The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Everything Else

by Daniel Coyle

Gallimore and Tharp kept attending practices. As weeks and months went by, an ember of insight began to glow. It came partly from watching the team improve, rising from third in the conference at midseason to winning its tenth national championship. But it came mostly from the data they collected in their notebooks. Gallimore and Tharp recorded and coded 2,326 discrete acts of teaching. Of them, a mere 6.9 percent were compliments. Only 6.6 percent were expressions of displeasure. But 75 percent were pure information: what to do, how to do it, when to intensify an activity. One of Wooden's most frequent forms of teaching was a three-part instruction where he modeled the right way to do something, showed the incorrect way, and then remodeled the right way, a sequence that appeared in Gallimore and Tharp's notes as M+, M−, M+; it happened so often they named it a “Wooden.” As Gallimore and Tharp wrote, Wooden's “demonstrations rarely take longer than three seconds, but are of such clarity that they leave an image in memory much like a textbook sketch.”