.
The catch is that PPLI can only be purchased by accredited investors
($200,000 annual income or $1,000,000 net worth), but TIAA-CREF has a
version of PPLI that anyone can access. Tony refers us to TIAA-
CREF’s or Stronghold Financial’s websites to take advantage of this tool.

Section 6: Invest like the .001%: The Billionaire’s

Playbook
Because Tony wrote this book based on the interviews in this section, there
isn’t much specific new information here. However, given that the people
interviewed are the top names in investing, it might be worth getting the
book just to read through the interviews and understand their perspectives.

Section 7: Just Do It, Enjoy It, and Share It!

Tony steps away from the focus on money to wrap up the book by revisiting
how money is just a part of a good life. The three decisions of what you
focus on, what your life means, and what you’re going to do will shape your
life, and money is simply an enabler of focus, meaning, and action. Money
allows you to invest in experiences, buy time for yourself, and give to
others. Using money for growth and contribution will give you a happier and
healthier life.

Conclusion
Most of the contents of this book have been said elsewhere before, but
Tony’s contribution is invaluable in calling out truths that are regularly
forgotten by the professionals and misunderstood by the general public. Its
600+ pages do contain quite a lot of motivational fluff, but coming from the
master of motivation himself, maybe it’s worth the time. Either way, this
book is the best guide to investing in the public markets that I’ve seen.
 The Art of Learning Summary

Josh Waitzkin’s story is a fascinating one, culminating in a book that surpasses any other
writing in its insight into how a world champion is made.

Everyone in the chess world knew the name Josh Waitzkin by the time he earned the
Chess Master designation at the age of twelve, somewhere in the middle of his eight
national championship titles. Notoriety in the chess world then morphed into pop culture
fame five years later with the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, which was based on
Waitzkin’s life.

In seeking an escape from the inner turmoil caused by his child celebrity status, Josh
stumbled upon the Tao Te Ching, and was drawn by the Buddhist and Taoist
philosophies of inner tranquility. Pressing further into Tai Chi, he found that the methods
he used in chess to convert techniques and theory into subconscious memory also worked
in Tai Chi, and leveraged that knowledge into a Tai Chi career that overshadowed even
his brilliant chess record, with 13 national championships.

The journey from king of the chess nerds to martial arts legend is astounding in itself, but
the real story here is that Josh subsequently accomplished what few have done. In
studying philosophy at Columbia, he began to unearth the foundation of the highest levels
of learning, retracing his steps and breaking down a process that typically can only be
grasped intuitively. The result is a book that explains in clear and practical terms what
every grandmaster of every craft has known, but few have so eloquently expressed.

Josh sums up his method as “the study of form to leave form”; in other words,
practicing technical methods with the express purpose of handing them over to the
subconscious mind to become part of your intuition, or flow. This book is an outline of
the incremental steps you can use to get there – a systematic, rather than haphazard,
approach to learning.

My apologies for the length and density of this summary; this book is filled to the brim
with the complexities of the secrets of world-class performance, and there was simply no
way to maintain the integrity of the content in bullet-point lists. Good luck.
Part I: The Foundation

Chapter 1: Innocent Moves & Chapter 2: Losing to Win

Josh starts with a little more detail about his own story: a six-year-old who walked up to
an old man with a chess board in the park, and took to chess so intuitively that he almost
beat the guy in his first game. After a few months of Josh hustling the hustlers in the
park, a chess master by the name of Bruce Padolfini heard about the young prodigy and
offered to become his teacher.

Bruce had actually announced the famous 1972 metaphorical Cold War chess match
between American Bobby Fischer and Soviet Boris Spassky. Josh’s father would later
write the book Searching for Bobby Fischer, which led to the movie of the same name,
inspired by his son’s life.

With a combination of Bruce’s technical coaching and street-style practice in the park,
Josh became the highest ranked player for his age in the country by the time he was eight.
His meteoric rise was interrupted by a loss in the final round of the national
championships, but after spending a vacation on the ocean and gaining some perspective
on his shattered invincibility, Josh came back to win the first of his eight national
championships.

Chapter 3: Two Approaches to Learning

Josh contends that the way most people learn, especially highly motivated people, is
terribly wrong. To find the right approach to learning, there are two important questions:
what are the factors that differentiate the few who make it to the top, and since most
people never achieve that lofty goal, what is the point of trying?
Dr. Carol Dweck is famous for distinguishing between two mindsets of intelligence:
“entity” and “incremental.” Many people are raised to believe the entity theory of
intelligence, which is the belief that skill is an “ingrained and unalterable level of ability.”
They use language like, “I’m a good writer,” or “I’m bad at math.”

In contrast, people who have internalized the incremental theory of intelligence say
things like, “I did well because I put in the time,” or “I should have worked harder at
this.” They understand that any concept can be grasped and mastered incrementally. (Dr.
Dweck’s research is presented in more detail in her book Mindset: The New Psychology
of Success. In addition, Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting perspective on this
phenomenon, which you can read here.)

When children associate success with effort, they develop what Waitzkin calls a
“mastery-oriented response.” Children who see themselves as smart, dumb, good, or bad
have a “learned helplessness orientation.”

In one experiment, researchers first identified each child’s theory of intelligence, then
gave the group a series of math problems – first easy questions, which everyone solved,
then problems that were above their level of ability.

The third round of questions was then as easy as the first. However, while the children
with the incremental theory of intelligence dealt easily with the last round of questions,
many children with the entity theory of intelligence struggled.

This experiment, sadly, is readily observable in real life, and the phenomenon can be
just as damaging to the child who thinks he is smart as it is to the child who thinks
he’s dumb. Highly intelligent people who unwittingly maintain their entity theory of
intelligence are compelled to maintain the illusion of perfection. One of two things
happens: either they begin to avoid doing anything that might challenge them, or at some
point they face a concept or subject matter that they can’t master immediately.

In the former case, they never challenge themselves, and simply stop learning. In the
latter case, they crumble under the pressure they have built up for themselves, and often
have difficulty rebounding.
Well-intentioned parents often set their children up for failure by telling them things like,
“You’re so good at reading!” or, “It’s OK, math just isn’t your thing.” The child
implicitly learns to link success and failure with ingrained ability.

To help their children develop an incremental theory of intelligence, parents can say
things like, “You’re getting really good at reading! Keep up the good work!” or, “It’s
OK, we just need to study a little harder, and you’ll do great on the next math test.” The
good news is that it only takes a few minutes for children to develop an incremental
approach for a specific situation. If children are given mastery-oriented instructions for a
certain project, they will approach the project in precisely that manner.

This is critical, because, as Josh puts it, “Usually, growth comes at the expense of
previous comfort or safety.” It is the span of discomfort between safe places that we
grow, so those who “shoot for the stars… ultimately discover that the lessons learned
from the pursuit of excellence mean much more than the immediate trophies and glory.”
A core part of the art of learning is being able to keep this perspective in the middle of
the struggle.

The difference between entity and incremental theories of intelligence underlies the
reason Josh increased in skill so quickly. Most young chess players begin their learning at
the beginning of the chess game, learning complex opening variations so they can quickly
crush their opponents with superior tactics and win the game and the glory. In contrast,
Josh’s teacher began his training with only a king against a king and one pawn, moving
to other individual pieces before working their way up.

While Josh learned the principles surrounding each individual piece, his rivals were
learning how to win quickly and easily win with complicated strategies. The focus was
on the glory of winning games, and winning them in only a few moves. This is possible
in the younger leagues of chess, but once players get a little older, their opponents are too
skilled and the nature of the game changes. The young player is then left without a strong
fundamental understanding. Unfortunately, coaches in the younger leagues are
incentivized to win, and win now, not to build a solid foundation.

