The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born, It's Grown, Here's How - Daniel Coyle

The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born, It's Grown, Here's How

The more time and energy you put into the right kind of practice, the more myelin you earn

This summary is about a simple idea: tapping into a neurological mechanism in which certain patterns of targeted practice build skill. Without realizing it, this will help you enter a zone of accelerated learning that, while it can't quite be bottled, can be accessed by those who know-how. In short, this means you have cracked the talent code.

The talent code is built on revolutionary scientific discoveries involving a neural insulator called myelin, which some neurologists now consider to be the holy grail of acquiring a skill. Here's why. Every human skill, whether it's playing baseball or playing Bach, is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse — basically, a signal traveling through a circuit.

Myelin's vital role is to wrap those nerve fibers the same way that rubber insulation wraps a copper wire, making the signal stronger and faster by preventing the electrical impulses from leaking out. When we fire our circuits in the right way — when we practice swinging that bat or playing that note — our myelin responds by wrapping layers of insulation around that neural circuit, each new layer adding a bit more skill and speed.

The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates, and the faster and more accurate our movements and thoughts become.

Myelin is important for several reasons. It's universal: everyone can grow it, most swiftly during childhood but also throughout life. It's indiscriminate: its growth enables all manner of skills, mental and physical. It's imperceptible: we can't see it or feel it, and we can sense its increase only by its magical-seeming effects. Most of all, however, myelin is important because it provides us with a vivid new model for understanding skills. Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits, and that grows in response to certain signals.

The more time and energy you put into the right kind of practice — the longer you fire the right signals through your circuits — the more skill you get, or, to put it in a slightly different way, the more myelin you earn. All skill acquisitions, and therefore all talent hotbeds, operate on the same principles of action, no matter how different they may appear to us.

“All skills, all language, all music, all movements, are made of living circuits, and all circuits grow according to certain rules.” ~ Dr. George Bartzokis, a UCLA neurologist and myelin researcher

In the coming chapters, we'll see those rules in action by visiting the world's best soccer players, bank robbers, violinists, fighter pilots, artists, and skateboarders. We'll explore some surprising talent hotbeds that are succeeding for reasons that even their inhabitants cannot guess. We'll meet an assortment of scientists, coaches, teachers, and talent researchers who are discovering new tools for acquiring skills. Above all, we'll explore specific ways in which these tools can make a difference in maximizing the potential in our own lives and the lives of those around us.

Deep practice is built on a paradox: your mistake will make you smarter

Trying to describe the collective talent of Brazilian soccer players is like trying to describe the law of gravity. You can measure it — the five World Cup victories, the nine hundred or so young talents signed each year by European professional clubs. Or you can name it — the procession of transcendent stars like Pele, Zico, Socrates, Romario, Ronaldo, Juninho, Robinho, Ronaldinho, Kaka, and others who have deservedly worn the crown of “world's best player.”

The conventional way to explain this kind of concentrated talent is to attribute it to a combination of genes and environment, a.k.a. nature and nurture. In this way of thinking, Brazil is great because it possesses a unique confluence of factors: a friendly climate, a deep passion for soccer, and a genetically diverse population of 190 million, 40% of whom are desperately poor and long to escape through “the beautiful game.” Add up all the factors, and you have the ideal factory for soccer greatness.

But there's a slight problem with this explanation: Brazil wasn't always a great producer of soccer players. In the 1940s and 1950s, they had unspectacular results, never winning a World Cup, failing to defeat then-world-power Hungary in four tries, showing few of the dazzling improvisational skills for which it would later become known. It wasn't until 1958 that Brazil the world now recognizes truly arrived, in the form of a brilliant team featuring 17-year old Pele, at the World Cup in Sweden.

So how does Brazil produce so many great players?

The surprising answer is that Brazil produces great players because, since the 1950s, Brazilian players have trained in a particular way, with a particular tool that improves ball-handling skills faster than anywhere else in the world. They found a way to increase their learning velocity — and, they are barely aware of it. This kind of training is called deep practice, it applies to more than soccer.

Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways — operating at the edges of your ability, where mistakes make 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.

When you're practicing deeply, the world's usual rules are suspended. You use time more efficiently. Your small efforts produce big, lasting results. You have positioned yourself at a place of leverage where you can capture failure and turn it into skill. The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your present abilities; to target the struggle. Thrashing blindly doesn't help. Reaching does.

Deep practice is a strange concept for two reasons. The first reason is that it cuts against our intuition about talent. Our intuition tells us that practice relates to talent in the same way that a whetstone relates to a knife: it's vital but useless without a solid blade of so-called natural ability. Deep practice raises an intriguing possibility: that practice might be the way to forge the blade itself.

The second reason deep practice is a strange concept is that it takes events that we normally strive to avoid — namely, mistakes — and turns them into skills.

