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

by Daniel Coyle

(You haven't had your ego truly tested until an eight-year-old takes pity on you on the tennis court.)

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. How?

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

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

Then there's Useful Brain Science Insight Number 2: The more we develop a skill circuit, the less we're aware that we're using

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.

A few years ago a Carnegie Mellon University statistician named David Banks wrote a short paper entitled “The Problem of Excess Genius.” Geniuses are not scattered uniformly through time and space, he pointed out; to the contrary, they tend to appear in clusters.

RULE ONE: CHUNK IT UP

ABSORB THE WHOLE THING.

BREAK IT INTO CHUNKS.

SLOW IT DOWN.

RULE TWO: REPEAT IT

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.

RULE THREE: LEARN TO FEEL IT

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.

When long-term commitment combined with high levels of practice, skills skyrocketed.

Note the process McPherson is describing here. The teacher's playing caused Clarissa to experience an intense emotional response. That response—call it fascination, rapture, or love—instantly connected Clarissa to a high-octane fuel tank of motivation, which powered her deep practice. It's the same thing that happened to the South Korean golfers and the Russian tennis players. In their case, they used that fuel, over a decade's time, to dominate two sports; in Clarissa's case, she used that energy to accomplish a month's worth of practice in six minutes. 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. What ignited the progress wasn't any innate skill or gene. It was a small, ephemeral, yet powerful idea: a vision of their ideal future selves, a vision that oriented, energized, and accelerated progress, and that originated in the outside world.

Being highly motivated, when you think about it, is a slightly irrational state. One forgoes comfort now in order to work toward some bigger prospective benefit later on. 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.

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. The idea makes intuitive sense—after all, we've all felt motivated by the desire to connect ourselves to high-achieving groups. What's interesting, however, is just how powerful and unconscious those triggers can be.

I asked Bargh about a curious pattern I'd observed at the talent hotbeds: they tended to be junky, unattractive places. 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. Its buildings would be makeshift, corrugated-roofed affairs, its walls paint-bald, its fields weedy and uneven. So many hotbeds shared this disheveled ambience that I began to sense a link between the dented, beat-up state of the incubators and the sleek talent they produced. Which, in Bargh's opinion, was precisely the case, and for a reason he readily explained. “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.

for instance, the fact that the unconscious mind is able to process 11 million pieces of information per second, while the conscious mind can manage a mere 40. 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.

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

There's no instant gratification, man. Everything boils back down to training; doing it over and over.

First, Dweck gave every child a test that consisted of fairly easy puzzles. Afterward the researcher informed all the children of their scores, adding a single six-word sentence of praise. Half of the kids were praised for their intelligence (“You must be smart at this”), and half were praised for their effort (“You must have worked really hard”). The kids were tested a second time, but this time they were offered a choice between a harder test and an easier test. Ninety percent of the kids who'd been praised for their effort chose the harder test. A majority of the kids who'd been praised for their intelligence, on the other hand, chose the easy test. Why? “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 third level of tests was uniformly harder; none of the kids did well. However, the two groups of kids—the praised-for-effort group and the praised-for-intelligence group—responded very differently to the situation. “[The effort group] dug in and grew very involved with the test, trying solutions, testing strategies,” Dweck said. “They later said they liked it. But the group praised for its intelligence hated the harder test. They took it as proof they weren't smart.”

When we use the term motivational language, we are generally referring to language that speaks of hopes, dreams, and affirmations (“You are the best!”). This kind of language—let's call it high motivation—has its role. But the message from Dweck and the hotbeds is clear: 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.

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 wizard's secret, it turned out, was the same secret that the Renaissance artists and the Z-Boys discovered: the deeper you practice, the better you get.

many world-class talents, particularly in piano, swimming, and tennis, start out with seemingly average teachers.

Each interaction vibrates with Miss Mary's interest and emotion. To have better hand position is to earn a thrilling jolt of praise. To play something incorrectly brings a regretful “I'm sorry” and a request to please play it again. (And again. And perhaps again.) To play something properly brings a warm gust of joy. When it's over, there's a foil-wrapped chocolate, then you bow and say, “Thank you for teaching,” and Miss Mary bows and solemnly replies, “Thank you for learning.”