Chapter 4: Loving the Game

In this chapter, Josh discusses three foundational components of excellence. First, world
class performance requires that the individual develop a style that expresses the core of
their being. Josh’s nature was to revel in chaos, so he expressed this core aspect of his
personality in the styles he pursued on the chess board. Because of his training, Josh was
able to guide the game away from the structure his opponents preferred to a more chaotic
situation where he could use his grasp of the fundamentals to win while his rival ran out
of fancy strategies.

Secondly, there is a delicate interaction between celebrating success and falling prey to a
results-oriented mindset. Someone who cares only about winning is setting themselves up
for failure. However, this is not an excuse to pretend you don’t care about the results and
avoid challenging yourself; short-term goals and competition are useful and necessary
tools. There is nothing wrong with enjoying a win, so long as the spotlight is kept on the
process. Josh puts it beautifully: “When we have worked hard and succeed at something,
we should be allowed to smell the roses. The key, in my opinion, is to recognize that the
beauty of those roses lies in their transience.”

This chapter’s third point about excellence is similarly pithy: “Growth comes at the point
of resistance.” Josh attributes his success to a constant state of leaping into the unknown,
residing daily at the point of resistance. Of course, portions of the learning process will
also be characterized by plateaus, when you are internalizing the information necessary
for the next leap. Learning is a cycle between these two points, and stagnating at the
midpoint leads only to mediocrity.

It is worth mentioning that in outlining these three foundational components of

excellence, Josh also briefly touches on two other realities of world class performance.

First, he emphasizes how he made it a practice to play against adults, which built skills
that other kids didn’t have – so when he faced off against someone his own age, he had
an advantage from having played in a different world. Secondly, he mentions how he
often felt a state of complete normalcy in competition, even after making history by
becoming a Chess Master a few days after he turned thirteen, five months earlier than
Bobby Fischer:

“I’ll never forget walking out of the playing hall of the 1990 Elementary School National
Championships after winning the title game. There were over 1,500 competitors at the
event, all the strongest young players from around the country. I had just won the whole
thing… and everything felt normal. I stood in the convention hall looking around. There
was no euphoria, no opening of the heavens. The world was the same as it had been a few
days before.”
Refer to The Mundanity of Excellence by Daniel F. Chambliss for more on the
significance of these two factors.

Chapter 5: The Soft Zone – “Lose Yourself”

Josh transitions from describing the foundations of performance to outlining the learning
process by telling the story of being in Calicut, India in 1993, representing the U.S. in the
Under-21 World Championship. He describes his mental state as “disjointed, out of
whack, not yet settled into the rhythm of the tournament… I had no flow, no inspired
ideas, the pieces were alien, the position strange.”

Josh had been staring at the chessboard with no moves for twenty minutes. Then, he
began to settle into a state of flow, letting his subconscious and intuition take over. Many
of us will recognize the mental state that he describes:

“The mind moves with the speed of an electrical current, complex problems are breezed
through with an intuitive clarity, you get deeper and deeper into the soul of the chess
position, time falls away, the concept of “I” is gone, all that exists is blissful engagement,
pure presence, absolute flow.”

Suddenly, as Josh was immersed in this kind of mental state, there was an earthquake – a
literal shaking of the ground where the lights went out, and people began rushing to the
building exits. What happened next sounds a bit other-wordly:

“I knew what was happening, but I experienced it from within the chess position. There
was a surreal synergy of me and no me, pure thought and the awareness of a thinker – I
wasn’t me looking at the chess position, but I was aware of myself and the shaking world
from within the serenity of pure engagement – and then I solved the chess problem.
Somehow the earthquake and the dying lights spurred me to revelation. I had a
crystallization of thought, resurfaced, and vacated the trembling playing room. When I
returned and play resumed, I immediately made my move and went on to win the game.”

It was this incident that spurred Josh’s personal investigation of performance psychology,
and led to a profound understanding of the three-step process that can be applied in any
field to reach outlier-level performance:
 1. Learning to flow with whatever comes, undistracted by random, unexpected
events. (This is where 99.9% of the population struggles, and stagnates.)
2. Learning to actually use those events to your advantage.
3. Learning to be completely self-sufficient by creating your own earthquakes – so
your “mental process feeds itself explosive inspirations without the need for
outside stimulus.”

Sports psychologists have a term for the first step in this process: the “soft zone.” The
soft zone is a quiet, intensely focused presence that is based on “intelligent preparation
and cultivated resilience” instead of “a submissive world or overpowering force.”

To illustrate, Josh talks about a personal mental problem he developed, where a catchy
song he heard would stick in his head and interrupt his train of thought during a chess
game: “The more I tried to block out the distraction, the louder it would get in my head.”
Most top-level performers have experienced a similar issue.

The problem continued until finally, Josh started blasting music on his stereo while
studying chess, playing everything from monk chants to Bon Jovi. He taught himself to
integrate the distraction into his creative thought processes, rather than fight it. In a
similar way, when certain opponents were methodically cheating, Josh learned that “the
solution… does not lie in denying our emotions, but in learning to use them to our
advantage.”

Foreshadowing a recurring theme in later chapters, Josh emphasizes, “Mental resilience

is arguably the most critical trait of a world-class performer, and it should be nurtured
continuously… Seek out challenges as opposed to avoiding them.”

Chapter 6: The Downward Spiral

The second step in the process, learning to use unfavorable events to your advantage, can
be difficult. Often, a first mistake alone isn’t disastrous, but becomes so after the
psychological effect spirals into more errors. As an illustration of the workings of this
phenomenon, Josh presents the scenario of a chess player who has obtained an advantage
over his opponent and nurtured that advantage, spending the game constantly searching
for a way to turn the advantage into a win. When this player then makes a small error that
allows his opponent to equalize the position, it is hardly a disaster – the players are now
on equal footing.
What often happens, however, is that the player is still psychologically committed to his
dominant position. He has been calculating every move based on whether it will provide
an advantage over his current position, so when he now looks at a potential move that
will keep him in an equivalent position, he mentally rejects it as inferior. Looking
exclusively for positions that will provide an advantage restricts the number of possible
moves, putting the player at a severe disadvantage.

The difference between winning and losing is often miniscule, but rather than interpreting
that fact solely as a caution against missing the details, world class performers leverage
small errors into brilliant new creations. Rather than holding to a psychological
dependence on absolute perfection, they are comfortable with and even thrive in
uncertainty, escaping the downward spiral and instead turning those moments into
inspirations. Josh begins to detail the process for doing so in the next chapter.

Chapter 7: Changing Voice

To lay the groundwork for understanding the third step in the process, Josh presents
another anecdote from later in his chess career. It was in eastern Europe shortly after high
school that he began to develop an understanding of one of the most crucial concepts in
this book: form to leave form, or numbers to leave numbers.

At several points throughout each tournament, he would find himself in a position that he
didn’t quite understand, or that led to an error. Later, he would focus his study entirely on
these few positions where his intuition had failed him. The process is important, so I’ll
give you his exact description of those studies:

“At first my mind was like a runner on a cold winter morning – stiff, unhappy about the
coming jog, dreary. Then I began to move, recalling my attacking ideas in the struggle
and how nothing had fully connected. I tried to pick apart my opponent’s position and
discovered new layers of his defensive resources, all the while my mind thawing,
integrating the evolving structural dynamics it had not quite understood before.

Over time… I settled into the rhythm of analysis, soaked in countless patterns of evolving
sophistication… Like a runner in stride, my thinking became unhindered, free-flowing,
faster and faster as I lost myself in the position. Sometimes the study would take six
hours… sometimes thirty… I felt like I was living, breathing, sleeping in that maze, and
then, as if from nowhere, all the complications dissolved and I understood…

I couldn’t explain this new knowledge with variations or words. It felt more elemental…
My chess intuition had deepened. This was the study of numbers to leave numbers.”

To put it in plain English, he had studied the technical information – the numbers,
principles, patterns, variations, techniques, and ideas – to a degree sufficient to convert it
to intuition, or “natural intelligence.” When he found a gap in his natural intelligence, he
returned to the numbers in order to convert that section of his knowledge to intuition.

During his time in Slovenia, Josh also began to realize how his chess games mirrored his
personal life; being fundamentally homesick, his whole approach to chess was consumed
by clinging to the past, which hurt him when the nature of the game he was playing
changed from technical to abstract, for example. By working on his ability to embrace
change both in life and on the board, Josh was able to address that weakness much more
quickly.

This one anecdote is an insight into Josh’s entire approach to learning. Parallel learning –
or devoting your time to learning skills that apply to multiple areas – is a useful
efficiency technique to learn more in less time, but it is also more than that; it is a way to
overlap the various areas of your life, recognizing the principles that connect them and
learning to smoothly navigate those connections.

Josh leveraged this realization to lead the game into situations in which his opponent
would be uncomfortable. Opponents whose behavior in the hallways indicated
impatience, intuitiveness, or a desire for control would be met with games that required
the opposite approach. By acting on this principle, he had found another way to dictate
the tone of the battle to his advantage.

Chapter 8: Breaking Stallions

Another key component in “creating your own earthquakes” is the mindset applied to
improvement. A person does not become an outlier by gritting their teeth and grinding it
out. The ideal approach is “cultivating a resilient awareness that is the older, conscious
embodiment of a child’s playful obliviousness.”
How, exactly, do you practice that? First, Josh returns to the necessity of operating in a
manner that is consistent with the core of your being:

“I believe that one of the most critical factors in the transition to becoming a conscious
high performer is the degree to which your relationship to your pursuit stays in harmony
with your unique disposition… By taking away our natural voice, we leave ourselves
without a center of gravity to balance us as we navigate the countless obstacles along our
way.”

Josh illustrates this point with an interesting anecdote about mentorship. He had been
training with two different mentors, considered by many to be the two best chess players
in the world. Yuri Razuvaev taught by first digging into the core of his student’s style,
then designing his training to strengthen the student’s own approach. In contrast, Mark
Dvoretsky broke his students down by crushing them with his superior abilities, then built
them back up again into a mirror image of his own style.

While Dvoretsky was clearly one of the best chess players in the world, Josh’s entire
playing style and nature was one of chaotic attacks. Dvoretsky played like an anaconda,
preempting his opponent’s attacks and squeezing him out until he had nowhere to go. For
Josh to abandon everything that made him great would be a grave mistake.

That said, Josh still had to learn Dvoretsky’s playing style to compete at the highest
levels – but Yuri Razuvaev pointed out what Josh calls “a delicate and rather mystical-
feeling idea.” He needed to learn from someone of his own nature who had integrated the
Dvoretsky strategies into their own game. If a rock guitarist wanted to learn classical
music, he would learn much better from a former rock guitarist who turned to classical
music than he would from a lifelong classical composer, even one who was a genius.

This is a deeper understanding of the principle of improving by focusing on increasing

your strengths rather than minimizing your weakness, as discussed in the summary of
Chapter 2 of Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek. Improving your strengths can lead to
huge leaps of progress, rather that the incremental improvement that comes from trying to
fix weakness, because improving your strengths builds on your natural voice and your
already existing neural networks.
Writing about the results of staying true to your disposition and personal strengths, Josh
says, “When we feed the subconscious, it will discover connections between what may
appear to be disparate realities. The path to artistic insight in one direction often involves
deep study of another – the intuition makes uncanny connections that lead to a
crystallization of fragmented notions.”

As an illustration of this process in his own mind, Josh draws a parallel between human
learning and the two ways to tame a horse, one of his mother’s favorite pastimes. The
first is to restrain the horse and “freak it out,” driving it crazy with noise until it submits
to control by a rope and a pole, and then saddle it and ride it until it gives up – in other
words, the Dvoretsky method.

Josh’s mother preferred a method more similar to Yuri’s. From the time the horse was
very young, she pet it, fed it, groomed it, and so on, always getting the horse used to her
touch. By the time she mounted it, there was nothing for the horse to fight. Instead of
breaking the horse’s spirit, she synchronized the animal’s desire with her own. A horse
that has been trained in this way has something that the broken horse does not. It not only
yields more easily and responds more fluidly, but it also brings its own unique character
and spirit into the ride.

When you try to fit a student into a mold, you rob him of the intuition he has built. That
might be suitable for a complete beginner, but for a student who has built up a level of
skill, it not only sets them back, but also destroys their own natural voice, which hampers
their progress in the future and prevents them from realizing their potential.

Josh finishes the chapter with some commentary on the balance between creativity and
practical awareness:

“In my mind, the fields of learning and performance are an exploration of greyness – of
the in-between. There is the careful balance of pushing yourself relentlessly, but not so
hard that you melt down. Muscles and minds need to stretch to grow, but if stretched too
thin, they will snap.

A competitor needs to be process-oriented, always looking for stronger opponents to spur

growth, but it is also important to keep on winning enough to maintain confidence. We
have to release our current ideas to soak in new material, but not so much that we lose
touch with our unique natural talents. Vibrant, creative idealism needs to be tempered by
a practical, technical awareness.”

Part II: My Second Art

Josh’s reading of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and The Dharma Bums began a journey
into the philosophies of Zen Buddhism, which soon led to Laotse’s Tao Te Ching.
Taoism taught a focus on “the underlying essence as opposed to the external
manifestations, searching for the flow that lay at the heart of, and transcended, the
technical.” In other words, form to leave form.

This journey brought Josh to the studio of William C. C. Chen. Chen was one of the
greatest living masters of Tai Chi, the physical expression of Taoism. He could read the
human body like a chess master reads a chess board, pinpointing the most miniscule spot
of tension in his students. After months of careful, attentive practice, Josh was then
invited to begin classes for Push Hands, the martial application of Tai Chi.

Chapter 10: Investment in Loss

The underlying principle of Push Hands might sound familiar: “not to clash with the
opponent but to blend with his energy, yield to it, and overcome with softness.” It is
natural to push back and meet force with force, but to master Push Hands, you must make
an “investment in loss” by getting beat up until you learn not to make that mistake.

Josh writes, “I have long believed that if a student of virtually any discipline could avoid
ever repeating the same mistake twice – both technical and psychological – he or she
would skyrocket to the top of their field.” While it is impossible to maintain a perfect
track record in this regard, the goal should be to constantly be on the lookout for “themes
of error,” both technical and psychological.

Master Chen eventually paired Josh up with a six-foot-two, 200-pound martial artist
named Evan who had been training in Tai Chi for eight years. Evan’s experience meant
that Josh was technically outmatched, and his size meant that Josh was constantly being
pummeled.
After many months, Josh began to learn how to absorb the blows. As he became more
relaxed, his opponent’s moves appeared to slow down. One day, all of a sudden Josh
found that Evan no longer even presented a challenge. Not being willing to invest in loss
himself, Evan avoided sparring from Josh from that point onward, and missed out on the
opportunity to learn from Josh’s improvement.

There is a recurring cycle in the process of learning: one phase of full-throttle action, and
one of in-flux, broken-down growth. Many people refuse to invest in loss during these
growth stages, and as a result never upgrade their game. An otherwise talented boxer who
has difficulty with the left jab will never progress if he isn’t willing to put himself in the
beginner’s mindset and get beat up as he addresses that aspect of his skill. Sometimes a
Tiger Woods has to step back, completely break down his golf swing, and start from
ground zero to reconstruct his game if he wants to get to the next level.

This is challenging not only because it is mentally difficult, but also because there are
often other people who are expecting you to perform at a certain level. To surmount this
obstacle, we must be willing to let others see us fail, and have the intestinal fortitude
to make a lifelong practice of being comfortable with risking that disappointment.

Chapter 11: Making Smaller Circles

The distinguishing factor in the pursuit of excellence is depth over breadth – to “plunge
into the detailed mystery of the micro in order to understand what makes the macro tick.”
Immersed in the busy modern world, many people are completely unfamiliar with the
focus required to do so, but the path to greatness is to truly and completely master the
essentials at the deepest level possible, rather than amass a range of ancillary abilities.

