Nine Quotes by Josh Waitzkin That'll Teach You the Science of Becoming a Top Performer
Stop grinding, start living
At 16, I was trying to hump anything that walked.
Josh Waitzkin at this age was an international chess master. A child prodigy, according to some.
His path to mastery became so legendary…. they made a popular film about him called "Searching for Bobby Fischer."
Still, most people have no idea who Josh is. What put him on the map was when Tim Ferriss featured Josh on his podcast multiple times. They’re also close friends. Tim doesn’t hang out with losers so people paid attention to Josh (including me).
Since I came across Josh, I’ve been fascinated by him.
At the height of his chess success he quit the game forever and transitioned into martial arts. He became a national champion in both Tai Chi and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
He’s also a best-selling author with his book “The Art of Learning.” Because Josh is so good at mastery, he accidentally created a business that helps the top 1% become masters in their field.
To the public, Josh is mostly a nobody. To elite performers in Silicon Valley, Tennis, and big corporations, he is a god more useful than self-help guru Tony Robbins.
When you master Josh’s way of thinking you can literally do anything or be anyone you want. The mental limitations are removed and the path to mastery reveals itself.In recent years, Josh has been quietly behind close doors mastering the art of surfing with one of those fancy foil boards.
I expect he’ll become a master in this field, too, because once you know how to learn you can apply it to anything. In my life, I learned how to master the world of music, then I took the skill to startups, banking, writing, and now online business.
These are Josh’s best ideas to unlock the science of high achievement in your life.
1. “Usually, growth comes at the expense of previous comfort or safety.”
Everything in life requires a sacrifice.
To experience the level of growth needed to become a top performer in any field, you must give up something. That normally means the safety or comfort you have right now needs to be temporarily put at risk or for it to disappear.
“We cannot expect to reach excellence if ‘going through the motions’ is the norm of our lives.”
The average person goes through the motions expecting to find hacks or get lucky. But it never happens and all they get is regrets.
When I decided in 2021 to get serious about online business, I quit my banking career. I lost the safety of a paycheck. And because I trashed 9-5 jobs on LinkedIn, I burned any path I might have back into banking.
Who the F is going to hire an ex-banker who says 9-5 jobs are a scam?
No one.
Only after I put everything on the line did I know I was serious. Before that point I was just fluffing around with no strategy or intention. If you can’t deal with mild discomfort, you’ll never become a top performer.
Make the hard decision to take a calculated risk.
2. “Mental resilience is arguably the most critical trait of a world-class performer, and it should be nurtured continuously.
Left to my own devices, I am always looking for ways to become more and more psychologically impregnable.”
In the world of business, people are always talking about sales funnels, email lists, newsletters, and building social media audiences. What no one dares talk about is mental resilience.
John Assaraf said this recently and it flipped my mind upside down:
People think they’re missing the how-to or the knowledge to achieve their big goal. After 10 years of teaching people to write online, I can confidently say this is bullsh*t. The knowledge and how-to is foundational but it isn’t everything.
What the average person lacks are the beliefs, mindset, and habits to join the top 1%.
You can have great skills and every book on a topic displayed in your Zoom background when you’re on a call, but if you don’t have the right mindset, nothing is gonna happen.
I wish I ran a mindset academy (and in some ways I secretly do).
The reason I don’t is because people all think they have a great mindset and would never pay to upgrade it, even though the opposite is true.
Josh Waitzkin goes a step further.
He spends considerable time making his mind psychologically impregnable. A great mindset that’s easy to hijack still equals cataclysmic failure.
An impregnable mind looks like this:
Expects failure
Loves rejection
Studies psychology
Takes hate and turns it into greatness
Ignores people standing in the peanut gallery and focuses on feedback from people in the arena.
Only once your mindset is right will you outperform, become wealthy, own a successful business, or achieve extraordinary results.
Your mindset isn’t developed once either. It’s a daily maintenance task to keep your mindset top-notch with meditation, podcasts, a clean content diet, and great friends/mentors.
Mindset > Everything
3. “Expectations are limitations. Let go of them and discover your true potential.”
Expectations piss me off.
They’re a handbrake to high performance. They’re how you open the floodgates to entitlement and victimhood. When you show up to achieve a big goal, no one knows what the heck is gonna happen. That’s the whole point.
When you create expectations you also create guaranteed disappointments.
Why? Because nothing ever goes how you expect. If you knew the outcome beforehand, you’d be a fortune-teller in a wig living in a gypsy commune.
The first attempt at any big goal, by design, will probably be a failure. Remove the expectations to remove the limitations on your potential.
4. “Growth comes at the point of resistance.
We learn by pushing ourselves and finding what really lies at the outer reaches of our abilities.”
Without friction life is boring.
You WANT resistance otherwise there’s nothing to break through. Resistance, obstacles, and roadblocks are the where we find growth.
In my finance days, I wanted to work in investment banking. The trouble is I didn’t meet the minimum criteria which was to have a finance degree. So resistance set in and all I got were back-to-back noes.
Then when I was ready to give up I did one final job interview. The recruiter liked me. So did the General Manager Slave. They made me an offer to join one of the biggest investment banks in the world on a high 6-figure salary.
