The Talent Code

Author Daniel Coyle studies the origin of talent.  Through a multitude of interactions with doctors, coaches, teachers, performers he makes his conclusion that talent is the product of three essential factors.  They are:

1. Deep Practice

2. Ignition

3. Master Coaching

Deep Practice

Deep Practice is the rehearsal of skill in a way that focuses all effort on the proper execution of any one component of the whole.  The first thing Coyle explains is the role of myelin.  Myelin is the insulation of neurological curcuitry that solidifies the mechanical/technical execution of a skill.  Myelin grows over time as the technique is repeated.  Not all repetitions/practice is the same.  Only "Deep Practice" counts, where the performer is focused and the technique is isolated, slowed down and struggled through until it is performed to perfection.  Coyle says this, "Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows in response to certain signals" (p.6).

Quotes from Deep Practice:

• Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways - operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes - makes you smarter (p 18).

• The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your present abilities; to target the struggle (p 19).

• The revolution is built on three simple facts.  1) Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons - a circuit of nerve fibers.  2) Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy.  3) 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 (p 32).

• Skill is myelin insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows according to certain signals (p 33).

• Struggle is... neurologically required (p 43).

• [Breaking habits] The only way to change them is to build new habits by repeating new behaviors - by myelinating new circuits (p.45).

• The point, rather, is that although talent feels and looks predestined, in fact 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 (p 73).

• Three Rules of Deep Practice (chapter 4)

  • Rule One: Chunk It Up

    • Absorb the whole thing

    • Break it into chunks

    • Slow it down - Going slow allows you to attend more closely to errors (p 85).

  • Rule Two: Repeat It

    • Attentive repetition, daily practice

  • Rule Three: Learn to Feel It

    • To avoid mistakes, first you have to feel them immediately (p 90).

Ignition

Ignition is essentially the whole concept of motivation, passion and drive.  Coyle seeks to capture what is obvious to most people - true talent is always accompanied by passionate drive that keeps the performer going.  The baseline of Ignition is what Coyle calls "Primal Cues".  These are intrinsic, almost subconscious feelings and beliefs that ignite a pursuit.  A primal cue is intrinsic, but it is always ignited by extrinsic stimulus.  Essentially, it's the idea that a 10 year old boy can watch an all-pro ball player on TV and say, "That could be me".  It's like inspiration.  Coyle makes that case that ignition begins with a spark, but can be fanned into a flame.  There are several ways to create and cultivate/nurture ignition.

Quotes from Ignition:

• 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, the second element of the talent code (p 97).

• [Hotbeds] ...a breakthrough success is followed by a massive bloom of talent (p 99).

• Where deep practice is a cool, conscious act, ignition is a hot, mysterious burst, an awakening (p 101).

• "We instinctively think of each new student as a blank slate, but the ideas they bring to that first lesson are probably far more important than anything a teacher can do, or any amount of practice" (McPherson, p 104).

• 1) talent requires deep practice; 2) deep practice requires vast amounts of energy; 3) primal cues trigger huge outpourings of energy (p 114).

• [Talents hotbeds] keep the motivational fire lit... sustained ignition (p 125, 126).

• [Talent hotbeds] possess more than a single primal cue.  They contain complex collections of signals - people, images, and ideas - that keep ignition going for the weeks, months, and years that skill-growing requires (p 126).

• [The] signals we use most [are] words (p 132).

• [Talent hotbeds] used language that affirmed the value of effort and slow progress rather than innate talent or intelligence (p 136).

• [KIPP, chapter 7] "What we do here is like lighting a switch... It's extremely deliberate.  It's not random; there's no chance involved.  You have to stand behind what you do, to make sure every single detail is pushing the same way" (Ali, p 155).

Master Coaching

Master Coaching is Coyle's category for the critically important role of a coach in the development of talent.  But not all coaches are equal in their effectiveness.  There are certain qualities that make a "Master Coach".  Coyle attempts to capture what these qualities are.  Essentially they are extremely attentive experts with mass amounts of knowledge who speak very carefully and specifically to every technique and build a bridge into the heart of the performer through extra special love.