In some martial arts, students are rated by the number of flowery choreographed
movements they have memorized. They are “form collectors with fancy kicks and twirls
that have absolutely no martial value.” In contrast, Josh’s approach to improvement in
Tai Chi was to incrementally refine the simplest of movements, such as pushing his hand
six inches through the air. He learned to feel the tension in his body through this motion,
spending month after month to eliminate every last iota of stiffness.

By repeating the small movements until he developed the feeling (i.e., left form), he
would internalize the principle of the movement that would apply to other areas in the Tai
Chi system. By practicing the movement during the day and testing it in class that
evening, Josh also put into place a feedback loop that would quickly dispose of any
movements that didn’t actually work.

Only after approaching learning in this way should you then begin to apply that
internalized principle to your full range of tools and techniques. Once you are ready,
however, the key is what Josh calls “making smaller circles.” Now that you have the
feeling in place, you begin to “incrementally condense the external manifestation of the
technique while keeping true to its essence.”

In the context of martial arts, you might apply this principle to improving your standard
straight punch. First, identify the components of the technique: the punch starts with the
left foot pushing against the ground, the moves up through the left leg, diagonally across
the torso to the shoulder, triceps, and lastly to the fist. Then, practice the entire move in
slow motion, again and again until it becomes a thoughtless, fluid transition of energy
from ground to knuckles. Only then should you begin incrementally speeding up, using a
punching bag, and increasing the power of your punch.

This is hardly news, but it is essential in order to move on to the next step of the process
to become truly world class. Now that you’ve fully internalized the body mechanics of
the punch, begin removing the ancillary portions of the movement – make the wind-up of
your hips a little smaller, begin the punch a little closer to the target, and so on. Monitor
yourself with the feeling of the punch, and ensure that you make smaller circles in a
gradual way so that your body can barely feel the difference.

Boxing greats like Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson did this so well that they knocked
people out without even looking like they threw a straight punch, and world-class
performers in any field are able to apply the same technique in any field. They have
isolated the principle from the form, and as a result are able to wield the principle in new
and powerful ways.

While we might have a tendency to seek additions to our repertoires because it feels like
more tangible learning, “subtle internalization and refinement is much more important
than the quantity of what is learned… The fact is that when there is intense competition,
those who succeed have slightly more honed skills than the rest. It is rarely a mysterious
technique that drives us to the top, but rather a profound mastery of what may well be a
basic skill set.”
Why, exactly? “Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for
the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential.”

Chapter 12: Using Adversity

Adversity shouldn’t just be viewed as the inevitable appearance of roadblocks to be dealt
with and conquered; it is a useful and important part of Josh’s learning system. For one
thing, setbacks are a good opportunity to restore the balance between performing and
increasing our ability to perform.
It is a widely observable tragedy that high performers have great difficulty maintaining
this balance. Josh writes, “The importance of undulating between external and internal
training (or concrete and abstract; technical and intuitive) applies to all disciplines, and
unfortunately the internal tends to be neglected.”
When Josh broke his right hand only seven weeks before the national Tai Chi
championships, his doctor told him there was no chance he could compete. Resolved to
go against doctor’s orders, Josh began training with only his left hand and found that he
had been relying on his right hand for many things that he now had to teach his left hand
to do. He also found that his left arm began instinctively covering things that he never
considered possible, such as blocking his opponent’s other hand with an elbow.
In martial arts, if you can control two of your opponent’s limbs with only one of your
own, the fight is practically over. This reflects a larger principle. In any type of contest, if
your opponent is spending more energy to fend off an attack that you are spending to
initiate it, you have a major advantage. Every arena of competition includes technical
skills that make this possible.
Josh also fought off muscle atrophy during his recovery through intense and focused use
of visualization. During every workout using his uninjured left arm, he visualized the
stress passing to his right arm in its cast.
While current scientific understanding can’t fully explain this phenomenon, it has been
consistently demonstrated that the mind can direct the body to certain results. The cast
came off four days before the competition, and Josh’s arm had barely atrophied. With his
newfound skills and fully functioning arm, he became the national champion.
Most people view injuries and other setbacks as conditions from which to recover, but if
you want to be among the best, you must “take risks others would avoid, always
optimizing the learning potential of the moment and turning adversity to [your]
advantage.” (Refer to Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle is the Way for more on developing
this mindset and skill.)
There are certainly times when recovery and healing are necessary, but you can always
use those times for undistracted improvement of other areas of your game – mentally,
internally, etc. You should always come back from a setback stronger than you were
before it occurred.
The next level is to purposely create an imitation of these times; for example, a right-
handed basketball player might purposely play left-handed for a period of time. Every
adversity then becomes a source of inspiration to which you can return later to improve
your abilities.

Chapter 13: Slowing Down Time

We’ve all heard stories of people who accomplished seemingly superhuman feats in a
catastrophic situation, and perhaps we’ve experienced moments ourselves when time
seemed to stand still as our senses were heightened in a moment of danger or great
significance. We also probably all have the experience of searching in vain for a certain
answer, moving on to something unrelated, then returning and suddenly having the
answer.
It doesn’t occur to most of us that we could develop the ability to replicate both of these
situations at will, but in this chapter Josh shares the secret to consistent superhuman
performance and regular flashes of creative inspiration.
The structure of the learning process so far has been this:

1. Develop a solid grasp of the fundamentals

2. Expand and refine your skills, guided by your individual disposition, while
keeping in touch with the core of your discipline

The result of this framework will be “a network of deeply internalized, interconnected

knowledge that expands from a central, personal locus point.” Intuition, and the key to
replicating those moments of seemingly inexplicable deeds, is the ability to navigate that
network and use it to stimulate creative insight.
There are two important concepts here: chunking and carved neural pathways. Chunking
refers to the brain’s tendency to handle huge quantities of information by organizing it
into various chunks of patterns. (See Chapter 1 of the summary of The Power of Habit for
more on how the brain “chunks” information. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell devotes quite a
few pages to this, as well.)
In one experiment, researchers put chess players in front of chessboards to test their
ability to remember the positions on the board. Expert players could easily recall
positions that came from games played by other experts, because they recognized certain
patterns and “chunked” the game accordingly. When presented with boards having
random positioning, however, they had nothing to chunk and often performed worse than
less skilled players at the memory challenge.
The concept of carved neural pathways refers to the system of chunks and relationships
between chunks. (See Charlie Munger’s latticework of mental models for another way of
thinking about Josh’s “chunks.”) In the context of chess, a beginner is easily
overwhelmed by all the iterations of every move possible for all 32 pieces on the board,
and learning is slow. Because Josh started by learning to chunk the array of each piece’s
moves in isolation, his subconscious mind quickly learned to instantly associate each
piece with its value and possible movements.
From there, a player is able to begin learning the relationships of those chunks to each
other. Because each chunk has first been relegated to the subconscious, the brain is able
to process the equivalent of thousands of calculations, and a network of chunks begins to
develop. The player develops larger, more complex chunks by combining the simpler
ones – king, queen, and bishop against king, rook, and night, for example – and
developing chunks from the relationships.
At the highest levels, the player is also chunking the exceptions to the rules that become
apparent from these ever-increasing layers of complexity. These players have an ability
to be intensely present in the moment, relaxing their conscious mind to a degree that lets
the subconscious do its work, and it is this state of mind that is key to top-level
performance. The idea is to let the subconscious play the primary role, without losing the
connection to the conscious mind that keeps it in check.
For a demonstration of how this occurs, take a moment to keep looking at these words,
but allow your peripheral vision to take over. Then, refocus on these words, but maintain
the same awareness of your peripheral vision. In a similar way, highly skilled people can
let the subconscious operate freely while the conscious simultaneously sorts out the
details.
At the highest levels of competition, much of the game revolves around protecting
against the unexpected and bringing things back into familiar neural pathways. The
conscious mind has only a fraction of the processing power of the subconscious, which
often results in a situation where one contestant only experiences an instantaneous blur,
while the other has executed a series of moves, each subconsciously chosen from dozens
of options, calibrated based on the opponent’s miniscule reactions.
In those situations where time appears to stand still, information is simply being more
efficiently transmitted to the subconscious. In a life-or-death situation, the brain is simply
focusing on a very small amount of information, blocking out all other inputs as
irrelevant, but we can artificially generate this phenomenon by forming networks of
chunks in a specific area.
Because all that information is now going to the subconscious, the capacity of the
conscious mind is then freed to focus very narrowly, and as a result, the perception of
time is slowed down, just like in a life-or-death situation – except that rather than
ignoring all other information, we have relegated it to the subconscious.
Someone who has developed the subconscious in this way can operate in hundreds of
frames for every one frame that an untrained person can perceive. As a result, the trained
mind can operate in segments of time that are smaller than what the untrained mind is
capable of experiencing.

