The Little Book of Talent Quotes

“Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“TO LEARN IT MORE DEEPLY, TEACH IT”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“ignore the bad habit and put your energy toward building a new habit that will override the old one.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent

“Feeling stupid is no fun. But being willing to be stupid—in other words, being willing to risk the emotional pain of making mistakes—is absolutely essential, because reaching, failing, and reaching again is the way your brain grows and forms new connections.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“As the martial artist and actor Bruce Lee said, “I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick ten thousand times.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“Inspiration is for amateurs.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“As Pablo Picasso (no slouch at theft himself) put it, “Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“Even the most creative skills—especially the most creative skills—require long periods of clumsiness.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“Studies show that even a brief connection with a role model can vastly increase unconscious motivation.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“Super-slow practice works like a magnifying glass: It lets us sense our errors more clearly, and thus fix them.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“Studies show that even a brief connection with a role model can vastly increase unconscious motivation. For example, being told that you share a birthday with a mathematician can improve the amount of effort you’re willing to put into difficult math tasks by 62 percent.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“A method of schooling founded by the Italian educator Maria Montessori that emphasizes collaborative, explorative learning, and whose alumni include Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page; Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales; video-game designer Will Wright; Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos; chef Julia Child; and rap impresario Sean Combs.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“The solution is to ignore the bad habit and put your energy toward building a new habit that will override the old one.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“Practice on the days that you eat.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent

“Master teachers and coaches don’t stand in front; they stand alongside the individuals they’re helping. They don’t give long speeches; they deliver useful information in small, vivid chunks.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“After all, you aren’t built to be transformed in a single day. You are built to improve little by little, connection by connection, rep by rep. As Wooden also said, “Don’t look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent

“Think of your windshield as an energy source for your brain. Use pictures (the walls of many talent hotbeds are cluttered with photos and posters of their stars) or, better, video. One idea: Bookmark a few YouTube videos, and watch them before you practice, or at night before you go to bed.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent

“GIVE A NEW SKILL A MINIMUM OF EIGHT WEEKS”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“The blame lies with our brains. While they are really good at building circuits, they are awful at unbuilding them.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“When you practice a soft skill, focus on making a high number of varied reps, and on getting clear feedback. Don’t worry too much about making errors—the important thing is to explore. Soft skills are often more fun to practice, but they’re also tougher because they demand that you coach yourself. After each session ask yourself, What worked? What didn’t? And why?”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“This works because when you communicate a skill to someone, you come to understand it more deeply yourself.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“If you have early success, do your best to ignore the praise and keep pushing yourself to the edges of your ability, where improvement happens. If you don’t have early success, don’t quit. Instead, treat your early efforts as experiments, not as verdicts. Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“As Albert Einstein said, “One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“Luxury is a motivational narcotic.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“A good example of this technique is found in the work of the Shyness Clinic, a program based in Los Altos, California,”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“Simple, humble spaces help focus attention on the deep-practice task at hand: reaching and repeating and struggling. When given the choice between luxurious and spartan, choose spartan. Your unconscious mind will thank you.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

“is for amateurs.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent

“As Wooden also said, “Don’t look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.”
― Daniel Coyle, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills