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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Daniel Coyle
Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows in response to certain signals.
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—
The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your present abilities; to target the struggle. Thrashing blindly doesn't help. Reaching does.
The revolution is built on three simple facts. (1) Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons—a circuit of nerve fibers. (2) Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy. (3) The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become.
Q: Why is targeted, mistake-focused practice so effective? A: Because the best way to build a good circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again, over and over. Struggle is not an option: it's a biological requirement.
nerve firings grow myelin, myelin controls impulse speed, and impulse speed is skill. Myelin doesn't make synapses unimportant—to the contrary, Fields and other neurologists emphasize that synaptical changes remain key to learning. 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.”
“It's one of the most intricate and exquisite cell-to-cell processes there is,” Fields said. “And it's slow. Each one of these wraps can go around the nerve fiber forty or fifty times, and that can take days or weeks. Imagine doing that to an entire neuron, then an entire circuit with thousands of nerves. It would be like insulating a transatlantic cable.”*3
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.
It responds to urgent repetition.
Myelin is meritocratic: circuits that fire get insulated.
Myelin wraps—it doesn't unwrap. Like a highway-paving machine,
One teacher has a rule of thumb: if a passerby can recognize the song being played, it's not being practiced
going slow allows you to attend more closely to errors, creating a higher degree of precision with each firing—
a working perception of the skill's internal blueprints—
people observe, judge, and strategize their own performance—when they, in essence, coach themselves.
self-regulation,
Is it possible to judge ability solely by the way people describe the way they practice?
Ninety percent of the variation in skill could be accounted for by the players'
It only requires that you stop a skilled person from systematically firing his or her circuit for a mere thirty days.
practice between three and five hours a day, no matter what skill they pursue.
“How to Practice,” taught by Skye Carman,
What you're really practicing is concentration.
It's a feeling. So now we're going to practice that feeling.”
Attention
Connect Build Whole Alert Focus Mistake Repeat Tiring Edge Awake*5
describing a sensation that is stepwise, incremental, connective. It's the feeling of straining toward a target and falling just short, what Martha Graham called “divine dissatisfaction.”
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.
Evaluate the gap between the target and the reach. Return to step one.
“I think of it as a turn inward; they stop looking outside for solutions and they reach within. They come to terms with what works and what doesn't. You can't fake it, you can't borrow, steal, or buy it. It's an honest profession.”
American teachers, though, worked like waiters. Whenever there was a struggle, they wanted to move past it, make sure the class kept gliding along. But you don't learn by gliding.”
motivation is created and sustained through a process I call ignition.
Ignition supplies the energy,
“I couldn't believe my eyes,” he said. Progress was determined not by any measurable aptitude or trait, but by a tiny, powerful idea the child had before even starting lessons.
McPherson's graph, like the table showing the rise of South Korean golfers and Russian tennis players, is not a picture of aptitude. It is a picture of ignition.
It's not as simple as saying I want X. It's saying something far more complicated: I want X later, so I better do Y like crazy right now.
those people over there are doing something terrifically worthwhile.
Dr. Geoff Cohen
“Everything depends on collective effort and cooperation. When we get a cue that we ought to connect our identity with a group, it's like a hair trigger, like turning on a light switch.
automaticity,
If the training grounds of all the talent hotbeds I visited were magically assembled into a single facility—a mega-hotbed, as it were—that place would resemble a shantytown.
ignition is determined by simple if/then propositions, with the then part always the same—better get busy. See someone you want to become? Better get busy.
This disproportion points to the efficiency and necessity of relegating mental activities to the unconscious—and helps us to understand why appeals to the unconscious can be so effective.
deep practice requires vast amounts of energy; (3) primal cues trigger huge outpourings of energy.
received this signal as young teens, during the brain's key development period, in which information-processing pathways are particularly receptive to myelin.*4
why do breakthrough performances sometimes ignite talent blooms, and sometimes not? The answer is that talent hotbeds possess more than a single primal cue. They contain complex collections of signals—people, images, and ideas—that keep ignition going for the weeks, months, and years that skill-growing requires.
all flashed signals that added up to one energizing message: better get busy.
What skill-building really is, is confidence-building.
First they got to earn it, then they got it. And once it gets lit, it stays lit pretty good.”
“We are exquisitely attuned to messages telling us what is valued,”
At all the places I visited, praise was not constant but was given only when it was earned—
