The Secret Behind Successful Performers — The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle
By: Sarah Cy
Tags: Creativity, Inspiration, Books, Learning, Writing

Introduction: The Girl Who Did a Month’s Worth of Practice in Six Minutes

Coyle begins by introducing talent hotbeds, places that regularly produce top performers, then talking about a girl named Clarissa, studied by Australian music psychologists Gary McPherson and James Renwick, who watched her make “a month’s worth of progress in 6 minutes” when she actually buckled down and concentrated.

“Look at that!…She’s got a blueprint in her mind she’s constantly comparing herself to. She’s working in phrases, complete thoughts. She’s not ignoring errors, she’s hearing them, fixing them. She’s fitting small parts into the whole, drawing the lens in and out all the time, scaffolding herself to a higher level.” — McPherson, commenting on the Clarissa video.

Most of the time, though, Clarissa’s practice is about her not thinking, not learning, not building, and just wasting time.

Coyle says myelin is the “holy grail of acquiring skill,” which grows through practice.

PART 1 — DEEP PRACTICE

Chapter 1 The Sweet Spot

“For half of that time, being in a talent hotbed felt like standing amid a herd of running deer: everything moved faster and more fluently than in everyday life…But that was only half the time. During the other half I witnessed something very different: moments of slow, fitful struggle, rather like what I’d seen on the Clarissa video.”

Making progress: small failures, a shared facial expression of taut/intense squint.

When learners try a move, they fail, then stop and think, do it again more slowly, fail again, stops to think again, does it more slowly, break the move down to component parts.

Active retrieval versus passive reception of info makes you engrave things into memory.

Struggling at the edges of your ability makes you smarter. Experiences that force you to slow down, make errors, and correct them, make you “swift and graceful without your realizing it.”

Effortlessness is good for performance, not for learning.

The more we generate brain impulses through overcoming difficulties, the more scaffolding we build and the faster we learn. Turn mistakes into skills.

Henry Roediger, Wash U of St Louis: history students were split in 2 groups. 1st group studied 4x, second group studied 1x, tested 3x, 2nd group performed 50% better.

They’d studied one-fourth as much yet learned far more.

The more our brains generate impulses by overcoming difficulties, the more scaffolding they build, and the faster we learn.

Story: Edwin Link created the first pilot trainers by building sample planes.

How are Brazilian soccer players so good?

Players log 20 hrs a week of practice (as opposed to British 5 hours) and play futebol de salao (futsal), using a ball half the size and twice the weight of the real thing, that didn’t bounce, in a basketball-court sized concrete/wood/dirt field with teams of 5–6, not 11. It’s all about quick, nonstop, controlled action.

Why it works: Futsal players touch the ball 600% more often than soccer players, the smaller, heavier ball is harder to handle — you must be precise. It makes actual soccer easier.

Good advertising also uses these ideas to put viewers at the “sweet spot” of their abilities. For example, a whisky ad “ingle ells…ingle ells…the holidays aren’t the same without J&B”

Chapter 2 The Deep Practice Cell

Deep practice is a powerful idea because it seems magical. Clarissa begins as an average musician and, in six minutes, accomplishes a month’s worth of work.

The more you fire a circuit, the more that circuit is myelinated, and gets stronger and the more fluent your thoughts/mvts become. These circuits (NOT your muscles) control everything.

Automaticity: The more we develop these circuits, the more automatic our skills are, the less aware we’re using the circuits. The more we feel that a skill is natural, something we’ve always had.

We’re forever building vast, intricate circuits, and we’re simultaneously forgetting that we built them.

Myelin makes up more than half your brain’s mass.

Bill Greenough 1980s experiment showed that rats in an enriched environment had increased brain synapses by 25% and also white matter/myelin.

Greenough helped establish the concepts of brain plasticity and developmental windows.

Researchers started linking myelin deficiencies to dyslexia, autism, ADD, PTSD, etc.

Fredrik Ullen 2005: found a directly proportional relationship between hours of practice and white matter.

Myelin can regulate speed, and timing is imperative because neurons are binary, they either fire or not. If 2 neurons have to combine their impulses to make another one fire, they have to arrive at the exact same time.

Your brain has so many connections and possibilities that your genes can’t code the neurons to time things so precisely…But you can build myelin to do it. — Dr. Fields

Myelination is slow. It wraps 40–50 times, taking days to weeks per neuron. Fields: “It’s [myelinating thousands of nerves is] like insulating a transatlantic cable”

Struggle is not optional — it’s neurologically required

You have to fire the circuit suboptimally, make mistakes, pay attention, teach your circuit.

Deep practice is helped by a “primal state” where you’re attentive, hungry, focused, desperate.

Myelin wraps, doesn’t unwrap.

Myelin comes in waves, up into our 30s during critical periods, and we will gain myelin until 50, when you start to lose it, but even then 5% of oligodendrocytes stay ready to learn. That’s why most world-class experts start young.

In the 1970s, the cognitive revolution was starting. People believed that the mind works like a computer and obeys universal rules. In 1976, Anders Ericsson worked on a dissertation on verbal reports (people’s accounts of their mental states).

He caught the attention of Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize-winning economist who brought him to the US.

Every skill is a form of memory.

Deliberate practice: Work on technique, seek constant critical feedback, ruthlessly shore up weaknesses.

ALL skills are built with the same underlying mechanisms.

Michael Howe estimates that Mozart had studied 3,500 hours of music by age 6.

The rage to master: Ellen Winner’s term for people with an innate, obsessive desire to improve.

