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

by Daniel Coyle

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

they have found a way to increase their learning velocity—and

I call this kind of training deep practice,

when you encountered the words with blank spaces, something both imperceptible and profound happened. You stopped. You stumbled ever so briefly, then figured it out. You experienced a microsecond

You didn't practice harder when you looked at column B. You practiced deeper.

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.

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.

Robert Bjork,

Group A studied the paper for four sessions. Group B studied only once but was tested three times. A week later both groups were tested, and Group B scored 50 percent higher than Group A. They'd studied one-fourth as much yet learned far more. (Catherine Fritz, one of Bjork's students, said she applied these ideas to her schoolwork, and raised her GPA by a full point while studying half as much.)

We tend to think of our memory as a tape recorder, but

The more we generate impulses, encountering and overcoming difficulties, the more scaffolding we build. The more scaffolding we build, the faster we learn.”

deep practice is a strange concept is that it takes events that we normally strive to avoid—namely, mistakes—and turns them into skills.

crucial importance of errors to the learning process.

possession of repeatable skills

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.”

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.

Struggle is not optional—it's neurologically required: in order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit suboptimally; 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.

The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect.

myelin doesn't care who you are—it cares what you do.

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 the myelin model shows that certain hotbeds succeed not only because people there are trying harder but also because they are trying harder in the right way—practicing more deeply and earning more skill. When we look more closely, those hotbeds aren't really underdogs at all. Like David, they have found the right leverage against Goliath.

Memory wasn't like shoe size—it could be improved through training.

Ericsson called this process “deliberate practice” and defined it as working on technique, seeking constant critical feedback, and focusing ruthlessly on shoring up weaknesses. (For practical purposes, we can consider “deliberate practice” and “deep practice” to be basically the same thing—though since he's a psychologist, Ericsson's term refers to the mental state, not to myelin. For the record, he is attracted to the idea. “I find the correlation [between myelin and skill] very interesting,” he told me.)

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.

That's not to say that a minuscule percentage of people don't possess an innate, obsessive desire to improve—what psychologist Ellen Winner calls “the rage to master.”

Excellence is a habit. —Aristotle

Barker's work conclusively establishes two facts about the Brontës' little books. First, they wrote a great deal in a variety of forms—twenty-two little books averaging eighty pages each in one fifteen-month period—and second, their writing, while complicated and fantastical, wasn't very good.*2 As Barker put it, “Their slap-dash writing, appalling spelling, and non-existent punctuation well into their late teenage years is usually glossed over [by Brontë biographers], as is the frequent immaturity of thought and characterization. These elements in the juvenilia do not detract from the Brontës' achievement in producing such a volume of literature at so early an age, but they do extensively undermine the view that they were born novelists.”

Share with Jes and kids. Point is they developed the interest, put in the effort, used models, etc. Built up myelin

created hundreds of works that were utter artistic failures except for two redeeming facts: each one made them happy, and each one quietly earned them a bit of skill. Skill is insulation that wraps neural circuits and grows according to certain signals.

We tend to think of the great Renaissance artists as a homogenous group, but the truth is that they were like any other randomly selected group of people. They came from rich and poor families alike; they had different personalities, different teachers, different motivations. But they had one thing in common: they all spent thousands of hours inside a deep-practice hothouse, firing and optimizing circuits, correcting errors, competing, and improving skills. They each took part in the greatest work of art anyone can construct: the architecture of their own talent.

Why do breast-fed babies have higher IQs? Because the fatty acids in breast milk are the building blocks of myelin. This is why the FDA recently approved the addition of omega-3 fatty acids to infant formula, and also why eating fish, which is rich in fatty acids, has been linked to lowered risk of memory loss, dementia, and Alzheimer's disease.

Why can horses walk immediately on being born while humans take a year? A horse is born with its muscles already myelinated, online, and ready to go. A baby's muscles, on the other hand, don't get myelinated for a year or so, and the circuits get optimized only with practice

our genes let us—or more accurately, they let our needs and our actions—determine what skills we grow. This system is flexible, responsive, and economical, because it gives all human beings the innate potential to earn skill where they need it. The proof lies in the talent hot beds, in the ten thousand hours people spend deep-practicing their way to world-class expertise, even in the strained Clint Eastwood facial expressions they share. These similarities are not accidental; they are the logical expression of a shared evolutionary mechanism built to respond to certain kinds of signals. Skill is insulation that wraps neural circuits and grows according to certain signals.

This is not to say that every person on the planet has the potential to become an Einstein (whose autopsied brain was found to contain an unusual amount of you-know-what).*6 Nor does it mean that our genes don't matter—they do. The point, rather, is that although talent feels and looks predestined, in fact we have a good deal of control over what skills we develop, and we each have more potential than we might ever presume to guess. We are all born with the opportunity to become, as Mr. Myelin likes to put it, lords of our own Internet. The trick is to figure out how to do that.

The system lasted until the 1500s, when powerful new nation-states rose up to put an end to the guilds and with them the deep-practice engine of the Renaissance.

In 1985 Dr. Marian Diamond found that the left inferior parietal lobe of Einstein's brain, though it had an average number of neurons, had significantly more glial cells, which produce and support myelin, than the average person's brain. At the time the finding was considered so meaningless as to be nearly comical. But now it makes perfect sense, bandwidth-wise.

What/how did Einstein do that lead to more myelin than avg. person?

Try again. Fail again. Fail better. —Samuel Beckett

Try, struggle, struggle better, improve (reword trying not to use failure)

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

We've seen how deep practice is all about constructing and insulating circuits. But practically speaking, what does that feel like? How do we know we're doing it?

Deep practice feels a bit like exploring a dark and unfamiliar room. You start slowly, you bump into furniture, stop, think, and start again. Slowly, and a little painfully, you explore the space over and over, attending to errors, extending your reach into the room a bit farther each time, building a mental map until you can move through it quickly and intuitively.

absorbing a picture of the skill until you can imagine yourself doing it.

We're prewired to imitate,” Anders Ericsson says. “When you put yourself in the same situation as an outstanding person and attack a task that they took on, it has a big effect on your skill.”

glacial pace—it's

“It's not how fast you can do it. It's how slow you can do it correctly.”

This showed that experts practice differently and far more strategically. When they fail, they don't blame it on luck or themselves. They have a strategy they can fix.”

As Vladimir Horowitz, the virtuoso pianist who kept performing into his eighties, put it, “If I skip practice for one day, I notice. If I skip practice for two days, my wife notices. If I skip for three days, the world notices.”

Deep practice is not simply about struggling; it's about seeking out a particular struggle, which involves a cycle of distinct actions.

Judging by the facial expressions I saw in talent hotbeds, the sweet spot might better be named the bittersweet spot.

to get good, it's helpful to be willing, or even enthusiastic, about being bad. Baby steps are the royal road to skill.

Other hotbeds follow the same pattern: a breakthrough success is followed by a massive bloom of talent. Note that in each case the bloom grew relatively slowly at first, requiring five or six years to reach a dozen players. This is not because the inspiration was weaker at the start and got progressively stronger, but for a more fundamental reason: deep practice takes time (ten thousand hours, as the refrain goes). Talent is spreading through this group in the same pattern that dandelions spread through suburban yards. One puff, given time, brings many flowers.*1