Making Smaller Circles

Definition

Waitzkin's method for converting a large, deliberately learned movement into an economical, nearly invisible one: internalize a technique's essence (its body mechanics, its feeling) in an expansive, easy-to-monitor form, then incrementally shrink its external size in small enough steps that the body barely notices the change — so potency is preserved while telegraphing disappears. He pairs this with what he calls "depth over breadth": plunging into the detailed mystery of one micro-element to understand what makes the macro system work, rather than collecting many techniques shallowly.

In the Book

Waitzkin frames the depth-over-breadth principle with an anecdote from Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: a student blocked on writing 500 words about her town is freed by being told to write instead about a single brick on the opera house across the street — she returns with twenty pages. He contrasts martial arts schools that rate students by how many flashy forms they've collected ("form collectors") with his own approach of drilling a single technique — a classic straight punch — first in slow motion with a large, exaggerated wind-up until the felt sense of ground-to-fist connection is fully internalized, then condensing the motion inch by inch without losing power, until the punch becomes nearly invisible, the way a Mike Tyson or Muhammad Ali knockout sometimes only becomes visible in slow-motion replay. He draws the same principle from his own chess study of reduced-complexity endgames (king and pawn versus king) and cites Grandmaster Michael Adams, who appears to casually surrender central control yet wins because he has internalized the principle so deeply that its outward form has vanished — "he has made the circles so small, even Grandmasters cannot see them." Waitzkin credits this approach — condensing a large, well-understood technique rather than collecting more techniques — with winning his first Push Hands National Championship after only two years of Tai Chi study.

Why It Matters

This gives a concrete answer to "how does a slow, deliberate fundamental turn into fast, instinctive mastery": not by learning more things, but by shrinking the same thing while protecting what makes it work, monitored by an internalized feeling rather than external cues. It also reframes a common failure mode — chasing breadth, more techniques, more frameworks, more tools — as a trap that produces showy but shallow competence, while the performers who actually win have usually condensed a smaller repertoire to a much higher degree of refinement. The same shrinking-without-losing-potency move shows up anywhere a beginner's exaggerated, correct form needs to become an expert's compressed, efficient one — a golf swing, a design process, a negotiation tactic.