The video explores the relationship between failure and personal growth by examining the powerful changes that can emerge from significant setbacks. The speaker shares personal anecdotes of failures in life, including a near-drowning experience, losing important chess matches, and the transformative impact these losses had on subsequent successes and life-altering decisions. These experiences led the speaker to move to the jungle, and develop resilience, ultimately leading to great achievements.

Delving into the neuroscience of brain plasticity, it is suggested that failures trigger chemical reactions in the brain, like adrenaline and dopamine release, which signal the need for adaptation and learning. These neurochemical changes catalyze a phase of plasticity that can facilitate new learning and personal development. The speaker reflects on the concept of tension in chess and chess strategy, the pressure to resolve tension, and how this can apply to other life scenarios, finding creative solutions in unexpected diversions.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. catalyze [ˈkætəˌlaɪz] - (verb) - To cause or accelerate a reaction or process, often used in context of change or transformation. - Synonyms: (stimulate, activate, accelerate)

What do you think it is about failure or missing the mark in some way that catalyzes change?

2. neuroplasticity [ˌnʊroʊˌplæsˈtɪsɪti] - (noun) - The ability of the brain to change and adapt as a result of experience, allowing for learning and memory formation. - Synonyms: (brain adaptability, neural flexibility, neural reorganization)

But the neuroscience of brain plasticity tells us that it's only under conditions in which there's some mismatch between what you're trying to do.

3. dissonance [ˈdɪsənəns] - (noun) - A lack of agreement, consistency, or harmony; often used to describe cognitive conflict or discomfort. - Synonyms: (conflict, discord, disparity)

That’s also something we should talk about later, chess engines change the nature of who chess players are because you can have the answer right away versus having to sit in cognitive and emotional dissonance for sometimes weeks or months.

4. cataclysmic [ˌkætəˈklɪzmɪk] - (adjective) - Relating to a violent natural event or a large-scale and impactful disaster. - Synonyms: (disastrous, catastrophic, devastating)

So do you think these big, what feel like cataclysmic fails set a sort of window of plasticity in which we can change?

5. fluid [ˈfluːɪd] - (adjective) - Characterized by smoothness and adaptability; can refer to actions, thoughts, or physical movement. - Synonyms: (smooth, flowing, flexible)

He ended up becoming a world class grandmaster and is just an incredible chess player today at the time he was just amazingly brilliant, beautiful fluid mind.

6. unobstructed [ˌʌnəbˈstrʌktɪd] - (adjective) - Not blocked or hindered, clear. - Synonyms: (unhindered, clear, open)

First board, last round just unobstructed learning until then.

7. elemental [ˌɛləˈmɛntəl] - (adjective) - Basic and fundamental; related to simple, primary parts. - Synonyms: (fundamental, essential, basic)

We want to release the tension, right? It’s just elemental to who we are when we’re living with that much pressure.

8. counterintuitive [ˌkaʊntərɪnˈtuːɪtɪv] - (adjective) - Contrary to intuition or to common-sense expectations. - Synonyms: (illogical, unexpected, surprising)

I had to remove my final defensive piece from in front of my king, away from my king side, which is super counterintuitive because you think you wanted to defend your king.

9. harness [ˈhɑːrnɪs] - (verb) - To control and make use of (natural resources), especially to produce energy. - Synonyms: (utilize, employ, exploit)

And I won that fight by harnessing the power of empty space.

10. manifest [ˈmænəˌfɛst] - (verb) - To display or show (a quality or feeling) through one's actions or appearance; to demonstrate. - Synonyms: (exhibit, reveal, demonstrate)

And of course, that principle is manifest in every part of my life today.

How to Use Failure For Change & Growth - Josh Waitzkin & Dr. Andrew Huberman

What do you think it is about failure or missing the mark in some way that catalyzes change? I mean, I always say that, you know, your brain has no reason to change. If you're just in trying to learn something and you're in flow, you're getting, you know, most people associate being quote, unquote, in flow with getting everything correct, doing everything correctly. I don't think that was the original definition that Cziksamahalyi intended.

But the neuroscience of brain plasticity tells us that it's only under conditions in which there's some mismatch between what you're trying to do. Like even, you know, like this has been studied in terms of reaching for an object and there's a mirror displacement or a prism displacement or something you eventually can learn to error. Correct. Because the cup is actually over there, as opposed to where you see it. But it is the deployment of these chemicals inside of us, adrenaline, noradrenaline and dopamine. In particular those three, their cousins, the catecholamines, that tells the.

