“As Daniel Coyle points out in The Little Book of Talent, successful athletes don’t just fail during games. They go out of their way to seek out failure during practice. Hockey great Wayne Gretzky, for example, would often fall flat on the ice during skating exercises. It’s not that he’d forgotten how to skate. He was deliberately pushing his boundaries, experimenting with the limits of his ability. When practice is effortless, Coyle argues, learning stops. It’s by walking the precipice between your current abilities and the skills just beyond your reach that growth happens. Master performers don’t get to where they are by playing at the same level day after day. They do so by risking failure and using the feedback to master new skills.”