Myelin plays a key role in the way our brains function, particularly when it comes to acquiring skills

Deep practice is a powerful idea because it seems magical. A dangerously unskilled pilot climbs into a Link trainer and, within a few hours, emerges with new abilities. The fact that a targeted effort can increase learning velocity tenfold sounds like a fairy tale in which a handful of tiny seeds grows into an enchanted vine. But strangely, the enchanted vine turns out to be something close to neurological fact.

Like most people, the author was under the impression that the key to learning skills and being human resided in our brain's neurons, that flickering web of interconnected nerve fibers and the famous synapses through which they link and communicate. But according to Dr. Douglas Fields, director of the Laboratory of Developmental Neurobiology at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, “while neurons and synapses to be vitally important, the traditional neuron-centric worldview is being fundamentally altered by a Copernican-size revolution. This humble-looking insulation (Myelin), it turns out, plays a key role in the way our brains function, particularly when it comes to acquiring skills.

The revolution is built on three simple facts.
• Every human movement thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons — a circuit of nerve fibers.
• Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy.
• 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.

Myelin is not built to respond to fond wishes or vague ideas or information that washes over us like a warm bath. The mechanism is built to respond to actions: the literal electrical impulses traveling down nerve fibers. It responds to urgent repetition.

One size fits all skills. Our myelin doesn't “know” whether it's being used for playing shortstop or playing Schubert: regardless of its use, it grows according to the same rules.

“What do good athletes do when they train? They send precise impulses along wires that give the signal to myelinate that wire. They end up, after all the training, with a super-duper wire — lots of bandwidth, a high-speed T-3 line. That's what makes them different from the rest of us” ~ Dr. George Bartzokis

Researchers like Fields are attracted to myelin because it promises to provide insights into the biological roots of learning and cognitive disorders. For our purposes, however, the workings of myelin link the various talent hotbeds to each other and to the rest of us. Myelination bears the same relationship to human skill as plate tectonics does to geology, or as natural selection does to evolution. It explains the world's complexity with a simple, elegant mechanism. Skill is myelin insulation that wraps neural circuits, and that grows according to certain signals. The story of skill and talent is the story of myelin.

Did you know? When Ronaldinho and Ronaldo played futsal, they were firing and optimizing their circuits more often and more precisely than when they played the outdoor game. They were growing more myelin.

The three rules of deep practice

“The Holy Shit Effect” refers to the heady mix of disbelief, admiration, and envy we feel when talent suddenly appears out of nowhere. The HSE is not the feeling of hearing Pavarotti sing or watching Willie Mays swing — they're one in a billion; we can easily accept the fact that they're different from us. The HSE is the feeling of seeing talent bloom in people who we thought were just like us. It's the tingle of surprise you get when the goofy neighbor kid down the street is suddenly lead guitarist for a successful rock band, or when your own child shows an inexplicable knack for differential calculus. It's the feeling of, where did that come from?

The interesting thing about the HSE is that it operates in one direction. The observer is dumbstruck, amazed, and bewildered, while the talent's owner is unsurprised, even blase.

This trick-mirror quality is not merely a case of diverging impressions — of willful naivete on the observer's part or undue modesty on the talent – holder's part. It is a consistent perceptual pattern at the core of the skill-acquiring process, and it raises an important question: What's the nature of this process that creates two such wildly divergent realities? How can these people, who seem just like us, suddenly become talented while barely cognizant of how talented they've become?

Chunking is a strange concept. The idea that skill — which is graceful, fluid, and seemingly effortless — should be created by the nested accumulation of small, discrete circuits seems counterintuitive, to say the least. But a massive body of scientific research shows that this is precisely the way skills are built — and not just for cognitive pursuits like chess. Physical acts are also built of chunks. When a gymnast learns a floor routine, he assembles it via a series of chunks, which in turn, are made up of other chunks. He's grouped a series of muscle movements together in exactly the same way that you grouped a series of letters together to form Everest.

When chunking has been done effectively, it creates a mirage that gives rise to the HSE.

The instinct to slow down and break skills into their components is universal. We heard it a billion times while we were growing up, from parents and coaches who echoed the old refrain, “Just take it one step at a time.”

Rule one: Chunk it up.

Deep practice feels a bit like exploring a dark and unfamiliar room. You start slowly, you bump into furniture, stop, think, and start again. Slowly, and a little painfully, you explore the space over and over, attending to errors, extending your reach into the room a bit farther each time, building a mental map until you can move through it quickly and intuitively.

a. Absorb the whole thing.

This means spending time staring at or listening to the desired skill — the song, the move, the swing — as a single coherent entity.

b. Break it into chunks.