At a neurochemical level, tells the synapses. Wait, something needs to change. I mean, the brain doesn't have any reason to change unless there's frustration, agitation, or at least some neurochemical change associated with those things that we call frustration and agitation. So do you think these big, what feel like cataclysmic fails set a sort of window of plasticity in which we can change? I often think, think that. That it's only through, like the devastation of a huge loss that the brain is now set up for a bunch of new learning.

Certainly we wouldn't want to design the system that way, but as I always joke, you know, I wasn't consulted at the design phase, and you weren't either. We just had to work with what's there. Yeah, like big failure. Why? Why do you think that sets a wavefront of. Of change? I think the way that I like, if I think about the most painful losses of my life, the most devastating injuries of my life, I think about dying, drowning. I drowned in the bottom of doing hypoxic breath work in a pool. I was on the bottom of the pool four and a half minutes after that led to the. Arguably the best decision of my life to move into the jungle.

I think about losing the last round of the Under 18 World Chess Championship on the first board. That's a very interesting story. I could describe little bit. Or I think about, like my first national championship. I lost when I was. I was seven, eight, first board, last round Just unobstructed learning until then. And then I lost the last round of the. On the. On the. You know, for the title. Fell into an opening trap. Like, that's the loss. That was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.

You were how old? I think I just turned 8 or May. I was late 7. And like that was. It was because if I had won that game, I would. I easily could have associated winning with just no pain, no heart, just. Just cruising up into the end. That was the moment that, like, I got my ass kicked. I had to go back, you know, deal with these demons, come back, train for the next year. And then I won the next year and then it was off to the races.

My life might look very different if I'd won that game. That and actually the kid who beat me in that game, David Arnett, became two years later, we became best friends. And for all of our childhood, we were on the same chess team and best friends. And I think he gave me the greatest gift of my compet of life by kicking my ass. That game. The most devastating loss of my chess life was So I was 17 years old. I was competing in the World Under 18 Chess Championship in SE Hungary. Every. So every year there's another 12, 14, 16, 18, 21 World Championship.

And I was always representing the US in those tournaments around the world. And you know, I, you know, travel to India or Brazil or Hungary or Germany or somewhere and compete in the World championship and under 18 worlds. I played the tournament. I just was playing very inspired chess. I just picked up on the road three weeks before Jack Kerouac. I had become. I was just on fire with Kerouac's vision. And I was just so like appreciating life with as freshness and intensity than I'd ever had, more than I'd ever had.

I was, I was like totally on fire in chess, in life, in love, in everything. And I, I was paired against Peter Svidler, who was the Russian. We were on the, on the first board, last round we were, we'd come, you know, we were playing for the World Championship. Every country sends their national champion, so it's a long tournament to get there. Early in the game, I think it was move 12. He offered me a draw. So if I'd accepted the draw for it would have gone the tie breaks.

I didn't know exactly what was happening, but I thought that he was slightly favored in tie breaks. I wasn't sure, but basically the World Championship would be determined or the gold medal would be determined by how our opponents in previous rounds did in the last round. But I hadn't calculated it out before, but I had a feeling it was like maybe it was like 40, 60 or 30, 70 against me. But it was my style. I never accepted draw first. That wasn't my style. I always wanted to fight, so I declined, pushed for a win.

Now the beauty of his decision was also he offered me a draw in the critical position where I had to make a very specific decision, which is a trick that chess players play on one another, which is that like if you're, we should talk about tension at one point. It's a, it's a really beautiful theme to explore in different sports. So one thing that happens in chess games is that you have this building tension between minds. And often the tension on the chessboard and the tension on the minds are mounting together.

And the urge, the need to release psychological tension often leads to the decision to release chest tension in the chest chess pieces. And when you release chess tension, usually the person who releases the tension will be on the wrong side of tactics. So a lot of chess, chess game is about putting mental pressure on the opponent to force them to break the tension on the chessboard. So in that game he offered me a draw. So you think about it, and we're 17 years old, we're 10 days into a world championship battle.

Even no matter how much we love the battle, some piece of ourselves wants a way out. Like we want to release the tension, right? It's just elemental to who we are when we're living with that much pressure. So all I have to do then is like accept the draw, shake hands and the tournament's over. And then it's out of our hands. What happens? So in that moment I have to also make a critical chess position. So the urge to release the tension is subtly entering into my chess decision.

