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

by Daniel Coyle

We instinctively think of each new student as a blank slate, but the ideas they bring to that first lesson are probably far more important than anything a teacher can do, or any amount of practice,” McPherson said. “It's all about their perception of self. At some point very early on they had a crystallizing experience that brings the idea to the fore, that says, I am a musician. That idea is like a snowball rolling downhill.”

The teacher's playing caused Clarissa to experience an intense emotional response. That response—call it fascination, rapture, or love—instantly connected Clarissa to a high-octane fuel tank of motivation, which powered her deep practice. It's the same thing that happened to the South Korean golfers and the Russian tennis players. In their case, they used that fuel, over a decade's time, to dominate two sports; in Clarissa's case, she used that energy to accomplish a month's worth of practice in six minutes.

showing the rise of South Korean golfers and Russian tennis players, is not a picture of aptitude. It is a picture of ignition. What ignited the progress wasn't any

a vision that oriented, energized, and accelerated progress, and that originated in the outside world. After all, these kids weren't born wanting to be musicians. Their wanting, like Clarissa's, came from a distinct signal, from something in their family, their homes, their teachers, the set of images and people they encountered in their short lives. That signal sparked an intense, nearly unconscious response that manifested itself as an idea: I want to be like them. It wasn't necessarily a logical idea for them to have. (Recall that it didn't correlate with any aural, rhythmic, or mathematic skills they possessed.) Perhaps the idea came about purely by accident. But accidents have consequences, and the consequence of this one was that they started out ignited, and that made all the difference.*2

“Our brains are always looking for a cue as to where to spend energy now. Now? Now?

superstars on Eisenstadt's list are not uniquely gifted exceptions, but rather the logical extensions of the same universal principles that govern all of us: (1) talent requires deep practice; (2) deep practice requires vast amounts of energy; (3) primal cues trigger huge outpourings of energy. And as George Bartzokis might point out, the eminent people, on average, received this signal as young teens, during the brain's key development period, in which information-processing pathways are particularly receptive to myelin.*4

being fast, like any talent, involves a confluence of factors that go beyond genes and that are directly related to the intense, subconscious reaction to motivational signals that provide the energy to practice deeply and thus grow myelin.

The two islands were twins, right down to the motivational spark, and yet Curaçao ignited while Aruba did not. Why? Part of the answer is that Curaçao, like other talent hotbeds, has found a way to do a very important and tricky thing: to keep the motivational fire lit. It's one thing to persuade Scrooge to crack open his vault; it's another to persuade him to splurge on Christmas geese day after day, year after year. Curaçao forms, quite by accident, a natural case study on the science and practice of sustained ignition.

all flashed signals that added up to one energizing message: better get busy.

What skill-building really is, is confidence-building.

“Left to our own devices, we go along in a pretty stable mindset,” she said. “But when we get a clear cue, a message that sends a spark, then boing, we respond.”

Ninety percent of the kids who'd been praised for their effort chose the harder test.

The third level of tests was uniformly harder; none of the kids did well. However, the two groups of kids—the praised-for-effort group and the praised-for-intelligence group—responded very differently to the situation. “[The effort group] dug in and grew very involved with the test, trying solutions, testing strategies,” Dweck said. “They later said they liked it. But the group praised for its intelligence hated the harder test. They took it as proof they weren't smart.”

group improved their initial score by 30 percent, while the praised-for-intelligence group's score declined by 20 percent. All because of six short words. Dweck was so surprised at the result that she reran the study five times. Each time the result was the same.

finding that dovetails with the research of Dweck, who notes that motivation does not increase with increased levels of praise but often dips.

speaking to the ground-level effort, affirming the struggle. Dweck's research shows that phrases like “Wow, you really tried hard,” or “Good job, dude,” motivate far better than what she calls empty praise.

The truth is, skill circuits are not easy to build; deep practice requires serious effort and passionate work.

palaver,

insistence on environmental coherency:

Even the lettering above the classroom mirrors inquires, “Where will YOU go to college?”

KIPP students start visiting colleges as soon as they're enrolled.

“When they get to KIPP, their lives are like a single dot on a map. You can't do anything with a dot,” Feinberg said. “But when they connect that dot to another dot, to a college somewhere, then you get a connection. When they get back from those trips, they carry themselves differently.”

So far in this book we've talked about skill as a cellular process that grows through deep practice. We've seen how ignition supplies the unconscious energy for that growth. Now it's time to meet the rare people who have the uncanny knack for combining those forces to grow talent in others.

skill at sensing the student's needs and instantly producing the right signal to meet those needs.

The information didn't slow down the practice; to the contrary, Wooden combined it with something he called “mental and emotional conditioning,” which basically amounted to everyone running harder than they did in games, all the time.

libretto.

Don't look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time.

You Haven't Taught Until They Have Learned, authored by Gallimore

error-centered, well-planned, information-rich practices.

the deeper you practice, the better you get.

Rousing Minds to Life

John Wooden uses the deep-practice part of the talent mechanism, speaking the language of information and correction, honing circuitry. Miss Mary, on the other hand, deals in matters of ignition, using emotional triggers to fill fuel tanks with love and motivation. They succeed because building myelin circuits requires both deep practice and ignition; they succeed because they are mirrors of the talent code itself.

coaching is something more evanescent: more art than science.

takes good care of the small steps.”

they spoke in short imperatives. “Now do X”

each one creating a worthwhile combination of errors and fixes that grew myelin.

accomplish the feat (play that chord, hit that volley), the coach would quickly layer in an added difficulty. Good. Okay, now do it faster. Now do it with the harmony. Small successes were not stopping points but stepping-stones.

The day is here. What are you going to do with it?”

they are helping the right circuit to fire as often as possible.

Skills like soccer, writing, and comedy are flexible-circuit skills, meaning that they require us to grow vast ivy-vine circuits that we can flick through to navigate an ever-changing set of obstacles. Playing violin, golf, gymnastics, and figure skating, on the other hand, are consistent-circuit skills, depending utterly on a solid foundation of technique that enables us to reliably re-create the fundamentals of an ideal performance. (This is why self-taught violinists, skaters, and gymnasts rarely reach world-class level and why self-taught novelists, comedians, and

These things are not flu shots. It takes work.

The vast majority of improvements come from employees, and the vast majority of those changes are small: a one-foot shift in the location of a parts bin, for instance. But they add up. It's estimated that each year Toyota implements around a thousand tiny fixes in each of its assembly lines, about a million tiny fixes overall.

The sign over the door of Toyota's Georgetown, Kentucky, factory puts it in perfect deep-practice language: “When something goes wrong, ask WHY five times.”

an avalanche of new studies, books, and video games built on the myelin-centric principle that practice staves off cognitive decline. The myelin model also highlights the importance of seeking new challenges. Experiments have found that situations in which people are forced to adapt and attune themselves to new challenges (i.e., make errors, pay attention, deep-practice) tend to increase cognitive reserve. One study showed that elderly people who pursued more leisure activities had a 38 percent lower risk for developing dementia. As one neurologist pointed out, the mantra “Use it or lose it” needs an update. It should be “Use it and get more of it.”

world's parenting advice can be distilled to two simple rules: pay attention to what your children are fascinated by, and praise them for their effort.

The other day our daughter Zoe picked up her violin and stumbled her way through a new song about a fat king and queen who had a dog. She stopped frequently. She made mistakes. She started over. It sounded choppy, and it sounded wonderful. “I'm going to practice it a zillion million times,” she said. “I'm going to play super good.”

They spend so much time managing status that they fail to grasp the essence of the problem

Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do.