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

by Daniel Coyle

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.

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.

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

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.

not about recognizing talent, whatever the hell that is. I've never tried to go out and find someone who's talented. First you work on fundamentals, and pretty soon you find out where things are going.

“Basketball's John Wooden: What a Coach Can Teach a Teacher,” put it, Wooden's “teaching utterances or comments were short, punctuated, and numerous. There were no lectures, no extended harangues … he rarely spoke longer than twenty seconds.” Here are some of Wooden's more long-winded “speeches”: “Take the ball softly; you're receiving a pass, not intercepting it.” “Do some dribbling between shots.”

Of them, a mere 6.9 percent were compliments. Only 6.6 percent were expressions of displeasure. 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.” As Gallimore and Tharp wrote, Wooden's “demonstrations rarely take longer than three seconds, but are of such clarity that they leave an image in memory much like a textbook sketch.”