Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle, (53) Appendix, Notes

Post date: Nov 25, 2018 7:28:30 PM

Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle

APPENDIX

GLOSSARY

- Deep practice (n), also called deliberate practice: The form of learning marked by 1) the willingness to operate on the edge of your ability, aiming for targets that are just out of reach, and 2) the embrace of attentive repetition.
- Ignition (n): The motivational process that occurs when your identity becomes linked to a long-term vision of your future. Triggers significant
- amounts of unconscious energy; usually marked by the realization That is who I want to be.
- Reach (v): The act of stretching slightly beyond your current abilities toward a target, which causes the brain to form new connections. Reaching invariably creates mistakes, which are the guideposts you use to improve the next attempt.
- Rep (n, abbreviation for repetition): The act of attentively repeating an action, often with slight variances at gradually increasing difficulty, which causes the brain’s pathways to increase speed and improve accuracy.
- Rule of Ten Thousand Hours (n): The scientific finding that all world-class experts in every field have spent a minimum of ten thousand hours intensively practicing their craft. While this number is sometimes misinterpreted as a magical threshold, in reality it functions as a rule of thumb underlining a larger truth: Greatness is not born, but grown through deep practice, no matter who you are.
- Shallow practice (n): The opposite of deep practice, marked by lack of intensity, vagueness of goal, and/or the unwillingness to reach beyond current abilities. Often caused by an aversion to making mistakes; results in vastly slowed skill acquisition and learning.
- Sweet spot (n): The zone on the edge of current ability where learning happens fastest. Marked by a frequency of mistakes, and also by the recognition of those mistakes.
- THE NEW SCIENCE OF TALENT DEVELOPMENT A BRIEF LOOK AT MYELIN
- Much of the new research about talent revolves around the brain, specifically a substance called myelin. Here’s what you need to know.
- Myelin is an insulator (you might recall the term “myelin sheath” from biology class). This refers to its function of wrapping the wires of our brain in exactly the same way that electrical tape wraps around an electrical wire: It makes the signal move faster and prevents it from leaking out. For the
- past hundred years or so, scientists considered myelin and its associated cells to be inert. After all, it looked like insulation, and it didn’t appear to react to anything.
- Except the early scientists were wrong. It turns out that myelin does react—it grows in response to electrical activity, i.e., practice. In fact, studies show that myelin grows in proportion to the hours spent in practice. It’s a simple system, and can be thought of this way: Every time you perform a rep, your brain adds another layer of myelin to those particular wires. The more you practice, the more layers of myelin you earn, the more quickly and accurately the signal travels, and the more skill you acquire.
- “What do good athletes do when they train?” asks Dr. George Bartzokis, a professor of neurology at UCLA. “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 than the rest of us.”
- A few other facts worth knowing:
- • Action is vital. Myelin doesn’t grow when you think about practicing. It grows when you actually practice—when you send electricity through your wires.
- • Myelin wraps—it doesn’t unwrap. Like a highway paving machine, myelination happens in one direction. Once a skill circuit is insulated, you can’t uninsulate it (except through age or disease). This is why habits are tough to break (see Tip #46).
- • You can add myelin throughout life. It arrives in a series of waves throughout childhood, creating critical learning periods. The net amount of myelin peaks around age fifty, but the myelin machinery keeps functioning into old age, which is why we can keep learning new things no matter what our age. Studies have linked practice to myelin growth and improved performance in such diverse skills as reading, vocabulary, music, and sports. The research is still in its early phases, but it is threatening to rewrite the old saying. Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect. For more information, read The Talent Code.