In The Art of Learning, Joshua Waitzkin tells the story of his early days training in Push Hands, a Tai Chi practice. He had a classmate named Evan, and every time they stepped onto the mat, Evan smashed him around. Not once or twice—every session, for months.

It was humbling. Sometimes humiliating.

But Waitzkin kept coming back. Because he knew that the fastest way to grow wasn’t to avoid these beatings, it was to seek them out.

He calls it “investment in loss”—the practice of deliberately putting yourself in situations where you are overmatched. Not to prove anything. Not to protect your ego. But to find out, as quickly as possible, where your weaknesses are.

“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.”

—Indian proverb

Josh Waitzkin, the chess prodigy turned world-champion-martial artist, has faced and beaten the world’s best.

And at the highest levels of competition, there are always dirty players. Waitzkin encountered them in his chess career as a fifteen-year-old.