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

by Daniel Coyle

“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.”

There is, biologically speaking, no substitute for attentive repetition. Nothing you can do—talking, thinking, reading, imagining—is more effective in building skill than executing the action, firing the impulse down the nerve fiber, fixing errors, honing the circuit.

However well this finding might support our thesis, its real use is to paint a vivid picture of what deep practice feels like. It's the feeling, in short, of being a staggering baby, of intently, clumsily lurching toward a goal and toppling over. It's a wobbly, discomfiting sensation that any sensible person would instinctively seek to avoid. Yet the longer the babies remained in that state—the more willing they were to endure it, and to permit themselves to fail—the more myelin they built, and the more skill they earned. The staggering babies embody the deepest truth about deep practice: to get good, it's helpful to be willing, or even enthusiastic, about being bad. Baby steps are the royal road to skill.

Losing a parent is a primal cue: you are not safe. You don't have to be a psychologist to appreciate the massive outpouring of energy that can be created by a lack of safety; nor do you have to be a Darwinian theorist to appreciate how such a response might have evolved. This signal can alter the child's relationship to the world, redefine his identity, and energize and orient his mind to address the dangers and possibilities of life—a response Eisenstadt summed up as “a springboard of immense compensatory energy.” Or

(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

cues. In this case the cue is: you're behind—keep up! We can safely imagine that in most families this signal is sent and received hundreds if not thousands of times over the childhood years, sent by older, bigger kids to smaller, younger ones, who respond with levels of effort and intensity that those older children (who share the same genetic inheritance) never had the opportunity to experience. (And recall that myelin is all about impulse speed: the more you have, the faster your muscles can fire—a particularly handy feature for sprinters.)

If talent is a gift sprinkled randomly through the world's children, we would naturally expect Wadleigh's program to be the one to succeed. But if talent is a process that can be ignited by primal cues, then the reason for PS 233's success is clear. The genetic potential in both schools was the same; the teaching was the same; the difference was, the students at Wadleigh received the motivational equivalent of a gentle nudge, while the PS 233 students were ignited by primal cues of scarcity and belonging. In each case the kids reacted the same way any of us would.

But the rich combination of cues, peppering Ben's ignition switch one after another, succeeded in cracking open his vault of motivational energy.

Skill is insulation that wraps neural circuits and grows according to certain signals.

out,” he said. “If a kid's got a lot of shit in his life, I'm going to stir in some whipped cream. If a kid's life is pure whipped cream, then I'm going to stir in some shit.”

They never began sentences with “Please, would you” or “Do you think” or “What about;” instead they spoke in short imperatives. “Now do X” was the most common construction; the “you will” was implied. The directions weren't dictatorial in tone (usually) but were delivered in a way that sounded clinical and urgent,

Of the many phrases I heard echoing around the talent hotbeds, one stood out as common to all of them. It was: “Good. Okay, now do_____.”

faster. Now do it with the harmony. Small successes were not stopping points but stepping-stones. “One of the big things I've learned over the years is to push,” Septien said. “The second they get to a new spot, even if they're still groping a little bit, I push them to the next level.”

word. “Truly great teachers connect with students because of who they are as moral standards,” he said. “There's an empathy, a selflessness, because you're not trying to tell the student something they know, but are finding, in their effort, a place to make a real connection.” Theatrical honesty works best when teachers are performing their most essential myelinating role: pointing out errors.

skill. If ideal soccer circuitry were rendered as an electrician's blueprint, it would look like a gargantuan hedge of ivy vines: a vast, interconnected network of equally accessible possibilities (a.k.a. fakes and moves) leading to the same end: Pelé dribbling downfield alone. Now visualize the circuitry that fires when a violinist plays a Mozart sonata. This circuit is not a vinelike tangle of improvisation but rather a tightly defined series of pathways designed to create—or more accurately, re-create—a single set of ideal movements. Consistency rules; when the violinist plays an A-minor chord, it must always be an A-minor chord, and not a smidgen off. This circuit of precision and stability serves as the foundation on which other, increasingly complex patterns can be constructed to form that Mozart sonata. If ideal violin-playing circuitry were also rendered as an electrician's blueprint, it would look like an oak tree: a solid trunk of technique growing straight upward, branching off into realms of pure fluency—Itzhak Perlman flying through high canopies of sixteenth notes.

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.

A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary.

Baby-brain DVDs don't work because they don't create deep practice—in fact, they actively prevent it, by taking up time that could be used for firing circuits. The images and sounds on the DVDs wash over the babies like a warm bath—entertaining and immersive but useless compared with the rich interactions, errors, and learning that happens when babies are staggering around in the real world. Or, to put it another way: Skill is insulation that wraps neural circuits and grows according to certain signals.

period. Businesses are groups of people who are building and honing skill circuits in exactly the same way as the tennis players at Spartak or the violinists at Meadowmount. The more an organization embraces the core principles of ignition, deep practice, and master coaching, the more myelin it will build, the more success it will have.

andons.) 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. Toyota, moving in these fitful baby steps, is like a giant, car-making Clarissa. The small changes are like tiny wraps of myelin, helping its circuitry run a fraction faster, smoother, and more accurately. 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.”

But please talk to us about your problems so we can all work on them together.’”

experience. “Neurosis is just a high-class word for whining,” he said. “The trouble with most therapy is that it helps you to feel better. But you don't get better. You have to back it up with action, action, action.”

“The myelin literally starts to split apart with age,” Bartzokis said. “This is why every old person you've ever met in your life moves more slowly than they did when they were younger. Their muscles haven't changed, but the speed of the impulses they can send to them has changed, because the myelin gets old.” The good news is that while natural waves of myelination end in our thirties, our overall volume of myelin increases until our fifties, and we always retain the ability to add more myelin through deep practice. “You must remember the myelin is alive, always being generated and degenerating, like a war,”

It's also why we've recently seen 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.

When I started working on this project, I came across an electron microscope photo of myelin. It's not a great image in the usual sense of the word: it's grainy and blurred. But I like looking at it, because you can see each individual wrap, like the layers in a cliff face or the growth rings of a tree. Each wrap of myelin is a unique tracing of some past event. Perhaps that wrap was caused by a coach's pointer; perhaps that one by a parent's encouraging glance; perhaps that one by hearing a song they loved. In the whorls of myelin resides a person's secret history, the flow of interactions and influences that make up a life, the Christmas lights that, for some reason, lit up.

The actions of the kindergartners appear disorganized on the surface. But when you view them as a single entity, their behavior is efficient and effective. They are not competing for status. They stand shoulder to shoulder and work energetically together. They move quickly, spotting problems and offering help. They experiment, take risks, and notice outcomes, which guides them toward effective solutions. The kindergartners succeed not because they are smarter but because they work together in a

smarter way. They are tapping into a simple and powerful method in which a group of ordinary people can create a performance far beyond the sum of their parts.

The second surprise is that Jonathan succeeds without taking any of the actions we normally associate with a strong leader. He doesn’t take charge or tell anyone what to do. He doesn’t strategize, motivate, or lay out a vision. He doesn’t perform so much as create conditions for others to perform, constructing an environment whose key feature is crystal clear: We are solidly connected. Jonathan’s group succeeds not because its members are smarter but because they are safer.