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

by Daniel Coyle

They possess piles of supportive data to explain why this is so effective—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.

On average, the eminent group lost their first parent at an average age of 13.9, compared with 19.6 for a control group. All in all, it's a list deep and broad enough to justify the question posed by a 1978 French study: do orphans rule the world?*3

Seen this way, the superstars on Eisenstadt's list are not uniquely gifted exceptions, but rather 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. And as George Bartzokis might point out, the eminent people, on average, received this signal as young teens, during the brain's key development period, in which information-processing pathways are particularly receptive to myelin.*4

While the sample size is small, the pattern is clear. Of the eight men on the list (Burrell and Lewis appear twice), none of them were firstborn, and only one was born in the first half of his family's birth order. In all, history's fastest runners were born, on average, fourth in families of 4.6 children.

Or consider the scene at the Mermaid Tavern in London during Shakespeare's day. There, across the river from the Globe Theatre, the major writers of the day—Marlowe, Jonson, Donne, Raleigh—gathered to talk shop and match wits.

And according to theories developed by Dr. Carol Dweck, Engblom's verbal cues, however minimal, are just the kind to send the right signal.

“Left to our own devices, we go along in a pretty stable mindset,” she said. “But when we get a clear cue, a message that sends a spark, then boing, we respond.”

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 experiment then came full circle, returning to a test of the same difficulty as the initial test. 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.

True to the findings of Dweck's study, each of the hotbeds I visited used language that affirmed the value of effort and slow progress rather than innate talent or intelligence. At Spartak, for instance, they did not “play” tennis—they preferred the verb borot'sya—“fight” or “struggle.” South Korean golfers are exhorted to yun sup'he, which translates (to Nike's possible delight) as “just do it.” In Curaçao the nine-to ten-year olds play in the Liga Vraminga, the Little Ant League; the watchword is progresa, “baby steps.”

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.

Interestingly, the same pattern occurred among mile runners in their reaction to the success of Roger Bannister, who wasn't considered among the world's talents when he broke the four-minute mark. Similarly, Anna Kournikova had been routinely defeated by many of her tennis teammates. The peers' reaction in both cases was to be incredulous and highly motivated at once: Them?

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. —W. B. Yeats

During my first morning at Meadowmount two students mentioned how their families had relocated to Chicago so they could take lessons from Jensen. Melissa Kraut, who teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Music, simply described him as “the most brilliant cello teacher on the planet.”

Gallimore and Tharp recorded and coded 2,326 discrete acts of teaching. 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.”

Wooden may not have known about myelin, but like all master coaches, he had a deep understanding of how it worked. He taught in chunks, using what he called the “whole-part method”—he would teach players an entire move, then break it down to work on its elemental actions. 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.

Septien was concise, locating mistakes and their solutions in the same vivid stroke. She highlighted the crucial moments when Kacie hit the desired mark. (“There it is.”) Septien's skill is not only her matrix of knowledge but also the lightning-fast connections she makes between that matrix and Kacie's efforts, linking where Kacie is now with actions that will take her where she ought to go.*2 Patience is a word we use a lot to describe great teachers at work. But what I saw was not patience, exactly. It was more like probing, strategic impatience. The master coaches I met were constantly changing their input.

Skills like soccer, writing, and comedy are flexible-circuit skills, meaning that they require us to grow vast ivy-vine circuits that we can flick through to navigate an ever-changing set of obstacles. Playing violin, golf, gymnastics, and figure skating, on the other hand, are consistent-circuit skills, depending utterly on a solid foundation of technique that enables us to reliably re-create the fundamentals of an ideal performance.

Until the 1980s, with those advantages present, Finnish education was generally regarded as average. So what changed? “Three reasons,” Kaisu Karkkainen, principal of the Arabia Comprehensive School in Helsinki, told the Washington Post. “Teachers, teachers, and teachers.” In Finland, a teacher is regarded as the social equal of a doctor or lawyer, and is compensated accordingly. All elementary teachers have master's degrees in pedagogy; schools are run like teaching hospitals, where young teachers are analyzed and evaluated. It's competitive: some schools receive forty applications for a single job opening.

“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.”

Virtual Iraq operates exactly like the Shyness Clinic, or any other talent hotbed for that matter. The desired skill is to experience traumatic events (footsteps, loud noises) without triggering the debilitating connection. They can't unbuild the circuit (remember, myelin only wraps; it doesn't unwrap), so the best way to gain the new skill is to establish and deep-practice a new circuit that connects the traumatic stimulus to normal, everyday events.

Not sure if this is the right way to do 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. To which I would add, tell them how the myelin mechanism works, as Dweck herself did in a study that revealed the power of sending this message.

The business school students appear to be collaborating, but in fact they are engaged in a process psychologists call status management. They are figuring out where they fit into the larger picture: Who is in charge? Is it okay to criticize someone’s idea? What are the rules here? Their interactions appear smooth, but their underlying behavior is riddled with inefficiency, hesitation, and subtle competition.

“You can measure interest levels, who the alpha is, who’s cooperating, who’s mimicking, who’s in synchrony. We have these communication channels, and we do it without thinking about it. For instance, if I lean a few inches closer to you, we might begin mirroring.”

Like any language, belonging cues can’t be reduced to an isolated moment but rather consist of a steady pulse of interactions within a social relationship. Their function is to answer the ancient, ever-present questions glowing in our brains: Are we safe here? What’s our future with these people? Are there dangers lurking?

Belonging cues possess three basic qualities: 1. Energy: They invest in the exchange that is occurring 2. Individualization: They treat the person as unique and valued 3. Future orientation: They signal the relationship will continue

Pentland and Curhan found that the first five minutes of sociometric data strongly predicted the outcomes of the negotiations. In other words, the belonging cues sent in the initial moments of the interaction mattered more than anything they said.

Pentland found that the sociometers—which tracked only the cues exchanged by presenter and audience and ignored all the informational content—predicted the rankings with nearly perfect accuracy. In other words, the content of the pitch didn’t matter as much as the set of cues with which the pitch was delivered and received.

“The executives [listening to the pitches] thought they were evaluating the plans based on rational measures, such as: How original is this idea? How does it fit the current market? How well developed is this plan?” Pentland wrote. “While listening to the pitches, though, another part of their brain was registering other crucial information, such as: How much does this person believe in this idea? How confident are they when speaking? How determined are they to make this work? And the second set of information—information that the business executives didn’t even know they were assessing—is what influenced their choice of business plans to the greatest degree.”

Overall Pentland’s studies show that team performance is driven by five measurable factors: 1. Everyone in the group talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short. 2. Members maintain high levels of eye contact, and their conversations and gestures are energetic. 3. Members communicate directly with one another, not just with the team leader. 4. Members carry on back-channel or side conversations within the team. 5. Members periodically break, go exploring outside the team, and bring information back to share with the others.