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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, ignition, and master coaching—
students were divided into two groups to study a natural history text. Group A studied the paper for four sessions. Group B studied only once but was tested three times. A week later both groups were tested, and Group B scored 50 percent higher than Group A.
one of the first recorded instances of nerd power trumping military tradition, the officers understood its potential.
Link's trainer permitted pilots to practice more deeply, to stop, struggle, make errors, and learn from them.
One reason lies in the math. Futsal players touch the ball far more often than soccer players—six times more often per minute, according to a Liverpool University study.
“No time plus no space equals better skills. Futsal is our national laboratory of improvisation.”
It also creates a powerfully convincing illusion: a skill, once gained, feels utterly natural, as if it's something we've always possessed.
Athens from 440 B.C. to 380 B.C., Florence from 1440 to 1490, and London from 1570 to 1640.
“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.
That strategy works well for creating behaviors to deal with rotten meat and potential mates. After all, writing instructions to build an urge-circuit is relatively simple: if X, then Y. But what about creating complex higher behaviors, like playing the saxophone or Scrabble? As we've seen, higher skills are made of million-neuron chains working together with exquisite millisecond timing. The question of acquiring higher skills is really a question of design strategy. What's the best strategy for writing instructions to build a machine that can learn immensely complicated skills?
whatever circuits are fired most, and most urgently, are the ones where the installers will go. Skill circuits that are fired often will receive more broadband; skills that are fired less often, with less urgency, will receive less broadband.
The HSE is the feeling of seeing talent bloom in people who we thought were just like us. It's the tingle of surprise you get when the goofy neighbor kid down the street is suddenly lead guitarist for a successful rock band, or when your own child shows an inexplicable knack for differential calculus.
De Groot went on to show that in the first test, the masters were not seeing individual chess pieces but recognizing patterns. Where novices saw a scattered alphabet of individual pieces, masters were grouping those “letters” into the chess equivalent of words, sentences, and paragraphs. When the pieces became random, the masters were lost—not because they suddenly became dumber but because their grouping strategy was suddenly useless. The HSE vanished. The difference between chess T. Rexes and ordinary players was not the difference between a cannon and a popgun. It was a difference of
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Another example is Ray LaMontagne, a shoe-factory worker from Lewiston, Maine, who at age twenty-two had an epiphany that he should become a singer-songwriter. LaMontagne had little musical experience and less money, so he took a simple approach to learning: he bought dozens of used albums by Stephen Stills, Otis Redding, Al Green, Etta James, and Ray Charles, and holed up in his apartment. For two years. Every day he spent hours training himself by singing along to the records.
Students scissor each measure of their sheet music into horizontal strips, which are stuffed into envelopes and pulled out in random order. They go on to break those strips into smaller fragments by altering rhythms. For instance, they will play a difficult passage in dotted rhythm (the horses' hooves sound—da-dum, da-dum). This
Zimmerman's interest in this type of learning, known as self-regulation, led him in 2001 to undertake an experiment that sounds more like a street-magic stunt than regular science. Working with Anastasia Kitsantas of George Mason University, Zimmerman posed a question: Is it possible to judge ability solely by the way people describe the way they practice?
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.
When McPherson saw the graph, he was stunned. “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. The differences were staggering. With the same amount of practice, the long-term-commitment group outperformed the short-term-commitment group by 400 percent. The long-term-commitment group, with a mere twenty minutes of weekly practice, progressed faster than the short-termers who practiced for an hour and a half. When long-term commitment combined with high levels of
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Future belonging is a primal cue: a simple, direct signal that activates our built-in motivational triggers, funneling our energy and attention toward a goal.
“If we're in a nice, easy, pleasant environment, we naturally shut off effort,” Bargh said. “Why work? But if people get the signal that it's rough, they get motivated now. A nice, well-kept tennis academy gives them the luxury future right now—of course they'd be demotivated. They can't help it.”
See someone you want to become? Better get busy. Want to catch up with a desirable group? Better get busy.
Losing a parent is a primal cue: you are not safe.
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.
it does say that 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 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. Talent hotbeds are to primal cues what Las Vegas is to neon signs, flashing with the kind of signals that keep motivation burning.
“Here's the deal. You've got to give kids credit at a younger age for feeling stuff more acutely. When you say something to a kid, you've got to know what you're saying to them. The stuff you say to a kid starting out—you got to be supercareful, unowaime? 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.”
“When we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck wrote, “we tell them that's the name of the game: look smart, don't risk making mistakes.”
The praised-for-effort 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.
What works is precisely the opposite: not reaching up but reaching down, 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 way every element of this world, from the painted stripes on the floor to the eyes of the teacher, to the angle with which students carry their binders, sends clear, constant signals of belonging and identity: you are at KIPP, you are a KIPPster. Instead of “ready, set, go,” they say “ready, set, KIPP.” Students address each other as “teammates.” KIPP teachers refer to this process only half-jokingly as “KIPP-nosis.”
stopping the school. This is not fanciful language. When someone violates a significant rule, classes screech to a halt, and teachers and students hold a meeting to discuss what just happened and how to fix it.*
Stopping the school for an eye roll is not inefficient; on the contrary, KIPP has found that it's the most efficient way to establish group priorities, locate errors, and build the behavioral circuits that KIPP desires.
Two hours of homework a night is standard; worksheets number in the hundreds; the day is filled with stretches of intense, silent work.
Our kids arrive way behind;
On both of my visits I was approached by students who wanted to know how I was doing, if there was anything they might do for me, and of course where I went to college.
KIPP alters our instinctive notion of character. Usually, we think of character as deep and unchanging, an innate quality that flows outward, showing itself through behavior. KIPP shows that character might be more like a skill—ignited by certain signals, and honed through deep practice.
steady, deep, unblinking. They listened far more than they talked. They seemed allergic to giving pep talks or inspiring speeches; they spent most of their time offering small, targeted, highly specific adjustments. They had an extraordinary sensitivity to the person they were teaching, customizing each message to each student's personality. After meeting a dozen of these people, I started to suspect that they were all secretly related. They were talent whisperers.
Their personality—their core skill circuit—is to be more like farmers: careful, deliberate cultivators of myelin,
Is it possible to look at two seedlings and tell which will grow taller? The only answer is It's early and they're both growing.
Wooden didn't give speeches. He didn't do chalk talks. He didn't dole out punishment laps or praise. In all, he didn't sound or act like any coach they'd ever encountered.
But 75 percent were pure information: what to do, how to do it, when to intensify an activity. One of Wooden's most frequent forms of teaching was a three-part instruction where he modeled the right way to do something, showed the incorrect way, and then remodeled the right way, a sequence that appeared in Gallimore and Tharp's notes as M+, M−, M+; it happened so often they named it a “Wooden.”
explanation, demonstration, imitation, correction, and repetition.
error-centered, well-planned, information-rich practices.
information-oriented teaching.
“The effect of this first phase of learning seemed to be to get the learner involved, captivated, hooked, and to get the learner to need and want more information and expertise.”
the supple ability to locate the sweet spot on the edge of each individual student's ability, and to send the right signals to help the student reach toward the right goal, over and over.
to always take it deeper, to see the learning the student is capable of and to go there. It keeps going deeper and deeper because the teacher can think about the material in so many different ways, and because there's an endless number of connections they can make.”
my job was to find out what worked for somebody and connect it to what worked