Chapter 14: The Illusion of the Mystical

At the highest levels, “reading and ultimately controlling intention” is the key to leading
the contest into places where the neural pathways are familiar to you.
In competition, Josh would make no effort to hide his “tells,” with the express purpose of
letting his opponent figure out what they were. Then, in a critical moment he would
purposely exhibit a misleading tell, leading his opponent astray.
This is an example of what Josh calls “mental programming,” or a system in which you
“observe and provoke a pattern of action/reaction” in the opponent, then use the
predictive power this gives you to achieve victory. As you move to higher levels of
competition, “making smaller circles” and “slowing down time” become more necessary
in order to prevent your opponent from noticing the mental programming.
A skilled opponent will often detect mental programming, so most high-level
competitions – from the boardroom to the field – revolve around the competitors
neutralizing each other’s programming and searching for new tells to exploit. If you’re
not aware of any such game being played, it likely means that the other party is operating
in a world you don’t understand. Proceed with caution.

Part III: Bringing It All Together

Chapter 15: The Power of Presence & Chapter 16: Searching
for the Zone

The difference between the great and mediocre is the ability to be at peace with ever-
increasing tension. In order to exhibit grace under pressure, we must first learn to be
deeply present in the day-to-day.
Sustainable peak performance comes from a pattern of stress and recovery. Many high
performers have a tendency to go full speed at all times, but top performers are those who
have learned to routinely incorporate recovery. The recovery itself is a crucial skill; the
better we are at recovery, the better we will perform.
There are many ways to undulate between exertion and relaxation in our daily lives.
When you start to struggle with focus, take a deep breath, go for a quick walk, or take a
moment for meditation. (For a great introduction to the power of meditation, try the free
Headspace app for Android or Apple.)
Possessing the ability to alternate in this way will help you be more resilient, as well as
allow bursts of creativity from your subconscious when you take a moment to force your
conscious mind to relinquish control.
The good news is that the more you practice cycles of rest, the less you will need to take.
Athletes often use interval training to improve their physical recovery abilities. They
might turn up the resistance on a stationary bike until their heart rate hits a certain
threshold, then turn the resistance back down until their heart rate drops below a chosen
floor. In time, their cardiovascular conditioning will result in a longer time before the
max heart rate, and a shorter time for the recovery. Mental conditioning often works the
same way.
If you haven’t yet made an effort to develop this ability, Josh recommends you take a
few months to make it your focus, and then move on to the next step.

Chapter 17: Building Your Trigger

We often instill terrible habits in our children by telling them to “focus” and chastising
them when they begin to daydream. As a result, they learn to associate a break in focus
with failure. The pattern that results is a habit of focusing with every ounce of strength
we can muster until the inevitable, forceful crash.
A better strategy is to recognize that sustained peak performance is only possible when it
is punctuated by periods of rest, and to focus instead on maximizing our ability to switch
from rest to explosive effort when the time comes.
A key part of this strategy is learning to love waiting. Countless people live their lives
waiting for their big break or expecting that their true calling will materialize and become
apparent at some undefined point in the future. (Oliver Emberton’s article on this self-
deception is both hilarious and eye-opening.)
Instead, our waiting must be (somewhat paradoxically) infused with engagement. Josh
puts it this way: “I believe an appreciation for simplicity, the everyday – the ability to
dive deeply into the banal and discover life’s hidden richness – is where success, let alone
happiness, emerges.”
Grace under pressure comes from establishing certain habits in the day-to-day that stay
in place in high-stakes situations, which results in the maintenance of normalcy through
those events.
Josh used a similar principle in his work as a performance coach for a high-level finance
executive. The executive was having difficulty achieving sustained performance, and
frequently found himself distracted in situations that required focus.
Josh asked him when he felt “closest to serene focus,” and found that it was when he was
playing catch with his twelve-year-old son. Many people have certain activities that fill
this role, but they are often dismissed as unproductive time spent just “taking a break.”
Josh then worked with the executive to construct a multi-step routine consisting of other
activities he simply enjoyed – music, meditation, stretching, and eating. Before he went
out to play catch with his son, the executive began drinking a certain fruit and soy shake.
Immediately following the shake, he practiced the same meditation technique for 15
minutes, then did a ten-minute stretch, and finally listened to Bob Dylan for ten minutes
before going outside to play catch.
After the executive had completed the prescribed routine every day for a month, Josh
instructed him to instead perform the same routine before an important meeting that
required focus. It was a huge success – the executive had formed a psychological and
physiological connection between the routine and the state of mind he had when playing
catch with his son.
Of course, it’s not very helpful to require 45 minutes to get in the zone. The next step
was to incrementally condense the routine in steps that reduced the time but maintained
the same effect. First, the executive ate a normal breakfast instead of the shake, did the
meditation and stretching, then listened to Bob Dylan during his drive to work.
After a few days, he decreased the meditation time by three minutes. A few days later, he
decreased the stretching time by two minutes, and a few days after that, was able to skip
the meal without any loss of the routine’s effectiveness. He continued to compress the
time allotments once every few days until the 45-minute routine took only 12 minutes.
He could have kept going, step by step, until it was only a quick stretch, a moment of
meditative stillness, and a quick thought about the song.
For your own routine, the key is to string any four or five activities you enjoy right
before the activity that best puts you in a state of serene, relaxed focus, and practice doing
so for a sufficient number of days that the connection is formed.
You will lose some effectiveness with the highly condensed version of your routine, but
the point is to have a malleable routine that gives you the ability to get in the best mindset
possible using whatever time is available to you. You’ll probably also possess an
advantage in any competition, knowing that you can achieve your mindset instantly while
your competitors will likely have to struggle with unpredictability.
Finally, the ability to find presence at a moment’s notice can have a huge impact on our
day-to-day lives. Presence, or the continual appreciation of ordinary things – rainwater on
the pavement, a leaf, a housecat – is as much a tool for living life as it is one for
increasing performance.

