Joshua Waitzkin Quotes

Knowing one thing well empowers you and gives you a set of tricks to the trade that you can apply across the board. Go deep, and it will serve you when you make your choices about where you want to leave your mark.

Without natural gifts technical rules are useless.

You have to have some form of talent. Getting to a skill-set when you can do something is achievable. Getting to a skill-set when you can do it an elite level is a different thing.

Talent (a natural way of thinking, feeling, or behaving) × Investment (time spent practicing, developing your skills, and building your knowledge base) = Strength (the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance)

You have to eat your technique. Digest it. It's in your blood, but you're not concerned with it anymore.

When it comes to mastering a skill, time is the magic ingredient.

The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert - in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again…no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

Research indicates that the desire to achieve the skills associated with success is more highly correlated with achievement than the desire for success itself.

Once you have mastered a technique, you barely have to look at a recipe again

The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well. And having done it well, he loves to do it better.

In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.

When young, one learns his craftsmanship, may become a young master, and it is youth that is most auspicious for developing certain skills.

Constant practice devoted to one subject often outdoes both intelligence and skill. - Assiduus usus uni rei deditus et ingenium et artem saepe vincit

To become really good at anything, you have to practice and repeat, practice and repeat, until the technique becomes intuitive.

The first thing you've got to do is know your craft, and then you can do something else with it.

The shoemaker makes a good shoe because he makes nothing else.

It takes ten thousand hours to truly master anything. Time spent leads to experience; experience leads to proficiency; and the more proficient you are the more valuable you'll be.

Excellence in one area is the beginning of excellence in every area.

The sum of all technical knowledge cannot make a master contract player.

Life isn't about trying to be an expert in everything. It's about being an expert in one thing and offering it to the world.

I think we have a lot of tools, a lot of skills to do certain things.

Methods are the masters of masters.

One hour per day of study in your chosen field is all it takes. One hour per day of study will put you at the top of your field within three years. Within five years you'll be a national authority. In seven years, you can be one of the best people in the world at what you do.

The difference between the novice and the master is simply that the novice has not learnt, yet, how to do things in such a way that he can afford to make small mistakes. The master knows that the sequence of his actions will always allow him to cover his mistakes a little further down the line. It is this simple but essential knowledge which gives the work of a master carpenter its wonderful, smooth, relaxed, and almost unconcerned simplicity.