Chapter 3 The Brontes, the Z-Boys, and the Renaissance

Biographer Elizabeth Gaskell’s story of the Bronte sisters’ romantic creativity is not true. Rather, according to Juliet Barker, the Brontes lived in a home full of stimulating ideas, often imitated articles and books.

[The Brontes] wrote a great deal in a variety of forms — twenty-two little books averaging eighty pages each in one fifteen month period — and…their writing, while complicated and fantastical, wasn’t very good.

The Bronte’s early, unskilled writing is a prerequisite to their eventual literary success. They had to spend massive amounts of time being immature and imitative in the “safe space of their little books.”

They were practicing collaboratively.

To write a book, even a tiny one, is to play a particular kind of game.

Each one of the Bronte’s little books were terrible, except, each “made them happy, and each one quietly earned them a bit of skill.”

David Banks shows that geniuses tend to appear in clusters:

Athens, 440–380 BC

Florence, 1440–1490

London, 1570–1640

Why? People predicted: prosperity, peace, freedom, social mobility, new paradigms/perspectives.

But those predictions aren’t true.

Turns out, Florence saw geniuses emerge from the rise of craft guilds, based on the apprenticeship system, where young kids age 7 or so would live with a master for 5–10 years and learn.

If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all. — Michelangelo

Monkeys have all the same neurons and neurotransmitters as us, but they have 20% less myelin, and they can’t talk beyond the level of a 3 year old.

This is also why breast fed babies have more IQ — there’s more myelin building blocks in breast milk.

Same with the reason why eating fish with fatty acids is good for preventing memory loss.

But building myelin is biologically expensive.

In the space of a generation, or a few hundred miles, certain higher skills flip from being crucial to being trivial and vice versa.

Our genes matter, but

We have a good deal of control over what skills we develop, and we each have more potential than we might ever presume to guess.

Chapter 4 The Three Rules of Deep Practice

HSE: the Holy Shit Effect. The feeling of seeing talent blooming in folks just like you.

Adriaan de Groot, Dutch psychologist, discovered that chess masters memorized boards via chunking.

Each group of chunks (discrete small circuits) nests inside other groups like Russian dolls. Reading is all about chunking at lightning speed.

Deep practice feels a bit like exploring a dark and unfamiliar room. You start slowly, you bump into furniture, stop, think, and start again.

Rules for myelination/learning:

Chunk it up: Look at the task as a whole (Spend time staring at/listening to the task in its totality, as a single coherent entity, listen to the song you want to play over and over. Absorb the picture of the skill, imagine yourself doing it) We’re pre-wired to imitate. Then break it into its smallest chunks. Then play it slow, then speed it up (to learn inner architecture) Slow it down Repeat it Learn to feel it: to avoid mistakes, you have to feel them immediately

Ray LaMontagne taught himself to be a singer-songwriter at age 22 by buying dozens of used albums by people like Etta James, Ray Charles, Al Green, Stephen Stills, and spending 2 years singing along to the records, ignoring everyone else. 8 years later, his first album sold nearly half a million copies.

Imitatsiya: Spartak (Larisa Preobrazhenskaya’s Russian tennis training center) term for rallying in slow motion with an imaginary ball. Students work on slow, simple, precise motions with an emphasis on technique. No one is allowed to play a tournament for the first 3 years.

If you begin playing without technique, it is big mistake. Big, big mistake! — Preobrazhenskaya

Ivan Galamian chose upstate NY to create Meadowmount music academy. In 7 weeks, students learn a years’ worth of material, 5x as much as anyone else.

The teachers cut music into strips, stuff it in envelopes, and pull chunks out randomly.

They cut the strips into smaller fragments by changing the rhythms. The goal? Break a skill into component pieces/circuits, memorize those pieces individually, link them into progressively larger groups (interconnect circuits)

One teacher’s rule of thumb: If a passerby can recognize the song being played, you’re not practicing right. Go 3–5x slower than ever. If you do this for 3 hours with one page of music, you can accomplish 1–2 weeks’ worth of shallow practice.

Going slow lets you pay more attention to errors and get more precise with your neuronal firing, which is everything.

It’s not how fast you can do it. It’s how slow you can do it correctly. — Tom Martinez, football coach

Barry Zimmerman studies how people coach themselves, self-regulation. (How they observe, judge, strategize, set goals, plan, self-monitor, adapt)

Experts think in terms of chunks, building up into a private skill language.

“When I click in, every note is being played for a purpose. It feels like I’m building a house…I connect them and get a foundation. Then I add the walls, connect those. then the roof, then the paint. Then, hopefully, it all hangs together.” — John Henry Crawford, Meadowmount student

There isn’t a substitute for attentive repetition. Action. Not talking, thinking, imagining, or reading.

To start losing skill, stop practicing for 30 days. Myelin will break down.

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. — Vladimir Horowitz

There’s a universal limit to how much deep practice people can do in a day. 3–5 hours max, for all skills.

At Meadowmount, Skye Carmen taught students:

Athletes don’t fool around when they practice. Musicians are athletes too. Tune your instrument, then tune your ear. You have to feel mistakes coming. Hearing a string out of tune should bother you a LOT.

The deep practice cycle:

Pick Target Reach for Target Evaluate Gap between Target and Reach Repeat

Babies learning to walk stagger around: To get good, it’s helpful to be willing, even enthusiastic, about being bad.

Baby steps are the royal road to skill.

W Timothy Gallwey taught beginner students without speech: He just showed them how to hit.

I am slow to learn and slow to forget what I have learned — Abraham Lincoln

Deliberate practice is NOT natural, effortless, routine, automatic, or genius.