The goal is to break a skill into its component pieces (circuits), memorize those pieces individually, then link them together in progressively larger groupings (new, interconnected circuits).

c. Slow it down

Going slow allows you to attend more closely to errors, creating a higher degree of precision with each firing — and when it comes to growing myelin, precision is everything. “It's not how fast you can do it. It's how slow you can do it correctly.”

Rule two: Repeat it.

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.

Repetition is invaluable and irreplaceable. 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.

Rule three: Learn to feel it.

Myelin is sneaky stuff. It's not possible to sense myelin growing along your nerve fibers any more than you can sense your heart and lungs becoming more efficient after a workout. It is possible, however, to sense the telltale set of secondary feelings associated with acquiring new skills — the myelin version of “feeling the burn.”

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.

Where deep practice is a cool, conscious act, ignition is a hot, mysterious burst, an awakening

Growing skill, as we've seen, requires deep practice. But deep practice isn't a piece of cake: it requires energy, passion, and commitment. In a word, it requires motivational fuel. In this chapter, we'll see how motivation is created and sustained through a process called ignition. Ignition and deep practice work together to produce skills in exactly the same way that a gas tank combines with an engine to produce velocity in an automobile. Ignition supplies the energy, while deep practice translates that energy over time into forward progress, a.k.a. wraps of myelin.

When the author visits talent hotbeds and asked about the source of their passion for violin/singing/soccer/math, the question struck most of them as faintly ridiculous, as if he was inquiring when they first learned to enjoy oxygen. The universal response was to shrug and say something like, “I dunno, I've just always felt this way.”

Faced with these responses, it's tempting to return the shrug, to chalk up their burning motivation to the unknown depths of the human heart. But this would not be accurate. Because in many cases, it is possible to pinpoint the instant that passion ignited.

For South Korea's golfers, it was the afternoon of May 18, 1998, when a 20-year old named Se Ri Pak won the McDonald 's LPGA Championship and became a national icon. (As one Seoul newspaper put it, “Se Ri Pak is not the female Tiger Woods; Tiger Woods is the male Se Ri Pak.”) Before her, no South Korean had succeeded in golf. Flash forward to ten years later, and Pak's countrywomen had essentially colonized the LPGA Tour, with 45 players who collectively won about 1/3 of the events.

For Russia's tennis players, the moment came later that same summer when 17-year old Anna Kournikova reached the Wimbledon semifinals and, thanks to her supermodel looks, gained the status of the world's most downloaded athlete. By 2004 Russian women were showing up regularly in major finals; by 2007, they occupied five of the top ten rankings and twelve of the top fifty.

Other hotbeds follow the same pattern: a breakthrough success is followed by a massive bloom of talent. Note that in each case, the bloom grew relatively slowly at first, requiring five or six years to reach a dozen players. This is not because the inspiration was weaker at the start and got progressively stronger, but for a more fundamental reason: deep practice takes time (ten thousand hours, as the refrain goes). Talent is spreading through this group in the same pattern that dandelions spread through suburban yards. One puff, given time, brings many flowers.

This is how the ignition works. 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. We usually think of passion as an inner quality.

Ignition is a strange concept because it burns just out of our awareness, largely within our unconscious mind. But that doesn't mean it can't be captured, understood, and used to produce useful heat.

Ignition and deep practice work together to produce skill in exactly the same way that a gas tank combines with an engine to produce velocity in an automobile.

Baron Lamm was a master coach and a talent whisperer

In the early part of the twentieth century, American bank robbers weren't very skilled. Gangs like the Newton Brothers of Texas followed a simple and unvarying plan: they picked a bank, waited until nightfall, then blew open the vault with dynamite and/or nitroglycerine (which, in addition to being ticklish to handle, occasionally had the unfortunate side effect of setting the money on fire). This straightforward approach worked well for a time. But by the early 1920s, the banks had caught up, introducing alarm systems and concrete-reinforced, blast-proof vaults. Gangs like the Newtons were stymied; bank authorities expected that a new era of safety and security had dawned.

It didn't dawn. The bank robbers simply became more skilled. These new thieves worked in daylight and operated with such clockwork professionalism that even the police were occasionally moved to admiration. It was as if bank robbers had suddenly evolved into a more talented species. They demonstrated their capabilities in downtown Denver on December 19, 1922, when a gang relieved the Federal Mint of $200,000 in ninety seconds flat, a feat that then ranked, on a per-second basis, among history's most lucrative bank heists.

This evolution could be traced to the man who led that Denver gang: Herman “The Baron” Lamm. Lamm was the originator and teacher of modern bank-robbing skills. His singular insight was that robbing a bank was not about guts or guns; it was about technique. Each bank job involved weeks of preparatory work.

