Tim Ferriss on Mastery: Start with End Game and Make Space for Creativity | Big Think

One of the concepts that comes up over and over again with prolific creative minds that I've interviewed for the Tim Ferriss Show or for the book Tools of Titans is creating empty space. And one of the guests, Josh Waitzkin, who never does any media, can I curse on this? He always texts me with profanity laden SMSs because I'm the only one who can pull him out of his cave to do media.

But he is best known perhaps as the chess prodigy, and I'll explain why I put that in air quotes, besides how funny it looks on camera, that formed the basis for Searching for Bobby Fischer, both the book and the movie. He was a very well-known chess player and continues to be an incredible chess player. But he has applied his learning framework to more than chess.

So he was a world champion in tai chi push hands; he was the first black belt in Brazilian jujitsu under the phenom, probably the best of all time, Marcelo Garcia, who trains in New York City and he's a nine-time world champion, something like that. And he's now tackling paddle surfing, and he can apply it to just about anything. He works with some of the top financial minds in the world, hedge fund managers and beyond, the best of the best; top one percent.

So, why? What are the principles that he shares? One of them is creating empty space, cultivating empty space as a way of life, and these are all tied together, so I'll mention another one. Learning the macro from the micro and then beginning with the end in mind. And these all work together.

So I'll explain in fact the last two first. Josh learned to play chess, or I should say more accurately, was coached by his first real coach in the opposite direction when compared to most training and most chess books. He was taught in reverse. What does that mean? He began with the endgame and with very few pieces. So they cleared all the pieces off the board. Instead of starting with openings, meaning what do you do first, the first five to ten moves, he started with the ending game with king and pawn versus king.

What does this do? Well, this forces you to focus on principles like opposition, creating space, zugzwang, which is a principle of forcing your opponent to do anything that will destroy their position or anything they can possibly do will worsen their position. And these types of principles that you learn when there's an empty board with a few pieces accomplish a few things.

Number one, you are learning the macro, the principles that you can apply throughout the game of chess in almost any scenario through the micro, this end game situation. And these principles are adaptable. You become a machine that can bob and weave with the circumstances very effectively. Compared to that, as Josh would put it, if you're memorizing the openings, and this might be like memorizing recipes if you're learning to cook, you're effectively stealing the answers from the teacher's guidebook to a test and you'll be able to beat your friends for a while and maybe even be considered a pretty decent chess player, but on a deep level, you don't understand the game and you will hit a ceiling and you will never progress past that, and you'll get beaten by really good players.

So that can be applied to, for instance, Brazilian jujitsu. Josh taught me basically all of the most important principles of jujitsu through one move, at the end of the game, which is a choke called The Guillotine, which Marcello was famous for. His version was called The Marcelotine, but it's effectively like this: you're choking someone's head in here and he has a weird way of doing it where he puts his forearm on top of your shoulder. It's pretty wicked. If you want to be put unconscious, you can go to that gym and experience that yourself.

But that can also be applied to many, many other things. For instance, if you're trying to build a startup, this is a common trendy thing to do these days, and I think everybody should start a business at some point. But in the startup game in say Silicon Valley where I live, if you're going to go into the venture-backed world, well, yo...