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

by Daniel Coyle

During the other half I witnessed something very different: moments of slow, fitful struggle, rather like what I'd seen on the Clarissa video. It was as if the herd of deer suddenly encountered a hillside coated with ice. They slammed to a halt; they stopped, looked, and thought carefully before taking each step. Making progress became a matter of small failures, a rhythmic pattern of botches, as well as something else: a shared facial expression. Their taut, intense squint caused them to take on (I know this sounds weird) an unaccountable resemblance to Clint Eastwood.

You stopped. You stumbled ever so briefly, then figured it out. You experienced a microsecond of struggle, and that microsecond made all the difference. You didn't practice harder when you looked at column B. You practiced deeper.

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.

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

Futsal compresses soccer's essential skills into a small box; it places players inside the deep practice zone, making and correcting errors, constantly generating solutions to vivid problems. Players touching the ball 600 percent more often learn far faster, without realizing it, than they would in the vast, bouncy expanse of the outdoor game (where, at least in my mind, players run along to the soundtrack of Clarissa tootling away on “The Blue Danube”).

The revolution is built on three simple facts. (1) Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons—a circuit of nerve fibers. (2) Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy. (3) The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become.

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.

Like a highway-paving machine, myelination happens in one direction. Once a skill circuit is insulated, you can't un-insulate it (except through age or disease). That's why habits are hard to break. The only way to change them is to build new habits by repeating new behaviors—by myelinating new circuits.

every expert in every field is the result of around ten thousand hours of committed practice. Ericsson called this process “deliberate practice” and defined it as working on technique, seeking constant critical feedback, and focusing ruthlessly on shoring up weaknesses.

People called the Pietà pure genius, but its creator begged to differ. “If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery,” Michelangelo later said, “it would not seem so wonderful at all.”

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

First, the participants look at the task as a whole—as one big chunk, the megacircuit. Second, they divide it into its smallest possible chunks. Third, they play with time, slowing the action down, then speeding it up, to learn its inner architecture. People in the hotbeds deep-practice the same way a good movie director approaches a scene—one instant panning back to show the landscape, the next zooming in to examine a bug crawling on a leaf in slo-mo. We'll look at each technique to see how it is deployed.

Meadowmount, however, is better defined by the camp's storied alumni (Yo-Yo Ma, Pinchas Zuckerman, Joshua Bell, and Itzhak Perlman) and, at its core, by a simple equation that has become the school's de facto motto: in seven weeks, most students will learn a year's worth of material, an increase of about 500 percent in learning speed. Among the students, this acceleration is well known but only dimly understood. So it's often spoken about as if it were some kind of snowboarding trick.

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.

As Vladimir Horowitz, the virtuoso pianist who kept performing into his eighties, put it, “If I skip practice for one day, I notice. If I skip practice for two days, my wife notices. If I skip for three days, the world notices.”

Deep practice, however, doesn't obey the same math. Spending more time is effective—but only if you're still in the sweet spot at the edge of your capabilities, attentively building and honing circuits. What's more, there seems to be a universal limit for how much deep practice human beings can do in a day. Ericsson's research shows that most world-class experts—including pianists, chess players, novelists, and athletes—practice between three and five hours a day, no matter what skill they pursue.

As I traveled to various talent hotbeds, I asked people for words that described the sensations of their most productive practice. Here's what they said: Attention Connect Build Whole Alert Focus Mistake Repeat Tiring Edge Awake*5

According to a 1995 study, a sample of Japanese eighth graders spent 44 percent of their class time inventing, thinking, and actively struggling with underlying concepts. The study's sample of American students, on the other hand, spent less than 1 percent of their time in that state. “The Japanese want their kids to struggle,” said Jim Stigler, the UCLA professor who oversaw the study and who cowrote The Teaching Gap with James Hiebert. “Sometimes the [Japanese] teacher will purposely give the wrong answer so the kids can grapple with the theory. American teachers, though, worked like waiters. Whenever there was a struggle, they wanted to move past it, make sure the class kept gliding along. But you don't learn by gliding.”

Where deep practice is a cool, conscious act, ignition is a hot, mysterious burst, an awakening. Where deep practice is an incremental wrapping, ignition works through lightning flashes of image and emotion, evolution-built neural programs that tap into the mind's vast reserves of energy and attention. Where deep practice is all about staggering-baby steps, ignition is about the set of signals and subconscious forces that create our identity; the moments that lead us to say that is who I want to be.

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. A nice, well-kept tennis academy gives them the luxury future right now—of course they'd be demotivated. They can't help it.”

Losing a parent is a primal cue: you are not safe. 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.

Gustavo Dudamel, a.k.a. El Dude, is the twenty-six-year-old wunderkind who now directs the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Most stories about him mention his off-the-chart skills, his signature curly hair, his charm. They don't mention the fact that Venezuela is producing lots of El Dudes through a program called the Fundación del Estado para el Sistema Nacional de las Orquestas Juveniles e Infantiles de Venezuela, known by its handier nickname of El Sistema (the system). The program enrolls poor kids into classical-training programs (250,000 kids at last count), brings the best players back as teachers, sends orchestras all over the world, and in general is starting to bear a striking resemblance to Venezuela's equally successful baseball academies. Another future hotbed will be Chinese novelists. Ha Jin (Waiting) looks to be the breakthrough performer of what might be a rather large contingent, including Ma Jian, Li Yiyun, Fan Wu, and Dai Sijie, which should arrive around the same time as the Chinese basketballers ignited by Yao Ming. Lastly, moviegoers should brace themselves for a wave of Romanian filmmakers, an unlikely group sparked by the four major prizes won at the Cannes Film Festival by that nation's directors over the last three years, as well as by the famously rigorous teaching at the Bucharest National University of Drama and Film.

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.

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.”

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.” In Brazilian soccer the age levels are the Bottle (five- and six-year olds), Diapers (seven and eight), and Pacifier (nine and ten). The under-twenty national team is called the Aspirantes, the Hopeful Ones.

As Feinberg likes to say, “Everything is everything.” This sounds like new-age palaver, but what he's really talking about is KIPP's insistence on environmental coherency: 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.”

“A great teacher has the capacity 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.”

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. (This is why self-taught violinists, skaters, and gymnasts rarely reach world-class level and why self-taught novelists, comedians, and soccer players do all the time.)

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. Or, to put it another way: Skill is insulation that wraps neural circuits and grows according to certain signals.

“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.’”

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.”

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. She began by splitting seven hundred low-achieving middle schoolers into two groups. The first were given an eight-week workshop of study skills; the second were given the identical workshop along with something extra: a special fifty-minute session that described how the brain grows when it's challenged. Within a semester the second group had significantly improved their grades and study habits.

John Jerome, The Sweet Spot in Time: The Search for Athletic Perfection (New York: Breakaway Books, 1980); Glenn Kurtz, Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003); John McPhee, A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965); and Steve Martin, Born Standing Up (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007).