The Talent Code: Greatness isn't born. It's grown

by Daniel Coyle

As Dr. George Bartzokis, a UCLA neurologist and myelin researcher, put it, “All skills, all language, all music, all movements, are made of living circuits, and all circuits grow according to certain rules.”

You will become clever through your mistakes. —German proverb

they are purposely operating at the edges of their ability, so they will screw up. And somehow screwing up is making them better.

“Things that appear to be obstacles turn out to be desirable in the long haul,” Bjork said. “One real encounter, even for a few seconds, is far more useful than several hundred observations.”

Deep practice is a strange concept for two reasons. The first reason is that it cuts against our intuition about talent. Our intuition tells us that practice relates to talent in the same way that a whetstone relates to a knife: it’s vital but useless without a solid blade of so-called natural ability. Deep practice raises an intriguing possibility: that practice might be the way to forge the blade itself. The second reason deep practice is a strange concept is that it takes events that we normally strive to avoid—namely, mistakes—and turns them into skills. To understand how deep practice works, then, it’s first useful to consider the unexpected but crucial importance of errors to the learning process. In fact, let’s consider an extreme example, which arrives in the form of a question: how do you get good at something when making a mistake has a decent chance of killing you?

The word talent can be vague and loaded with slippery overtones about potential, particularly when it comes to young people—research shows that being a prodigy is an unreliable indicator of long-term success (see here). In the interest of clarity, we’ll define talent in its strictest sense: the possession of repeatable skills that don’t depend on physical size (sorry, jockeys and NFL linemen). fn2

Good advertising operates by the same principles of deep practice, increasing learning by placing viewers in the sweet spot at the edge of their capabilities. This is why many successful ads involve some degree of cognitive work, such as the whiskey ad that featured the tag line “… ingle ells, … ingle ells … The holidays aren’t the same without J&B.”

This process, which is called automaticity, exists for powerful evolutionary reasons. (The more processing we can do in our unconscious minds, the better our chances of noticing that saber-toothed tiger lurking in the brush.) It also creates a powerfully convincing illusion: a skill, once gained, feels utterly natural, as if it’s something we’ve always possessed.

To sum up: it’s time to rewrite the maxim that practice makes perfect. The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect.

Once a skill circuit is insulated, you can’t un-insulate it (except through age or disease). That’s why habits are hard to break. The only way to change them is to build new habits by repeating new behaviors—by myelinating new circuits.

But anyone who has tried to learn a language or a musical instrument later in life can testify that it takes a lot more time and sweat to build the requisite circuitry. This is why the vast majority of world-class experts start young. Their genes do not change as they grow older, but their ability to build myelin does.

And this was when Ericsson had an insight: a glimpse of an unexplored territory worthy of his hero Hedin. If short-term memory wasn’t limited, then what was? Every skill was a form of memory. When a champion skier flew down a hill, she was using structures of memory, telling her muscles what to do and when. When a master cellist played, he too was using structures of memory. Why wouldn’t they all be subject to the same sort of training effect?

Along with his colleagues in this field, Ericsson established a remarkable foundation of work (documented in several books and most recently in the appropriately Bible-size Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance). Its central tenet is a Gibraltar-like statistic: every expert in every field is the result of around ten thousand hours of committed practice. Ericsson called this process “deliberate practice” and defined it as working on technique, seeking constant critical feedback, and focusing ruthlessly on shoring up weaknesses.

Excellence is a habit. —Aristotle

People called the Pietà pure genius, but its creator begged to differ. “If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery,” Michelangelo later said, “it would not seem so wonderful at all.”

Skill consists of identifying important elements and grouping them into a meaningful framework. The name psychologists use for such organization is chunking.

ABSORB THE WHOLE THING. This means spending time staring at or listening to the desired skill—the song, the move, the swing—as a single coherent entity. People in the hotbeds stare and listen in this way quite a lot. It sounds rather Zen, but it basically amounts to absorbing a picture of the skill until you can imagine yourself doing it.

These feats are routine at Meadowmount, in part because the teachers take the idea of chunking to its extreme. Students scissor each measure of their sheet music into horizontal strips, which are stuffed into envelopes and pulled out in random order.

One teacher has a rule of thumb: if a passerby can recognize the song being played, it’s not being practiced correctly.

Why does slowing down work so well? The myelin model offers two reasons. First, going slow allows you to attend more closely to errors, creating a higher degree of precision with each firing—and when it comes to growing myelin, precision is everything. As football coach Tom Martinez likes to say, “It’s not how fast you can do it. It’s how slow you can do it correctly.” Second, going slow helps the practicer to develop something even more important: a working perception of the skill’s internal blueprints—the shape and rhythm of the interlocking skill circuits.

What’s more, there seems to be a universal limit for how much deep practice human beings can do in a day. Ericsson’s research shows that most world-class experts—including pianists, chess players, novelists, and athletes—practice between three and five hours a day, no matter what skill they pursue.

when you depart the deep-practice zone, you might as well quit.

Glenn Kurtz writes about in his book Practicing: “Each day, with every note, practicing is the same task, this essential human gesture—reaching out for an idea, for the grandeur of what you desire, and feeling it slip through your fingers.”

Deep practice is not simply about struggling; it’s about seeking out a particular struggle, which involves a cycle of distinct actions. Pick a target. Reach for it. Evaluate the gap between the target and the reach. Return to step one.