Coyle, Daniel.
The little book of talent : 52 tips for improving skills / Daniel Coyle.
1. ability.
2012
BF431.C685 2012
153.9--dc23
(Coyle, Daniel., The little book of talent : 52 tips for improving skills / Daniel Coyle., 1. ability., 2012, BF431.C685 2012, 153.9--dc23, )
Daniel Coyle, The little book of talent, 2012 [ ]
“We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”;
── ARISTOTLE;
The little book of Talent :
52 tips for improving your skills;
DANIEL COYLE, 2012, author of the talent code.
contents
introduction xiii
part one: getting started 1
stare, steal, and be willing to be stupid
part two: improving skills 37
find the sweet spot, then reach
part three: sustaining progress 93
embrace repetition, cultivate grit, and keep big goals secret
glossary 115
appendix: the new science of talent development 117
further reading 121
acknowledgements 123
p.xiv
For centuries, people have instinctively assumed that talent is largely innate, a gift given out at birth. But now, thanks to the work of a wide-ranging team of scientists, including Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, Dr. Douglas Fields, and Dr. Robert Bjork, the old beliefs about talent are being overturned. In their place, a new view is being established, one in which talent is determined far less by our genes and far more by our actions: specifically, the combination of intensive practice and motivation that produces brain growth.*
* Why the brain? Because developing talent is all about growing the
brain. “Muscle memory” doesn't really exist, because our muscles
simply do what our brains tell them to do. Thus, the new science
can be summed up as follows: You want to develop your talent?
Build a better brain through intensive practice.
p.xvi
I scribbled down tips like Always exaggerate new moves; Shrink the practice space; and (my personal favorite) Take lots of naps.
p.xvi
The Talent Code
p.xvii
The advice is field-tested, scientifically sound, and, most important, concise.
p.xvii
When it comes to developing our talents, we could use an owner's manual, something to say Do this, not that. We could use a master coach that tucks in our pocket. We would use a little book.
p.xviii
1)
2)
3)
p.xviii
While the underlying neuroscience is fascinating and complex, it all adds up the basic truth: Small actions, repeated over time, transform us.
p.xviii
* If you'd like to offer a comment or suggest a new tip to others, go to thetalentcode.com.
p.xix
Each day, each practice session, is a step toward a different future.
p.(3-un-numbered)
Talent begins with brief, powerful encounters that spark motivation by linking your identity to a high-performing person or group. This is called ignition, and it consists of a tiny, world-shifting thought lighting up your unconscious mind: I could be them.
This first section is about creating the ignition moment, and about channeling its energy in the most constructive way.
p.(3-un-numbered)
to create the spark, and to use the fuel for deep practice.
p.5
We each live with a “windshield” of people in front of us; one of the keys to igniting your motivation is to fill your windshield with vivid images of your future self, and to stare at them every day. 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.
p.6
Windshields apply equally well to adults. The 5th Special Forces Group of the Green Berets recently started a leadership-training program in which soldiers spent several weeks in the executive offices of General Electric. The soldiers went to the office each morning and accompanied the execs throughout their workday, with no responsibilities other than to simply observe. And when the soldiers returned to their unit, the commanders noticed a significant boost in performance, communication, and leadership. “It was definitely a success”, said Lieutenant Colonel Dean Franks, the 5th Group's battalion commander. “We're planning to do a lot more of this in the future.”
p.7
Basically, they watch the skill being performed, closely and with great intensity, over and over, until they build a high-definition mental blueprint.
pp.7-8
A few years back, for the TV show 60 Minutes, the tennis teacher and author Timothy Gallwey assembled a group of middle-aged people who'd never played tennis before. He gave them a brief test of ability, and then selected the woman who showed the least potential. Then, without uttering a word, Gallwey began to hit a forehand while the woman watched. He directed her attention to his feet, his grip, and the rhythm of the stroke. The woman watched intently, then began to emulate his moves. Within 20 minutes, she was hitting a shockingly decent forehand.
p.8
Another example of engraving, which involves the ears instead of the eyes, is the Suzuki method for learning music. Each day, separate from their lessons, Suzuki students listen to a menu of songs, beginning with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and progressing by degrees to more complex tunes. Hearing the songs over and over (and over), engraves the songs in the student's brains. The “listening practice” builds a strong, detailed mental map, a series of points from which the success or failure of each following attempt can be measured.
p.8
The key to effective engraving is to create an intense connection: to watch and listen so closely that you can imagine the feeling of performing the skill.
p.8
For physical skills, project yourself inside the performer's body. Become aware of the movement, the rhythm; try to feel the interior shape of the moves. For mental skills, simulate the skill by re-creating the expert's decision patterns. Chess players achieve this by replaying classic games, move by move; public speakers do it by regiving great speeches complete with original inflections; musicians cover their favorite songs; some writers I know achieve this effect by retyping passages verbatim from great works. (It sounds kind of Zen, but it works.)
p.9
All improvement is about absorbing and applying new information, and the best source of information is top performers. So steal it.