These people are not average teachers; neither is Mary Epperson. As Bloom and his researchers realized, they are merely disguised as average because their crucial skill does not show up on conventional measures of teaching ability. They succeed because they are tapping into the second element of the talent code: ignition.

“Great teachers focus on what the student is saying or doing,” he says, “and are able, by being so focused and by their deep knowledge of the subject matter, to see and recognize the inarticulate stumbling, fumbling effort of the student who's reaching toward mastery, and then connect to them with a targeted message.”

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.

PERCEPTIVENESS: THE SECOND VIRTUE The eyes are the giveaway. They are usually sharp and warm and are deployed in long, unblinking gazes. Several master coaches told me that they trained their eyes to be like cameras, and they share that same Panavision quality. Though the gaze can be friendly, it's not chiefly about friendship. It's about information. It's about figuring you out.

THE GPS REFLEX: THE THIRD VIRTUE “You gotta give them a lot of information,” said Robert Lansdorp, the tennis coach. “You gotta shock 'em, then shock 'em some more.”

Shock is an appropriate word. Most master coaches delivered their information to their students in a series of short, vivid, high-definition bursts.

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_____.” A coach would employ it when a student got the hang of some new move or technique. As soon as the student could accomplish the feat (play that chord, hit that volley), the coach would quickly layer in an added difficulty. Good. Okay, now do it 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.”

teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary.

“With a new kid, it's no different from meeting a girl you might want to go on a date with,” Martinez said. “You make eye contact, and there's something happening there, underneath. Something hits a nerve, something is transmitted through eye contact that tells you to say hello. That's what I look for first in a kid, something to take our connection to a potentially different spot.”

“Sixty percent of what you teach applies to everybody,” he continued. “The trick is how you get that sixty percent to the person. If I teach you, I'm concerned about what you think and how you think. I want to teach you how to learn in a way that's right for you. My greatest challenge is not teaching Tom Brady but some guy who can't do it at all, and getting them to a point where they can. Now that is coaching.”

“I flat-out love coaching,” he said toward the end. “There's something there that's real. You get your hands on it, and you can make somebody better than they were. That's one hell of a feeling.”

“When something goes wrong, ask WHY five times.” This sounds like a simple thing to do. But in fact, like all deep practice, one first has to overcome the natural tendency to smooth over problems—something particularly difficult in business.

“One Friday I gave a report of an activity we'd been doing [a plant expansion], and I spoke very positively about it, I bragged a little. After two or three minutes, I sat down. And Mr. Cho [Fujio Cho, now the chairman of Toyota worldwide] kind of looked at me. I could see he was puzzled. He said, ‘Jim-san. We all know you are a good manager, otherwise we would not have hired you. But please talk to us about your problems so we can all work on them together.’”

“We believe that people are shy not because they lack social skills but because they haven't practiced them sufficiently” said therapist Nicole Shiloff. “Talking on the phone or asking someone on a date is a learnable skill, exactly like a tennis forehand. The key is that people have to linger in that uncomfortable area, learn to tolerate the anxiety. If you practice, you can get to the level you want.”

Ellis, who went on to write dozens of books, built a straight-talk, action-oriented approach that challenged the Freudian model of examining childhood 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.”

Ellis's approach, combined with that of Dr. Aaron Beck, became known as cognitive-behavioral therapy, which has been shown, according to The New York Times, to be equal to or better than prescription drugs for combating depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

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.

One study showed that elderly people who pursued more leisure activities had a 38 percent lower risk for developing dementia. As one neurologist pointed out, the mantra “Use it or lose it” needs an update. It should be “Use it and get more of it.”

Carol Dweck, the psychologist who studies motivation, likes to say that all the world's parenting advice can be distilled to two simple rules: pay attention to what your children are fascinated by, and praise them for their effort.