Daniel Coyle's Blog, page 24

Are You In the Zone? Take This Test.

Recently I've been talking with a few master coaches about learning velocity — specifically, asking them for tools that will help people locate the "sweet spot" where learning velocity increases. And that spot is pretty sweet. Research shows that changes in practice strategy and attention can improve learning velocity by as much as tenfold.

So here's the result: five questions to determine whether you are in the zone or not.

1. Can you describe the move you're trying to learn in five seconds...

Tiger's Baby Steps

Check out these rare snapshots from Tiger Woods's early childhood. (Located in the lobby of the Tiger Woods Center on Nike's campus in Beaverton, Oregon, where they reside like holy artifacts at the Vatican.)

These photos are good symbols for the skills that Woods is going to spend the next few months trying to learn – the ones he missed out on while he was growing up – the skills of managing emotions and controlling impulses.

Managing emotions and controlling impulses are skills. That's a...

How to Design a Useful Yardstick

Instant proverb of the day:

You are what you count.

Many of the talent hotbeds I visited for the book don't rely on conventional performance yardsticks. Instead, they design their own.

The other day I met Graham Walker and Steve Robinson, who coach many of England's fast-rising crop of junior golfers. Their most important teaching tool? A long piece of rope, which they use to mark off distances for accuracy-improving games they've designed. For instance, players make a series of wedge shots...

3 Rules of High-Velocity Learning

A couple weeks from now, when Shaun White wins his medals at the Vancouver Olympics, you'll want to remember this video. Because here we get a vivid picture of what's really beneath his unworldly skills — and it's not merely gallons of Red Bull. Rather, it's White's highly organized method of high-velocity learning — a deep-practice technique that lets him accomplish, as he calculates here, "a couple years of riding in one day."

So courtesy of Professor White, here are a few lessons that...

Will Apple's iPad Make Us Dumb? (Or Smarter?)

Like many of you, I spent part of yesterday staring curiously at Steve Jobs's latest creation, and wondering how it might affect my life and my brain.

Certain truths are already clear: this device will make a lot of people more connected, more efficient, and it'll certainly make them cooler in certain circles. But the real question is this: will it make people smarter?  What's the best way to use new technology to grow our talents?

Theory 1: It'll Make Us Dumber

The iPad, is built for three...

The Science of the Hot Streak

For the last couple weeks, many of my NY friends have been extremely psyched about their Amazin' Jets: a run-of-the-mill NFL team that suddenly, mysteriously started beating more talented teams, and which now stands one victory away from reaching the promised land of the Super Bowl.

It's a great story, because we can relate. We've all been part of groups, in school or sports or business or music, that suddenly inhabit some magical zone of high performance — and then just as suddenly fall out o...

Family Talent

The Nuge's Brother

The Nuge

A few years back I was eating dinner with Ted Nugent (for this Outside magazine story). The Nuge was on a roll — you know,  shredding on his guitar, raging against The Man — until midway through our venison steaks he lets drop a little family fact. His brother, Jeff, happens to be a successful businessman. In fact, he was CEO of Neutrogena (now CEO of Revlon).

I thought Nugent was pulling my leg. But in fact it turned out to be true.

While it's relatively common to...

Seeing Beneath Greatness

In a couple hours my son and I are going to see the Chosen One: Mr. LeBron Raymone James, live and in person, on his 25th birthday (Cleveland Cavaliers versus Atlanta Hawks). We'll be sitting in the rafters, but we're excited to see Him in action. After all, it isn't often you get to see a guy who makes the world's best basketballers look like helpless kids.

But what will we be seeing, really? Fast, fluent neural circuits James built through deep practice? God-given talents? How can we see...

Lighting Fires

Check out the above photograph from the Kenyan town of Iten, just sent to me by Dr. Randy Wilber, a senior sport physiologist at the U.S. Olympic Committee Performance Lab. In it, two elite Kenyan runners trailed by a little kid who's running to school.  It's a tiny moment, and yet one that helps explain why this relatively small place produces the vast majority of the world's great runners. As Wilber writes,

…it captures the "passing of the torch" from one generation of great runners to the...

The Talent of Creativity

"Would you like to spend tonight in the throws of passion?"

My older brother Maurice has a talent for creativity. I could list dozens of of examples, but you should just click this: Men_R_Dogs It combines suggestive personal ads (complete with misspellings) and puppy photos. It's pee-your-pants funny. And he churns out this kind of stuff all the time.

Most of us think of creativity as a kind of conjuring, where, as Webster's puts it, something new is "brought into existence." But I'm not so...