If I didn’t have any resistance to my goal, I never would’ve realized finance degrees were useless. This saved me 4 years and $200,000 in college education.
The obstacle is the way – Marcus Aurelius
5. “When uncomfortable, my instinct is not to avoid the discomfort but to become at peace with it. “
People either love discomfort and want to train to go to war as a navy seal. Or they hate discomfort and overworship self-care and Sponge Bob Square Pants.
Josh is different. He makes peace with the discomfort.
He’s says one of the surefire ways to tell if someone is a high performer is to see whether they have a recovery habit. Do they just go, go, go and slam into a wall, or do they deliberately work in periods of rest?
Without proper rest you’ll never be the best.
It’s why next week I’m going off grid for 10 days. I cannot keep up this level of writing obsession and publishing schedule without time away. Most of us can’t bare to be away from technology and to do nothing.
We constantly need stimulation and to be-busy-being-awesome. But when the mind can’t shut off, it can’t process all the experiences you’ve had and turn them into wisdom. So true learning doesn’t happen.
That’s how we become stupid.
6. “If I want to be the best, I have to take risks others would avoid, always optimizing the learning potential of the moment and turning adversity to my advantage.”
“The market is saturated” is just opportunity in disguise.
You take advantage of a saturated market by taking a risk the current players refuse to take. A few years back, I made it big on Medium. Substack came out of nowhere. All the Medium writers were too scared to try it, so I did.
I was one of the first writers to write here. It was a risk. Substack may have blown up and gone bankrupt.
But they didn’t.
They are now the leading social media platform on the internet because they made the incentives in the creator’s favor (not an ad for Substack…just a fact).
I’m not the smartest or best writer, but I do take risks most creators won’t take, and so I get rewards many can only dream of.
Taking calculated risks is a competitive advantage.
“Of course there were plateaus, periods when my results leveled off while I internalized the information necessary for my next growth spurt, but I didn’t mind.” – Josh Waitzkin7. “If you want to win, you have to lose first.”
Fear of failure holds 99% of people back.
They think if they don’t succeed at the first thing they try, everyone will judge them and they’ll have to hide forever. What they misunderstand is no one’s watching because they’re not Tom-Cruise-famous.
I started 3 writing academies and failed. It was only on my 4th attempt that I figured out how to do it. The losses taught me what didn’t work so I could do what did work. If you won’t lose you 100% will never win.
Stop worrying about being embarrassed.
Challenge: go to a comedy club and get up on stage and do 60 seconds of comedy. People will either laugh at you or with you. But when you wake up tomorrow nobody will give a sh*t that you tried. This applies to all goals.
“Musicians, actors, athletes, philosophers, scientists, and writers understand that brilliant creations are often born of small errors.” – Josh Waitzkin
8. “The only way to get better is to compete with people, who are better than you.”
You’ll never be the best in the world forever.
I remember chatting to Olympic Swimmer Kieran Perkins many years ago. I asked him what it was like on the hard days. He said even when you wake up, vomit everywhere, want to pass out, and shouldn’t be swimming it’s impossible NOT to.
Because when he went down to the pool there were 6 other Olympic gold medalists waiting to train with him. Other peak performers won’t let you quit. They push you to go beyond your best.
So Kieran swam a world record time during one event because his teammates refused to let him sit out the race. A few laps in, Kieran had already forgotten his sickness and was deep in the zone.
I’m not the most successful in online business.
I do 7-figures a year but others do 8-figures.
To get better I’ve started getting around these 8-figure owners. The people and mindset that got me to 7-figures won’t get me to 8-figures. I must get around people higher in the video game of life to reach my potential.
The temptation is to be jealous of other high performers in your field. The top 1% make friends with their competitors and train with them.
9. “Success comes from turning setbacks into comebacks.”
Setbacks in life are a given.
There are two options when they happen: 1) Give up, complain, blame, and become a victim. TikTok will love you for it. 2) Take the setbacks & use them to your advantage.
There are many ways to do this. My favorite as a writer is to take a setback and turn it into a story. Stories are what attract people to you like a magnet.
When stuff goes wrong it adds interesting angles to your life story. If you share these stories they help become part of the comeback. The stories inspire the people that can help you start a new goal.
Setbacks lead to frustration too. And frustration is one of the most potent forms of energy on the planet. You should pray to whatever god you worship that you’re blessed with setbacks.
With setbacks, you can get so pissed off you just break through Berlin walls others stand behind in compliance.
Face a setback. Get pissed off. Use it.
Tell me which of the 9 quotes you loved the most and why in the comments.
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#3 is my number one with a bullet! I’ve been learning how to free myself from expectations – mine and others’ – and Josh’s quote along with your insightful perspective just helped me get to a profound realization:
My favorite thing is being surprised. The more I can free myself from expectations, the more I can surprise myself and others. And THAT is both surprising AND delightful to me!
Thank you for helping me learn, grow, and think better, Tim 🙏🏼❤️🙏🏼
I love Quote #8 .The only way to get better is to compete with people who are better than you . I am falling in love with your writing.It’s always packed with top class information.I am learning and always looking forward to it.