Quotes from Master Coaching:

• So far in this book we've talked about skill as a cellular process that grows through deep practice.  We've seen how ignition supplies the unconscious energy for that growth.  Now it's time to meet the rare people who have the uncanny knack for combining those forces to grow talent in others (p 161).

• ...the teachers and coaches I met were quiet, even reserved.  They were mostly older; many had been teaching thirty of forty years.  They possessed the same sort of gaze: steady, deep, unblinking.  They listened far more than they talked.  They seemed allergic to giving pep talks or inspiring speeches; they spent most of their time offering small, targeted, highly specific adjustments.  They had an extraordinary sensitivity to the person they were teaching, customizing each message to each person's personality.  After meeting a dozen of these people, I started to suspect that they were all secretly related.  They were talent whisperers (p 162).

• ...skill at sensing the student's needs and instantly producing the right signal to meet those needs (p 164).

• [Hans Jensen] didn't only tell them what to do: he became what they should do, communicating the goal with gesture, tone, rhythm, and gaze.  The signals were targeted, concise, unmissable, and accurate (p 165).

• Master coaches aren't like heads of state.  They aren't like captains who steer us across the unmarked sea, or preachers on a pulpit, ringing out the good news.  Their personality - their core skill circuit - is to be more like farmers: careful, deliberate cultivators of myelin... They're down-to-earth and disciplined.  They possess vast, deep frameworks of knowledge, which they apply to the steady, incremental work of growing skill circuits, which they ultimately don't control (p 165-166).

• "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" (Wooden, p 170).

• They succeed because they are tapping into the second element of the talent code: ignition.  They are creating and sustaining motivation; they are teaching love (p 175).

• [Master coaching] exists in the space between two people, in the warm, messy game of language, gesture, and expression (p 176).

• "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops" Henry Brooks Adams (p 177).

• "Great teachers focus on what the student is saying or doing," he says, "and are able, by being so focused by their deep knowledge of 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 (p 177).

• Skill is insulation that wraps neural circuits and grows according to certain signals (p 177-178)

• A coach's true skill consists not in some universally applicable wisdom that he can communicate to all, but rather in the supple ability to locate the sweet spot on the edge of each individual student's ability, and to send the right signals to help the student reach toward the right goal, over and over (p 178).

• "He needs mentoring. He needs consistency. He needs somebody." The old coach's voice thickened with emotion. He looked into the trees for a moment, cleared his throat. "JaMarcus is like anybody else: he can't do it by himself." Tom Martinez of JaMarcus Russell (p 204).

Epilogue: The Myelin World

Coyle concludes the book with an epilogue devoted to the myriad of applications of the Talent Code.  Beyond athletic and musical talent, which was the focus of most of the book, the Talent Code model can be applied to education, business, psychology, aging, and even parenting.  A great diagram illustrating The Talent Code model is given at the bottom of the page.

A few key quotes from the epilogue:

• I'd like to end by briefly showing how the code applies to other ares of life, specifically to the ways in which we educate our kids, work, grow older, parent - and even master social skills (p.205-206).

• The good news is that while natural waves of myelination end in our thirties, our overall volume of myelin increases until our fifties, and we always retain the ability to add more myelin through deep practice.  "You must remember the myelin is alive, always being generated and degenerating, like a war," Bartzokis says.  "When we are younger, we build myelin easily.  As we age the overall balance shifts toward degeneration, but we can keep adding myelin.  Even when the myelin is breaking up, we can still build it, right to the end of our lives." (p.215).

• Carol Dweck, the psychologist who studies motivation, likes to say that ll the world's parenting advice can be distilled in two simple rules: pay attention to what your children are fascinated by, and praise them for their effort (p.217).

And a great quote from Coyle to close the book:

• When I started working on this project, I came across an electron microscope photo of myelin.  It's not a great image in the usual sense of the word: it's grainy and blurred.  But I like looking at it, because you can see each individual wrap, like the layers in a cliff face or the growth rings of a tree.  Each wrap of myelin is a unique tracing of some past event.  Perhaps that wrap was caused by a coach's pointer; perhaps that one by a parent's encouraging glance; perhaps that one by hearing a song they loved.  In the whorls of myelin resides a person's secret history, the flow of interactions and influences that make up a life, the Christmas lights that, for some reason, lit up (p.221).