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by
Daniel Coyle
Read between
September 7 - November 15, 2019
Talent hotbeds are mysterious places, and the most mysterious thing about them is that they bloom without warning.
The talent code is built on revolutionary scientific discoveries involving a neural insulator called myelin, which some neurologists now consider to be the holy grail of acquiring skill.
The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates, and the faster and more accurate our movements and thoughts become.
Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows in response to certain signals.
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. Like Clarissa, they are purposely operating at the edges of their ability, so they will screw up. And somehow screwing up is making them better.
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.
The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your present abilities; to target the struggle. Thrashing blindly doesn't help. Reaching does.
we'll define talent in its strictest sense: the possession of repeatable skills that don't depend on physical size
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.”
This humble-looking insulation, it turns out, plays a key role in the way our brains function, particularly when it comes to acquiring skills.
Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons—a circuit of nerve fibers.
Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal stren...
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The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent ...
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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.
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.
All actions are really the result of electrical impulses sent along chains of nerve fibers.
The more we develop a skill circuit, the less we're aware that we're using it. We're built to make skills automatic, to stash them in our unconscious mind. This process, which is called automaticity, exists for powerful evolutionary reasons.
each time we deeply practice a nine-iron swing or a guitar chord or a chess opening, we are slowly installing broadband in our circuitry. We are firing a signal that those tiny green tentacles sense; they react by reaching toward the nerve fibers. They grasp, they squish, and they make another wrap, thickening the sheath. They build a little more insulation along the wire, which adds a bit more bandwidth and precision to the skill circuit, which translates into an infinitesimal bit more skill and speed.
every expert in every field is the result of around ten thousand hours of committed practice. Ericsson called this process “deliberate practice” and defined it as working on technique, seeking constant critical feedback, and focusing ruthlessly on shoring up weaknesses.
“Why is wisdom most often found in older people? Because their circuits are fully insulated and instantly available to them; they can do very complicated processing on many levels, which is really what wisdom is.
Skill consists of identifying important elements and grouping them into a meaningful framework. The name psychologists use for such organization is chunking.
Deep practice feels a bit like exploring a dark and unfamiliar room. You start slowly, you bump into furniture, stop, think, and start again.
First, the participants look at the task as a whole—as one big chunk, the megacircuit. Second, they divide it into its smallest possible chunks. Third, they play with time, slowing the action down, then speeding it up, to learn its inner architecture.
First, going slow allows you to attend more closely to errors, creating a higher degree of precision with each firing—and when it comes to growing myelin, precision is everything.
Second, going slow helps the practicer to develop something even more important: a working perception of the skill's internal blueprints—the shape and rhythm of the interlocking skill circuits.
Through practice, they had developed something more important than mere skill; they'd grown a detailed conceptual understanding that allowed them to control and adapt their performance, to fix problems, and to customize their circuits to new situations. They were thinking in chunks and had built those chunks into a private language of skill.
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.
Spending more time is effective—but only if you're still in the sweet spot at the edge of your capabilities, attentively building and honing circuits. What's more, there seems to be a universal limit for how much deep practice human beings can do in a day. Ericsson's research shows that most world-class experts—including pianists, chess players, novelists, and athletes—practice between three and five hours a day, no matter what skill they pursue.
According to a 1995 study, a sample of Japanese eighth graders spent 44 percent of their class time inventing, thinking, and actively struggling with underlying concepts. The study's sample of American students, on the other hand, spent less than 1 percent of their time in that state.
to get good, it's helpful to be willing, or even enthusiastic, about being bad.
In a word, it requires motivational fuel, the second element of the talent code.
motivation is created and sustained through a process I call ignition.
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.
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.
high motivation is not the kind of language that ignites people. What works is precisely the opposite: not reaching up but reaching down, speaking to the ground-level effort, affirming the struggle.
He formulated laws of learning (which might be retitled laws of myelin): explanation, demonstration, imitation, correction, and repetition.
Matrix is Gallimore's word for the vast grid of task-specific knowledge that distinguishes the best teachers and allows them to creatively and effectively respond to a student's efforts.
