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

by Daniel Coyle

All skill acquisitions, and therefore all talent hotbeds, operate on the same principles of action, no matter how different they may appear to us.

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.

“We think of effortless performance as desirable, but it's really a terrible way to learn,” said Robert Bjork, the man who developed the above examples. Bjork, the chair of psychology at UCLA, has spent most of his life delving into questions of memory and learning.

The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your present abilities; to target the struggle. Thrashing blindly doesn't help. Reaching does.

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.

Q: Why are passion and persistence key ingredients of talent? A: Because wrapping myelin around a big circuit requires immense energy and time. If you don't love it, you'll never work hard enough to be great.

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.

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.

For the last few hundred years, Western culture has understood and explained talent using the idea of unique identity—the tumble of cosmic dice that makes everyone different, and a few lucky people special.

Guilds (the word means “gold”) were associations of weavers, painters, goldsmiths, and the like who organized themselves to regulate competition and control quality. Guilds worked like employee-owned corporations. They had management, dues, and tight policies dictating who could work in the craft. What they did best, however, was grow talent. Guilds were built on the apprenticeship system, in which boys around seven years of age were sent to live with masters for fixed terms of five to ten years. An apprentice worked directly under the tutelage and supervision of the master, who frequently assumed rights as the child's legal guardian.

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

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.”

(1) talent requires deep practice; (2) deep practice requires vast amounts of energy; (3) primal cues trigger huge outpourings of energy.

they would stop fighting the system and start their own school.

The majority of charter schools are built on a foundation of educational theory such as Waldorf, Montessori, or Piaget. Feinberg and Levin, short on time, instead followed the principles of Butch Cassidy: they stole. They located their district's best teachers and nabbed lesson plans, teaching techniques, management ideas, schedules, rules—everything. Feinberg and Levin would later be called “innovative,” but at the time they were about as innovative as a shoplifter during a blackout. “We took every good idea that wasn't nailed down,” Feinberg said. “We took everything but the kitchen sink, and then we went back and took the kitchen sink too.”

From this pile of stolen parts they assembled an educational jalopy. It featured an engine of old-fashioned hard work (longer school days, shorter summer vacations, uniforms, a clear system of punishment and reward), encased in a skin of innovative techniques (times tables would be learned via rapping; kids would be given teachers' home phone numbers for homework questions). On the wall, Feinberg and Levin pasted a slogan pilfered from a renowned Los Angeles teacher named Rafe Esquith—“Work Hard, Be Nice”—and pointed their jalopy toward a distant goal: to do whatever it took to get the students into college.

The coaches and teachers I met at the talent hotbeds were mostly older. More than half were in their sixties or seventies. All had spent decades, usually several, intensively learning how to coach. This is not a coincidence; in fact, it's a prerequisite, because it builds the neural superstructure that is the most essential part of their skills—their matrix.

One does not become a master coach by accident. Many of the coaches I met shared a similar biographical arc: they had once been promising talents in their respective fields but failed and tried to figure out why.

“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.”

“If it's a choice between me telling them to do it, or them figuring it out, I'll take the second option every time,” Lansdorp said. “You've got to make the kid an independent thinker, a problem-solver. I don't need to see them every day, for chrissake. You can't keep breast-feeding them all the time. The point is, they've got to figure things out for themselves.”

Master coaches, like NASA engineers, are familiar with irony. They spend years painstakingly helping to construct talent, then are left behind, gazing upward when the rocket lifts off. For every celebrated coaching star like John Wooden, there are dozens of Hans Jensens, Mary Eppersons, and Larisa Preobrazhenskayas who help grow world-class talent and yet live in obscurity.*

“Kids today are hard to reach,” he said. “They know how to give all the right answers, all the programmed answers. So when I see things, I say it so you can hear it. I say it a lot. Each guy has his own button you can tap on. Who are you out here for? If it's what you want, fine, we can do that. If you're out here because of your father or you think it's cool, it's going to take a lot longer. These things are not flu shots. It takes work. It's like the violin. There's no magic to it. If you don't practice, you'll never play the tune.

For middle- and upper-income kids, Whole Language seemed to help, or at least not to obviously hurt. For minority and low-income kids, however, it was an unqualified disaster. By the early 1990s California's scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress ranked lower than every state's but Louisiana. Other states that adopted Whole Language experienced similar test-score drops. In 1998 two major research efforts, the National Research Council and the National Reading Panel, found that the lack of Phonics contributed to lower rates of achievement for most students.

Looking at the question through the prism of the talent code, the answer is clear. The relationship between Phonics and Whole Language precisely mirrors the relationship between deep practice and ignition. Phonics is about building reliable circuits, paying attention to errors, and fixing them. It's about chunking: breaking down a skill into its component parts, and practicing and repeating each action involved in that skill. It's about the systematic firing of the signals that build the trusty high-speed skill circuits you're using right now. Whole Language, on the other hand, is about ignition, about filling motivational fuel tanks by creating environments where children fall in love with reading and writing. Like any ignition, Whole Language can create acceleration for those who already have the inclination and opportunity to deep-practice, but it is worthless to those who don't. To understand myelin is to understand that the Reading Wars should not be a war. Students need both to succeed.

But studies show that baby-brain DVDs don't make children smarter. In fact, they make them less smart. A 2007 University of Washington study found that, for children aged eight to sixteen months, each hour spent per day viewing “brain science” baby DVDs decreased vocabulary acquisition by 17 percent. And when you think about it in terms of the myelin model, this makes perfect sense. 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.

pay attention to what your children are fascinated by, and praise them for their effort.

For more on Clarissa and her high-velocity practice, see Gary E. McPherson and James M. Renwick, “Interest and Choice: Student-Selected Repertoire and Its Effect on Practising Behavior,” British Journal of Music Education 19 (June 2002), 173–88, and “I've Got to Do My Scales First!” Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (Keele, Staffordshire, U.K.: Keele University Department of Psychology, 2000), CD-ROM.

One of the interesting things about deep practice is that it feels indistinguishable from shallow practice, something Bjork calls the “illusion of competence.”

For more examples of deep practice in advertising, see Jaideep Sengupta and Gerald J. Gorn, “Absence Makes the Mind Grow Sharper: Effects of Element Omission on Subsequent Recall,” Journal of Marketing Research 39 (May 2002), 186–201.