And in that move I declined the draw and I made a slightly over aggressive move which turned and he ended up playing a beautiful game, big attack, beating me. I lose the World Championship just this close to like your dream and you're shattered, right? I then went and hitchhiked across Eastern Europe to meet my girlfriend at the time in a little town in Slovenia. And we broke up and all that. Then I ended up meeting again at a street corner in Brazil, the World Under 21 Championship three weeks later.

Lots of drama. You know, being a 17 year old kid, I didn't study that chess loss for two and a half months. It was so painful to me. I always studied games immediately afterwards and I Always you might study a chess game for every. Anywhere between three and 15 hours studying one chess game and that's that, say 10 hours is focused on the two or three critical positions of the game.

And this was before chess computers were rampant and you had chess engines that could always just tell you the answer to the move. That's also something we should talk about later. How chess engines and AI chess engines change the nature of who chess players are because you can have the answer right away versus having to sit in cognitive and emotional dissonance for sometimes weeks or months at a time without knowing the answer.

But we'll come back to that maybe so. I didn't study that loss for two and a half months because it was so painful to me. Then. I was, my family spent a lot of time at sea, which was an interesting part of my, my life and my chest life, living on a little boat, catching our own food, doing our own engine work. And I was, I was at sea after competing in both of those world championships and some other things. And I sat down to study that game and I spent, you know, dozen plus hours studying that one critical position of the game.

And then I realized what the, like the move I should have made was outside of my conceptual scheme in that critical position. I wasn't ready to make that the move I had to make. And he was also, I think, a slightly stronger chess player than me. I was a great fighter. I loved the battle. But I think if objectively he was a better. His name is Peter Svidler. He ended up becoming a world class grandmaster and his and is just an incredible chess player today.

At the time he was just amazingly brilliant, beautiful fluid mind. But I was confident going into the game. So I had to make this move that would essentially be. His attack was on the king side. My expansion was on the queen side. I had to remove my final defensive piece from in front of my king, away from my king side, which is super counterintuitive because you think you wanted to defend your king. What I didn't realize is like harnessing the power of empty space against aggression. His attack needed my defense like fire needs fuel to burn.

Moving my last defensive piece, his attack couldn't break through. But that principle was something I didn't understand at all. And so it's not like I would have found that move, but it was a real pop in my mind, right? So then I was 17, 18 years old. And then a year later I start studying Tai chi, start saying Taoist meditation, Taoist philosophy, the dao de Jing Chuang tzi, Lao tzu, the inner chapters.

And then I get into Tai chi. I started moving meditation. I started Tai chi, chuan, push hands without making the connection. Push hands is the martial art, which is the essence, which is like the essence of push hands is learning to utilize empty space against aggression. But I hadn't connected it to that moment.

Then you Fast forward to 2004 World Championship, which is what the art of learning ended with. The final chapter of that is the World Championship finals. I'm fighting this guy, bigger than me, stronger than me. He's been training since childhood. Final fight in a big stadium. Everyone wanted me to be destroyed in the biggest fight of my life.And I won that fight by harnessing the power of empty space, by letting him feel my weakness, by leaning on him, by letting him. By that. And then I just ended up disappearing. So it's very interesting how there was no mental process, there's no conscious processing of that connection.

But the biggest loss of my chess life, and then the principle which I wasn't ready to understand yet, was how I won the world championship in the martial arts so many years later. And it's a completely different discipline. Right. So it's an example of like. And of course, that principle is manifest in every part of my life today. But that's one of many stories in my life where, like, a loss spurs an insight which might consciously or often unconsciously, lead to something incredible down the road. And I think that one of the biggest challenges that we have.

It's so interesting that the loss of a World Chess Championship final leads to the win. Direct lesson leads to the win of a world championship in a fighting realm and how common that is. And one of the things that I think about, like, when you. When you sit down with great competitors again and again, when you hear their inner journey, the. The most heartbreaking losses lead to the transformational change which leads to the biggest wins of their life. Whether it's in basketball, whether it's in. In fighting, whether it's in business, it's in finance, it's in. It's in writing. Love. In love. Oh, my God. In love. Yeah. I mean, breakups are devastating. They're. They're a death of sorts. Yeah.

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