Lamm pioneered “casing,” which meant visiting the bank, sketching blueprint-like maps, and occasionally posing as a journalist to get a look at the bank's interior operations. Lamm assigned each man on his team a well-defined role: lookout, lobby man, vault man, driver. He organized rehearsals, using warehouses to stand in for the bank. He insisted on unyielding obedience to the clock: when the allotted time expired, the gang would depart, whether or not they had the money. Lamm scouted the getaway route in different weather conditions to gauge time; he taped maps to the dashboard that were indexed to the tenth of a mile.

Lamm's system — dubbed the Baron Lamm Technique — worked well. From 1919 to 1930, it brought Lamm hundreds of thousands of dollars from banks around the country; after his death, it was taught to John Dillinger, among others. Lamm's system, still employed today, succeeded not only because of its conceptual strength but also because Lamm was able to communicate his ideas and translate them into the seamless performance of an immensely difficult task. He was an innovator who taught with discipline and exactitude. He inspired through information. In short, Baron Lamm was a master coach.

Did you know? Lamm died in 1930 when he encountered a series of events so improbable that even he could not have anticipated them. He was departing a bank in Clinton, Indiana when the getaway car blew a tire.

The Four Virtues Of Master Coaches

Great teaching is a skill like any other. It only looks like magic; in fact, it is a combination of skills — a set of myelinated circuits built through deep practice.

Ron Gallimore, who is now a distinguished professor emeritus at UCLA, has a good way of describing the skill

“Great teachers focus on what the student is saying or doing, and are able, by being so focused and by their deep knowledge of the subject matter, to see and recognize the inarticulate stumbling, fumbling effort of the student who's reaching toward mastery, and then connect to them with a targeted message.” ~ Ron Gallimore

The First virtue: The matrix.

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. Gallimore explains it this way: “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.”

People are not born with this depth of knowledge. It's something they grow, over time, through the same combination of ignition and deep practice as any other skill.

One does not become a master coach by accident. Many coaches share a similar biographical arc: they had once been promising talents in their respective fields but failed and tried to figure out why.

The Second virtue: Perceptiveness.

The eyes are the giveaway. They are usually sharp and warm and are deployed in long, unblinking gazes. Several master coaches train their eyes to be like cameras, and they share that same Panavision quality. Though the gaze can be friendly, it's not chiefly about friendship. It's about information. It's about figuring you out.

The Third virtue: The GPS reflex.

“You gotta give them a lot of information. You gotta shock 'em, then shock 'em some more.” ~ Robert Lansdorp, a tennis coach

Shock is an appropriate word. Most master coaches delivered their information to their students in a series of short, vivid, high-definition bursts. They never began sentences with “Please, would you” or “Do you think” or “What about”; instead, they spoke in short imperatives. “Now do X” was the most common construction; the “you will” was implied. The directions weren't dictatorial in tone (usually) but were delivered in a way that sounded clinical and urgent as if they were being emitted by a particularly compelling GPS unit navigating through a maze of city streets: turn left, turn right, go straight, arrival complete.

The Fourth virtue: Theatrical honesty.

Many coaches radiate a subtle theatrical air. Robert Lansdorp wore a snow-white pompadour and a black leather jacket and spoke in a booming Sinatra baritone. Septien's sheeny outfits and flawless hair evoked a Hollywood star. Larisa Preobrazhenskaya (who trained in her youth as an actress) favored Gloria Swanson's turban-style head wraps and spotless white tracksuits and could go from a Brezhnev glower to a Betty White smile in a heartbeat.

Lansdorp took positive glee in the characterizations he would play. “I'm a total put-on,” he said. “I raise my voice, lower my voice, ask questions, figure out how they react. I have all kinds of things I do; sometimes I'm mean and tough, sometimes I'm easygoing. It depends on what works for that kid.”

As Ron Gallimore said, moral honesty is at the core of the job description — character in the deeper sense of the word. “Truly great teachers connect with students because of who they are as moral standards,” he said. “There's an empathy, a selflessness because you're not trying to tell the students something they know, but are finding, in their effort, a place to make a real connection.”

Patience is a word we use a lot to describe great teachers at work. But in master coaches, it is not patience, exactly. It is more like probing, strategic impatience. Master coaches are constantly changing their input. If A didn't work, they tried B and C; if they failed, the rest of the alphabet was holstered and ready.

Conclusion

Every human skill, whether it's playing baseball or playing Bach, is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse — basically, a signal traveling through a circuit. Myelin's vital role is to wrap those nerve fibers the same way that rubber insulation wraps a copper wire, making the signal stronger and faster by preventing the electrical impulses from leaking out. When we fire our circuits in the right way — when we practice swinging that bat or playing that note — our myelin responds by wrapping layers of insulation around that neural circuit, each new layer adding a bit more skill and speed.

Take action!

The more time and energy you put into the right kind of practice — the longer you will fire the right signals through your circuits — the more skill you get, or, to put it in a slightly different way, the more myelin you earn. All skill acquisitions operate on the same principles of action, no matter how different they may appear to us.