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

by Daniel Coyle

Talent hotbeds are mysterious places, and the most mysterious thing about them is that they bloom without warning.

“Look at that!” McPherson says. “She's got a blueprint in her mind she's constantly comparing herself to. She's working in phrases, complete thoughts. She's not ignoring errors, she's hearing them, fixing them. She's fitting small parts into the whole, drawing the lens in and out all the time, scaffolding herself to a higher level.” This is not ordinary practice. This is something else: a highly targeted, error-focused process. Something is growing, being built. The song begins to emerge, and with it, a new quality within Clarissa.

This is not a picture of talent created by genes; it's something far more interesting. It is six minutes of an average person entering a magically productive zone, one where more skill is created with each passing second.

myelin is important because it provides us with a vivid new model for understanding skill. Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows in response to certain signals. The more time and energy you put into the right kind of practice—the longer you stay in the Clarissa zone, firing the right signals through your circuits—the more skill you get, or, to put it a slightly different way, the more myelin you earn.

“All skills, all language, all music, all movements, are made of living circuits, and all circuits grow according to certain rules.”

Tennis players, singers, and painters don't seem to have much in common but they all get better by gradually improving timing and speed and accuracy, by honing neural circuitry, by obeying the rules of the talent code—in short, by growing more myelin.

three parts—deep practice, ignition, and master coaching—which correspond to the three basic elements of the talent code.

Making progress became a matter of small failures, a rhythmic pattern of botches, as well as something else: a shared facial expression.

When we see people practice effectively, we usually describe it with words like willpower or concentration or focus. But those words don't quite fit, because they don't capture the ice-climbing particularity of the event. The people inside the talent hotbeds are engaged in an activity that seems, on the face of it, strange and surprising. They are seeking out the slippery hills.

Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways—operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes—makes you smarter. Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you're forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them—as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go—end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it.

“We think of effortless performance as desirable, but it's really a terrible way to learn,” said Robert Bjork,

“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.

Like most people, I was under the impression that the key to learning skills and being human resided in our brain's neurons, that flickering web of interconnected nerve fibers and the famous synapses through which they link and communicate.

Skill is myelin insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows according to certain signals. The story of skill and talent is the story of myelin.

The myelin is harder to see, a faintly undulating fringe on the edge of the neurons. I blink, refocus, and struggle to imagine how this stuff may be the common link between Mozart and Michael Jordan, or at the very least the key to improving my golf game.

The input is all the stuff that happens before we perform an action: seeing the ball, feeling the racquet's position in our hand, deciding to swing. The output is the performance itself: the signals that move the muscles with the right timing and force to take a step, turn the hips, the shoulders, the arm.

the brain has critical developmental windows, during which its growth responds to its environment.

Myelin is infrastructure all right, but with a powerful twist: within the vast metropolis of the brain, myelin quietly transforms narrow alleys into broad, lightning-fast superhighways. Neural traffic that once trundled along at two miles an hour can, with myelin's help, accelerate to two hundred miles an hour.

“Your brain has so many connections and possibilities that your genes can't code the neurons to time things so precisely,” Fields said. “But you can build myelin to do it.”

But myelin plays a massive role in how that learning manifests itself. As Fields put it, “Signals have to travel at the right speed, arrive at the right time, and myelination is the brain's way of controlling that speed.”

you must make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes; you must slowly teach your circuit. You must also keep firing that circuit—i.e., practicing—in order to keep myelin functioning properly. After all, myelin is living tissue.

To sum up: it's time to rewrite the maxim that practice makes perfect. The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect. And myelin operates by a few fundamental principles.

Myelin wraps—it doesn't unwrap. Like a highway-paving machine, myelination happens in one direction. 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.

If you use your muscles a certain way—by trying hard to lift things you can barely lift—those muscles will respond by getting stronger. If you fire your skill circuits the right way—by trying hard to do things you can barely do, in deep practice—then your skill circuits will respond by getting faster and more fluent.

all skills are built using the same fundamental mechanism, and further that the mechanism involves physiological limits from which no one is exempt.

