Josh Waitzkin became a celebrity at 16 when the 1993 film "Searching for Bobby Fischer" told the chess champ's story, from learning the game at 6 by playing street hustlers in New York City's Washington Square Park to his first national title at 9.

Thrust into the spotlight, Waitzkin tried to play up to others' expectations, had trouble adjusting to a new coach and ultimately quit competitive chess in his early 20s. He explored Eastern philosophy as a religion major at Columbia, took up tai chi at 21 and won two world championships six years later. Now 30, he studied Brazilian jiu jitsu.

His new book, "The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence" (Free Press, $25), describes his journey through chess to tai chi and his approach to peak performance. USA Today's Tracey Wong Briggs reaches him in the Bahamas.

Q: Why did you take up tai chi?

A: 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.

Q: You were national champion two years after taking up tai chi and world champion four years after that. What did you bring from chess that allowed you to become that good that quickly?

A: One way of looking at that is through the idea of "numbers to leave numbers, form to leave form" (learning fundamentals, such as the numbers of chess positions, so well that they leave your conscious mind and become instinctive). It started to feel as though I was just taking the essence of my chess understanding and making it manifest in the martial arts.

Q: How are your techniques applicable outside direct competition — say, writing a poem or playing the violin?

A: I think my connecting those two arts is just an example that all arts can be connected. Principles of learning from anything can be applied to anything else. My relationship to these things isn't about the arts; it's not about chess or tai chi. It's really about learning.

Q: You had a lot of aptitude for chess, but you also credit your success to how you were raised. What did your parents and teachers do right?

A: Compared with many of the rivals I was competing against, I had the feeling they were much more naturally gifted than me. The thing that really separated me was having a great foundation and an environment around me that allowed me to pursue it in a beautiful way.

So many people are paralyzed by this (perfectionist) vision. Very gifted people, they win and they win, and they are told that they win because they are a winner. That seems like a positive thing to tell children, but ultimately, what that means is when they lose, it must make them a loser. I think that kind of fixed view of intelligence makes you brittle. It makes you unable to deal with inevitable setbacks.

For me, I think the best thing that ever happened was losing that first national championship game. It put me in a mini-crisis as a young boy — actually, for me, it didn't feel "mini" — but ultimately, when I won the nationals that followed, my relationship to success became about that process, the idea of having setbacks, overcoming them and ultimately succeeding.

My coach and my parents both had this relationship to what I was doing, which was allowing me to express myself with chess. And so I could love it. I had a passion for it. I was expressing myself through chess, and I was learning about myself through chess.

Q: A lot of your book is informed by Eastern thought. Why is this hard for Westerners? Or is it hard for everyone?

A: I don't think it's a Western-Eastern thing. When I've competed in Taiwan, I've been stunned by how many people are stuck; they're proclaiming themselves to be grand masters, but they haven't learned in 30 years. It's easy to get stuck. Once we start to have success, it becomes easier to become kind of cemented in this perspective of who we are.

In America, people focus on the end result; they focus on the star. Michael Jordan: They don't focus so much on his journey as his knocking in that last-second shot to win the game in the playoffs, as opposed to all the hundreds of shots he missed in the last second to lose the game for his team that ultimately made him the competitor he was.

Q: The highlight reel and not the whole game?

A. Exactly. Or even more than the whole game, how about all the missed shots in the lowlight reel? The lowlight reel is what makes the champion. That's part of the reason that in the writing of the book, I was very true to the most painful moments of my life, because I think the long period of crisis I described toward the end of my chess life was defining to me.