Chapter 18: Making Sandals

Emotions are an undeniable part of who we are as humans, but it is very easy to let them
influence us in a way that leads to mistakes. Many people deal with the unpredictable
force of emotions by pushing them down with a steely resolve when it comes time to
perform, which can be just as unproductive as letting emotions run wild.
A better way to deal with emotions is to acknowledge them and use them. To walk a
thorny road, you don’t need to pave the entire road; just make sandals.
Elite performers “use emotion, observing their moment and then channeling everything
into a deeper focus that generates a uniquely flavored creativity. This is an interesting,
resilient approach based on flexibility and subtle introspective awareness.”
Recall the three steps necessary to develop elite performance:

1. Flowing with distraction

2. Using the distraction as inspiration
3. Learning to re-create those situations without the external distraction

To flow with emotions, we first have to acknowledge where they are coming from.
Anger, for example, often comes from fear, which in turn is often the result of someone
bending the rules or otherwise acting in a way that we didn’t predict.
When Josh realized he had a problem becoming angry at competitors who cheated, he
asked his training partners to replicate the illegal moves so he would have practice
dealing with them. Rather than being indignant about the cheating, he accepted it as part
of reality and prepared for it. By addressing the root cause of the emotion, he was able to
flow with the emotion.
Basketball legend Michael Jordan was a classic example of progressing to the second
step and using anger as inspiration by purposely “trash talking” defenders on the court.
The smart defenders learned not to talk back, because if they did, it fed Jordan’s
competitive anger, goading him to new levels of basketball domination.
World Champion chess player Tigran Petrosian relied on this process so much that his
entire game was designed around it. He spent the first part of every day before a match
sitting quietly, observing his mood at the finest level of detail, and then built a game plan
based on that mood. His strategy would not only synchronize with his personality; it
would harmonize with his daily mood.
Once you stop being controlled by your emotions and start using each one to your
advantage, you might notice that certain emotions inspire you more than others. If
happiness, anger, confidence, or fear inspires your best performance, you might want to
build your trigger process to set up that particular mood.
Josh sums up the process in this way:
“First, we cultivate the Soft Zone, we sit with our emotions, observe them, work with
them, learn how to let them float away if they are rocking our boat, and how to use them
when they are fueling our creativity.
Then we turn our weaknesses into strengths until there is no denial of our natural
eruptions and nerves sharpen our game, fear alerts us, anger funnels into focus.
Next we discover what emotional states trigger our greatest performances. This is truly a
personal question. Some of us will be most creative when ebullient, others when
morose… Then… build condensed triggers so you can pull from your deepest reservoirs
of creative inspiration at will.”

Chapter 19: Bringing It All Together

The results of this process are readily apparent at the highest levels of any field. Josh
writes, “In my experience the greatest of artists and competitors are masters of navigating
their own psychologies, playing on their strengths, controlling the tone of battle so that it
fits with their personalities… The real art of learning takes place as we move beyond
proficiency, when our work becomes an expression of our essence.
At the highest levels of any kind of competitive discipline, everyone is great. At this
point the decisive factor is rarely who knows more, but who dictates the tone of the
battle. For this reason, almost without exception, champions are specialists whose styles
emerge from profound awareness of their unique strengths, and who are exceedingly
skilled at guiding the battle in that direction.”
Champions have mastered the technical so fully that their entire game consists of freely
flowing intuition. Those who progress even further are able to create a feedback loop by
which they observe the results of the intuition in order to deconstruct it with their
conscious mind and deliver improved instructions to their subconscious. (Elon Musk
calls this “the single best piece of advice”: “having a feedback loop, where you’re
constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.”)
The processes that lead to this condition are complex and fluid, and The Art of
Learning has accordingly been weaving those concepts in and out of each chapter. If your
head is spinning at this point (as mine was), you’ll probably appreciate a conversion of
the third step of the learning process into a high-level checklist format:

1. Lay a solid foundation by studying positions of reduced complexity.

2. Apply those principles to increasingly complex situations.
3. Make smaller circles: Take a single technique and practice it until you feel its
essence, then condense it incrementally while maintaining its full effectiveness.
4. Slow down time: Focus on a group of techniques to build “chunks” that allow your
subconscious mind to take over, allowing your conscious mind to hone in with
tremendous precision.
5. Use your ability to make smaller circles and slow down time to leverage nuances
unseen by others to control the intention of your opponent.
6. Once you understand the process, apply it to other areas.

Conclusion

The fact that Josh Waitzkin has applied the learning process to become the world
champion in two entirely distinct disciplines is a clear validation of his methods. I’m
unaware of any other performer of his caliber who has offered such a detailed,
informative, and precise breakdown of the type of learning process that leads to world-
class performance.
If you aren’t blown away by The Art of Learning, you might not have quite grasped it yet
– you’ll have to forgive me for any failure to convey Josh’s message. This is a dense and
profound book, and if you did actually understand everything in your first read, your IQ
is probably at least two standard deviations above mine.
The book is truly esoteric, and if you’re like me, you’ll probably want to re-read this
summary – or even better, read the book. Still, those who want to truly appreciate the
revelations within will probably want a little more context.
Early childhood fame made Josh averse to the spotlight, and the interviews and other
sources available online are typically higher-level summaries of the Art of Learning, so
unfortunately for us this book is one of the few available insights into the knowledge he
possesses. However, there is a highly informative interview with Tim Ferriss in 2014
that is available here. (A transcript of the interview is also available here.)
 Emotional Intelligence 2.0 Summary
I’ve been interested for a long time about that nebulous quality known as emotional intelligence.
It’s supposed to have a huge impact on your success in life, but what does it really mean, and
how do you measure it and improve it? With recommendations from the feelings triumvirate of
the Dalai Lama, Steven Covey, and Ken Blanchard, I figured that Emotional Intelligence 2.0
would be a pretty good bet to clear up some of the mystery.

I wasn’t disappointed. This book provides a great definition and framework for thinking about
emotional intelligence, a quantitative tool to measure your emotional intelligence quotient (EQ),
and 66 specific, practical steps you can take to improve your EQ. If you want to increase your
EQ, this is probably the best tool out there.

Chapters 1 & 2: Defining Emotional Intelligence and Why It’s

Important
The authors start by contrasting how important EQ is to success with how much attention we
tend to give it. Here are some stats:

 People with average IQs outperform people with high IQs 70% of the time
 EQ has zero correlation with IQ
 EQ accounts for about 58% of performance in most jobs
 People with high EQ make $29,000 more than people with low EQ, on average
 EQ point increases are highly correlated with salary ($1,300 increase per point)

Unlike IQ, you can substantially increase your EQ with effort. Because of our brains’ wiring, it’s
a biological fact that our first reaction to any event will be an emotional one, but only 36% of
people are able to accurately identify their own emotions as they happen.

So what exactly is EQ? According to the authors, “Emotional intelligence is your ability to
recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness
to manage your behavior and relationships.”
Chapter 3: A Framework for Understanding, Measuring, and
Improving EQ
While the authors’ EQ framework isn’t incredibly complex, the graph they present for
visualization is helpful:

People high in self awareness understand what they do well, what motivates and satisfies them,
and which people and situations push their buttons. This is the foundational emotional
intelligence skill.

The next component of EQ builds upon self awareness. Per the authors, “Self-management is
your ability to use your awareness of your emotions to stay flexible and direct your behavior
positively.” This involves your ability to put your immediate needs aside to focus on long-term
goals.

Social awareness is the ability to recognize emotions in other people and understand what is
really happening in a situation. In contrast to the natural tendency to think about what you’re
going to say next or try to anticipate what the other person will say, someone who is high in
social awareness has a perspective much like an anthropologist’s – objectively observing and
understanding human behavior.

The final and most complex part of EQ is relationship management – using your awareness of
emotions to successfully manage your interactions, both in the moment and over time.

Chapter 4: Measuring EQ & Creating a Plan to Boost It

The authors provide a passcode in each book to access their Emotional Intelligence Appraisal so
you can assess your strengths and weaknesses. The appraisal consists of 28 self-assessment
questions in which you rate the frequency with which you exhibit certain behaviors (e.g., “Can
be counted on” or “Do things you regret when you’re upset”), from “Never” to “Always”.
The advantage of the test is that it computes your answers, calculates a score from 1 to 99 for
each of the four EQ components, and refers you the page of the book that talks about how to
improve each area that represents a weakness for you.

I was hoping for a more rigorous test with features such as identifying emotions in video clips, or
collecting feedback from friends, family, coworkers, etc. It does give me some comfort that the
creators of this test have worked with over 75% of Fortune 500 companies and are generally
recognized as the world’s leading provider of emotional intelligence tests and training, but I’m a
bit skeptical of the accuracy of a test that relies on self-reporting. I’m assuming that the test is
intended solely to be a personal tool to more specifically identify strengths and weaknesses,
rather than a comparable metric.