Savants tend to excel within narrow domains that feature clear, logical rules (piano and math—as opposed to, say, improvisational comedy or fiction writing). Further more, savants typically accumulate massive amounts of prior exposure to those domains, through such means as listening to music in the home. The true expertise of these geniuses, the research suggests, resides in their ability to deep-practice obsessively, even when it doesn't necessarily look like they're practicing.

But the truth is, life's more complicated than that. The truth is, it's better to use the information as a lens through which we can illuminate how the talent code works, to uncover hidden connections between distant worlds, to ask strange questions, like: what do the Brontë sisters have in common with skateboarders?

Deep practice and myelin give us a better way to look at the Brontës. The unskilled quality of their early writing isn't a contradiction of the literary heights they eventually achieved—it's a prerequisite to it. They became great writers not in spite of the fact that they started out immature and imitative but because they were willing to spend vast amounts of time and energy being immature and imitative, building myelin in the confined, safe space of their little books.

Consider the pattern of actions that Ken describes. The space and shape of the pool constrain his efforts and narrow his focus to certain flashes, to certain connections that are either made or not made. It's fly high or fall hard: there are no gray areas, no mushiness.

But myelin doesn't care about who you are. It only cares about what you do.

We've seen how deep practice and myelin illuminate the talents of small groups of people. Now let's apply those ideas to two slightly larger groups. First, we'll look at the artists of the Italian Renaissance. Then we'll look at a slightly bigger group: the human species.

A solitary genius is easy to understand, but dozens of them, in the space of two generations? How could it happen?

Banks listed the conventional-wisdom explanations for the Renaissance:

Prosperity, which provided money and markets to support art

Peace, which provided the stability to seek artistic and philosophical progress

Freedom, which liberated artists from state or r...

Social mobility, which allowed talented poor people ...

The paradigm thing, which brought new perspectives and mediums that created a wave of o...

“Genius suddenly comes to life and speaks out of a vacuum, and then it is silent, equally mysteriously.”

In selecting for myelin, “evolution made the same choice that any engineer designing the Internet would make,” Bartzokis says. “It traded size of the computer for bandwidth. I don't care how big your computers are—what I want is to have them available instantaneously, so I can fully process things, now. That's what the Internet is, instant access to lots of computers. We operate by the same principles as Google does.

Human beings move around through a big, varied world. They encounter all sorts of dangers, opportunities, and novel experiences. Things happen quickly, which means that behavior—skills—need to change quickly. The challenge is, how do you write an instruction book for behavior? How do our genes, sitting quietly inside our cells, help us adapt to an ever-changing, ever-dangerous world?

The question of acquiring higher skills is really a question of design strategy. What's the best strategy for writing instructions to build a machine that can learn immensely complicated skills?

One obvious design strategy would be for the genes to prewire for the skill. The genes would provide detailed step-by-step instructions to build the precise circuits needed to perform the desired skill: to play music, or juggle, or do calculus. When the right stimulus came along, all the prebuilt wiring would connect up and start firing away, and the talent would appear: Babe Ruth starts whacking homers, Beethoven starts composing symphonies. This design strategy would seem to make sense (after all, what could be more straightforward?), but in fact it has two big problems.

First, it's expensive, biologically speaking. Building those elaborate circuits takes resources and time, which have to come at the ...

Second, it's a gamble with fate. Prewiring to create a genius software programmer doesn't help if it's 1850; and prewiring for a genius blacksmith would be useless today. In the space of a generation, or a few hundred miles, certain higher...

Any discussion about the skill-acquiring process must begin by addressing a curious phenomenon that I came to know as the Holy Shit Effect. This refers to the heady mix of disbelief, admiration, and envy (not necessarily in that order) we feel when talent suddenly appears out of nowhere.

The speed of the progression was stunning: each successive group was unimaginably stronger, faster, and more ferociously talented than the previous.

What's the nature of this process that creates two such wildly divergent realities? How can these people, who seem just like us, suddenly become talented while barely cognizant of how talented they've become?