A man wants to walk across the land, but the earth is covered with thorns. He has two options - one is to pave his road, to tame all of nature into compliance. The other is to make sandals. Making sandals is the internal solution...it does not base success on a submissive world or overpowering force, but on intelligent preparation and cultivated resilience.

Initially I was very drawn to the Tao Te Ching, the Taoist philosophy. It was helping me deal with the balance of these external and internal issues with my chess life. Tai chi is the martial embodiment of Taoist philosophy. Initially, I had no intention of competing in the martial arts; it was just the meditation.

The moment we believe that success is determined by an ingrained level of ability as opposed to resilience and hard work, we will be brittle in the face of adversity.

In America, people focus on the end result; they focus on the star.

The key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not to live in a shell of static, safe mediocrity. Usually, growth comes at the expense of previous comfort or safety.

At the very core of my relationship to learning is the idea that we should be as organic as possible. We need to cultivate a deeply refined introspective sense, and build our relationship to learning around our nuance of character.

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.