The authors then arm us with the following 66 tips for improving the various dimensions of EQ,
which we can read in their entirety, then select specific ones to put into practice. You’ll want to
focus on only one EQ component at a time, and pick only a couple tips within that component to
put into practice. If you try to simultaneously implement more than that, you probably won’t be
able to focus enough to recognize the relevant emotional patterns and create new habits. This is
probably the most compelling reason to take the EQ appraisal – to be able to identify which
specific focus is appropriate.

Chapter 5: Self-awareness Strategies

1. Quit treating your feelings as good or bad. Judging your emotions prevents you from
understanding them, adds more emotions to the pile, and keeps you from being able to see the
cause of the original feeling. Understand, don’t judge.

2. Observe the ripple effect from your emotions. Recognize that when you act out of your
emotions, the effects can be long-term, and on more than the person at whom you directed the
emotion.

3. Lean into your discomfort. We tend to try to ignore or minimize unpleasant emotions, but
this prevents us from understanding those emotions.

4. Feel your emotions physically. Learn to spot the physical changes that come with your
different emotions, and you’ll be able to better understand what you’re feeling.

5. Know who and what pushes your buttons. This needs to be specific – identify the exact
people, situations, and environments that trigger your emotions by rubbing you the wrong way,
and make a list. This will then allow you to determine the source of your reaction to these things.
6. Watch yourself like a hawk. Develop a more objective understanding of your behavior by
taking notice of your emotions and behaviors as a situation unfolds.

7. Keep a journal about your emotions. Because emotions are such an intangible subject,
you’ll need to write things down in order to understand them better, identify patterns, and track
progress. It will also later help you to remember your tendencies in the moment.

8. Don’t be fooled by a bad mood. A bad mood can overshadow all your emotions, so you need
to recognize when it’s the emotional state that’s affecting you rather than an individual emotion,
and go through the same process to identify what caused the mood.

9. Don’t be fooled by a good mood, either. You should also seek to understand why your good
moods happen, both for the sake of understanding your emotions better, and to avoid harm that
can come from a good mood (irrational exuberance, for example).

10. Stop and ask yourself why you do the things you do. Your emotions will alert you to
things you never would know otherwise.

11. Visit your values. Contrasting your values with the way your emotions compel you to act is
a helpful exercise to increase your self-awareness. Take a piece of paper and write down your
values in one column, and anything you’ve done recently that you’re not proud of in a second
column. The authors suggest doing this somewhere between daily and monthly in order to keep it
in your mind before you react in a way you’d regret.

12. Check yourself. Your physical appearance always gives good clues about how you feel.
Observe your facial expressions, body language, clothes, etc.

13. Spot your emotions in books, movies, and music. Art that you identify with can offer
further clues about your emotions. Consider which of these things grabs your attention, and ask
yourself why.

14. Seek feedback. Because your understanding of your emotions is limited by your one
perspective, getting feedback from others is invaluable. Ask others for specific examples and
look for similarities in different people’s answers.
15. Get to know yourself under stress. Learn to recognize your personal physiological and
emotional first signs of stress, and take the time to rest or recharge before that stress piles up.

Chapter 6: Self-management Strategies

1. Breathe right. Oxygen goes first to your body’s vital functions, then to complex functions
that help you stay calm. Learning correct breathing technique and consciously focusing on it
when you’re stressed is simple and often-repeated advice, but it is crucial.

2. Create an emotion vs. reason list. Make a habit of creating a list whenever your emotions
and reasoning are in conflict, with your emotions on one side and rational reasons on the other.
Use the list to identify which emotions aren’t valid considerations, and which ones offer
important cues that your reason may have missed.

3. Make your goals public. Because most of self-management is a matter of motivation, by

making your goals public you can harness the motivation of the expectations of others. Share the
right goals with the right people who will keep you accountable for each one.

4. Count to ten. Use this basic self-management trick to re-engage your rational mind when
necessary. You can do something else like take a drink to get the same effect and give yourself
those few moments.

5. Sleep on it. When you don’t know what to do, time will often give you clarity by allowing
emotions to run their course and settle down before you make a decision.

6. Talk to a skilled self-manager. Ask a skilled self-manager about his or her self-management
processes in order to gain insights to modify your own behavior.

7. Smile and laugh more. Because changing your external expression can influence your
internal mood, forcing yourself to smile can counteract a negative mood.

8. Set aside some time in your day for problem solving. Simply put 15 minutes on your
schedule to stop the flurry of activity and emotion, and take time to think without the disturbance
of your phone or computer.

9. Take control of your self-talk. The average person has about 50,000 thoughts per day, each
of which trigger chemical reactions in your brain that influence your emotions and behavior. You
usually don’t notice this, but you can improve your self-management by identifying negative
self-talk (I always, I never, I’m an idiot, it’s their fault, etc.) and replacing it with healthier
thoughts (sometimes I make that mistake, I accept responsibility, etc.).

10. Visualize yourself succeeding. Because your brain reacts the same way to visualizing
something as it does to you actually experiencing it, visualization is a simple but powerful tool to
prime yourself for success. Take the time each night before you go to bed and visualize yourself
acting the way you’d like in situations that you’ve had difficulty with in the past, or might have
difficulty with the next day.
Refer to my summary of Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich for more on the importance of
visualization, and the specifics of the practice.

11. Clean up your sleep hygiene. You need 20 minutes of natural morning sunlight each day to
reset your biological clock. Avoid caffeine after breakfast (caffeine stays in your system for 12
hours), screens for two hours before bed (the blue light prevents production of hormones needed
for sleep), and activities such as working or watching TV in bed (which prevent your brain from
cuing your body to sleep when you’re in bed).

12. Focus your attention on your freedoms, rather than your limitations. Take accountability
for what you can influence in any situation (such as your own attitudes and reactions), instead of
worrying about things beyond your control.
As mentioned in my summary of Stephen Covey’s first habit in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective
People, the more you focus on what you can influence, the more you will find you are able to
influence.

13. Stay synchronized. If your body language doesn’t match the situation, it’s a sign that your
emotions are out of whack. Be aware of your body language and use it as a cue to address your
emotions when necessary. Refer to What Every Body is Saying by Joe Navarro for a primer on
decoding and leveraging body language.

14. Speak to someone who is not emotionally invested in your problem. A second opinion
can be invaluable, but only if the other person doesn’t have their own emotions about the
particular situation. Find the right people to be sounding boards for the right situations.

15. Learn a valuable lesson from everyone you encounter. The key here is in the mindset; if
you are looking to learn a valuable lesson from everyone you interact with, you will be in a
mindset that makes you more flexible, open-minded, and relaxed. Always be asking yourself
what you can learn about yourself or others from others’ behavior, and you’ll experience
negative emotional reaction much less frequently.
16. Put a mental recharge into your schedule. Physical activity gives your brain an important
rest, in addition to the physical benefits. Put physical exercise on your schedule rather than trying
to fit it in if you have time.

17. Accept that change is just around the corner. Because people tend to be upset by change,
acceptance that change is inevitable will save you a great deal of stress. The authors suggest
taking time every week or two to write down some changes that could potentially happen in
important areas of your life, as well as actions you would want to take if those changes happen.

Chapter 7: Social Awareness Strategies

1. Greet people by name. Using and remembering someone’s name is a basic way to engage
them. Picture the individual’s name spelled out, and use it at least twice in your first conversation
with them. See Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People for more on why this
is so important.

2. Watch body language. By becoming an expert reader of body language, you’ll be better able
to recognize emotional cues and adapt accordingly.

3. Make timing everything. Focus on the other person’s emotional state and frame of mind,
instead of your own, to ascertain the right timing for what you need to communicate. One simple
example is not asking for a favor when the other person is in an upset or angry emotional state.

4. Develop a back-pocket question. Having a prepared open-ended question in reserve is useful

in cases when the conversation is dead, the other person is closing up, or you just don’t know
what to say. This should be used when you need to inject some life into the interaction, not for
conversations that are already emotionally charged.

5. Don’t take notes at meetings. If you’re focused on taking notes, you will likely miss
important cues in the conversation. Most communication happens nonverbally, so whenever
possible you should focus on the individuals, not your notes. If note-taking is necessary, make
sure to take breaks at regular intervals to observe the people in the meeting and pick up
emotional cues.

6. Plan ahead for social gatherings. It seems a bit stilted, but the reality is that planning ahead
will allow you to be more emotionally present at the event. Write down anything you want to be
sure to accomplish, and you’ll forget less and notice more.
7. Clear away the clutter. This involves bettering your listening skills by focusing on the other
person’s words and expressions instead of thinking about what you want to say next. The
difference is your mental purpose: are you in the conversation to impress the other person with
your knowledge, or to learn something?

8. Live in the moment. Being present wherever you are instead of wasting your time regretting
the past and worrying about the future will allow you to be more perceptive of the people around
you.

9. Go on a 15-minute tour. The authors suggest taking 15 minutes out of each workday to walk
around and observe emotional cues: the look of people’s workspaces, the timing of people’s
movements, the overall mood, etc.

10. Watch EQ at the movies. Take the time to watch two movies specifically for the purpose of
observing the character’s emotions, body language, relationships, interactions, etc.

11. Practice the art of listening. This means practicing a conscious focus on the speaker, and
the tone, speed, and volume of their voice.

12. Go people watching. In order to improve your social awareness abilities, go to a coffee
shop, grocery store, or other public place with the express purpose of observing people’s
emotional states.

13. Understand the rules of the culture game. In today’s world, being socially aware requires
that you develop emotional intelligence across the spectrum of the world’s cultures. This is a
complex endeavor, as every culture has its own norms for personal, family, and business
interactions. It will require patience as you watch and observe, taking extra time to understand
the cultural expectations of people outside your own culture.

14. Test for accuracy. If you’re not sure what a cue is telling you about someone, you can
always ask. State what you see (“You seem sad…”) and ask a direct question (“Did something
happen?”)

15. Step into their shoes. Remember that people have different backgrounds and motivations.
Put yourself in their situation, and from the perspective of how they would see things, try to
understand why they are acting the way they are. When possible, check with them to see if your
guesses are correct.
16. Seek the whole picture. Ask people about their perceptions of you, or send out a 360-degree
survey to get feedback that will help you understand how you appear to others.

17. Catch the mood of the room. Moving from perception of individuals to being able to read
the room is a big leap in abilities. You’ll probably have a gut feeling, but you can also observe
groups of people to see how they are talking, how they are moving, how they are grouped, etc. It
can be helpful to do this with someone who is experienced in reading a room.

Chapter 8: Relationship Management Strategies

1. Be open and be curious. Sharing things about yourself will leave less room for people to
misinterpret you, and the more you know about someone else, the more clearly you can interpret
their emotional signals.

2. Enhance your natural communication style. We can all benefit from understanding and
adjusting our natural communication style. The authors suggest another writing exercise, with
the positives of your style on one side and the negatives on the other. Ask friends or family to
help you define the ups and downs, and pick a few of each to emphasize or to work on.

3. Avoid giving mixed signals. It’s possible to be saying something that’s on your mind while
simultaneously exhibiting body language that shows a different emotion that is still lingering
from a completely separate situation or conversation. Stay aware of your emotions to make sure
that your body and voice match your words. If they don’t, explain why so people don’t get mixed
signals.

4. Remember the little things that pack a punch. Add back some old-fashioned good manners
into the way you talk if you’re not already in the habit of saying the little things like “please,”
“thank you,” and “I’m sorry.”

5. Take feedback well. Appreciate the feedback you get, and be mindful of your response. Ask
for examples in order to really understand what is being said, and thank the person for the
feedback. It’s hard to give feedback as well as get it. Many of the previous points apply; consider
sleeping on the feedback, or making an emotion vs. reason list.

6. Build trust. Start the trust-building process by being the first person to “be open” and share
something about yourself. I’ll directly quote the authors for the steps to continue building trust:
“Open communication; willingness to share; consistency in words, actions, and behavior over
time; and reliability in following through on the agreements of the relationship.”

7. Have an “open-door” policy. The point here is to find specific ways increase your
accessibility to others, not to make your time available to anyone at any time.

8. Only get mad on purpose. It is healthy to express anger in a way that communicates you
have strong feelings, or that a situation is serious. Use anger sparingly and purposefully, instead
of letting it control you. Again, the authors suggest putting pen to paper; write down things that
make you angry, from the minor annoyances to the things that make you explode. Specifically
define the degree of anger in each situation that would improve the relationship. If it’s not
possible, anger isn’t appropriate for the situation.

9. Don’t avoid the inevitable. When you’re faced with a situation you don’t like, don’t
withdraw; it will only make things worse. Apply your EQ skills to find something that helps you
through the situation or improves it.

10. Acknowledge the other person’s feelings. Accept others’ right to experience their emotions
without either pushing those feelings aside or making them a big deal. Respect the right to those
feelings, even if you don’t agree with the feelings themselves. Listen and repeat back what
you’ve heard to show your understanding and concern.

11. Complement the person’s emotions or situation. We often have a tendency to reflect the
other person’s emotions, but responding to anger with anger, for example, will only make things
worse. Take the time to consider some past situations you’ve experienced, and think about when
someone else acted in a way that complemented your emotions, making the interaction a pleasant
one.

12. When you care, show it. Small acts of appreciation can create powerful relationships.

13. Explain your decisions, don’t just make them. People need to understand why a decision
was made in order to support it. Take the time to verbalize your decision process, including what
the alternatives were and why you made the decision you did. Seek input before the decision if
possible, and always acknowledge the effects of your decision. The authors suggest looking
through your calendar to identify your next three upcoming decisions, consider who will be
affected, prepare explanations, etc.
14. Make your feedback direct and constructive. The key to giving good feedback is to
consider the person who is receiving the feedback, and to adapt your approach accordingly. Take
the time to consider the person beforehand.

15. Align your intention with your impact. Times when your impact didn’t align with your
intention will give you clues about the areas of your EQ you can improve. Think about times
when you unintentionally caused hard feelings, or relationships that seem illogically strained.

16. Offer a “fix-it” statement during a broken conversation. Learn to recognize when a
conversation is deteriorating, and say something like, “This is hard,” or “How are you feeling?”
Offer a reset button to restore open lines of communication.

17. Tackle a tough conversation. Tough conversations will come up no matter how high your
EQ is. The authors offer a six-part approach to managing them better:

1. Start the discussion with common ground.

2. Ask the other person to help you understand how he or she feels.
3. Don’t defend your point of view until you’ve heard the other person’s perspective.
4. Then help the other person understand your side – your reasoning, your feelings, etc. Apologize,
if appropriate, for the difficulty of the situation.
5. Move the conversation forward once what can be said has been said. Obtain agreement on next
steps.
6. Follow up concerning what you’ve discussed at a later time as a means of genuinely addressing
the issues.

Conclusion
I found this book’s method of breaking things down into four components, then specific actions
within each component to be a very helpful tool for navigating the ambiguous realm of
emotional intelligence. I’m not sure exactly how helpful the assessment test was; I found it
neither incredibly helpful nor absolutely useless. Most likely, how much you get out of it is
primarily a function of how much time you put into carefully considering and accurately
answering each question.

My personal recommendation would be to do as I have done, and return to this book summary to
go through each practical step one by one, observing to which degree it improves the results of
your interactions. The authors aren’t going to obtain the legacy of a Hemingway or Vonnegut
with the degree of profundity included in these pages, but they did provide an incredibly useful
framework we can use to get our heads around emotional intelligence and apply it to our own
lives.