Stealing has a long tradition in art, sports, and design, where it often goes by the name of “influence”.
p.9
The young Steve Jobs stole the idea for the computer mouse and drop-down menus from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The young Beatles stole the high “wooooo” sounds in “She Loves You”, “From Me to You”, and “Twist and Shout” from their idol Little Richard. The young Babe Ruth based his swing on the mighty uppercut of his hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson. As Pablo Picasso (no slouch at theft himself) put it, “Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.”
p.10
“Sweetheart, you gotta steal like crazy. Look at every single performer better than you and see what they've got that you can use. Then make it your own.” [Linda] Septien follows her own advice, having accumulated 14 three-ring notebooks' worth of ideas stolen from top performers. In plastic sleeves inside the binders, in some cases scribbled on cocktail napkins, reside tips on everything from how to hit a high note to how to deal with a rowdy crowd (a joke works best).
p.10
Stealing helps shed light on some mysterious patterns of talent--for instance, why the younger members of musical families so often are also the most talented. (A partial list: The Bee Gee's younger brother, Andy Gibb; Michael Jackson; the youngest Jonas Brother, Nick. Not to mention Mozart, J. S. Bach, and Yo-Yo Ma, all babies of their families.) The difference can be explained partly by the windshield phenomenon (see Tip #1) and partly by theft. As they grow up, the younger kids have more access to good information. They have far more opportunity to watch their older siblings perform, to mimic, to see what works and what doesn't. In other words, to steal.
pp.10-11
When you steal, focus on specifics, not general impressions. Capture concrete facts: the angle of a golfer's left elbow at the top of the backswing; the curve of a surgeon's wrist; the precise shape and tension of a singer's lips as he hits that high note; the exact length of time a comedian pauses before delivering the punch line.
p.11
What, exactly, are the critical moves here?
How do they perform those moves differently than I do?
p.12
A high percentage of top performers keep some form of daily performance journal.
p.12
What matters is not the precise form. What matters is that you write stuff down and reflect on it.
p.12
...; the rapper Eminem and the choreographer Twyla Tharp use shoeboxes, which they fill with ideas written on scrap paper.
p.12
Results for today. Ideas for tomorrow. Goals for next week. A notebook works like a map: It creates clarity.
pp.13-14
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. When it comes to developing talent, remember, mistakes are not really mistakes--they are the guideposts you use to get better.
One way some places encourage “productive mistakes” is to establish rules that encourage people to make reaches that might otherwise feel strange and risky--in effect, nudging them into the sweet spot at the edge of their ability (see Tip #13). For example, students at the Meadowmount School of Music often practice according to an informal rule: If a passerby can recognize a song, it's being played too fast. The point of this super-exaggerated slowness (which produces songs that resemble those of humpback whales) is to reveal small mistakes that might have gone undetected, and thus create more high-quality reaches.
p.14
Whatever the strategy, the goal is always the same: to encourage reaching, and to reinterpret mistakes so that they're not verdicts, but the information you use to navigate to the correct move.
p.16
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.
p.17
Every skill falls into one of two categories: hard skills and soft skills.
pp.17-18
hard skills
They are skills that have one path to an ideal result; skills that you could imagine being performed by a reliable robot. Hard skills are about REPEATABLE PRECISION, and tend to be found in specialized pursuits, particularly physical ones. Some examples:
• a golfer swinging a club, a tennis player serving,
or any precise, repeating athletic move;
• a child performing basic math (for example,
addition or the multiplication tables);
• a violinist playing a specific chord;
• a basketball player shooting a free throw;
• a young reader translating letter shapes into
sounds and words;
• a worker on an assembly line, attaching a part.
Here, your goals is to build a skill that functions like a Swiss watch--reliable, exact, and performed the same way every time, automatically, without fail. Hard skills are about ABC: Always Being Consistent.
pp.22-23
Precision especially matters early on, because the first reps establish the pathways for the future. Neurologists call this the “sled on a snowy hill” phenomenon. The first repetitions are like the first sled tracks on fresh snow: On subsequent tries, your sled will tend to follow those grooves. “Our brains are good at building connections,” says Dr. George Bartzokis, a neurologist at UCLA. “They're not so good at unbuilding them.”
When you learn hard skills, be precise and measured. Go slowly. Make one simple move at a time, repeating and perfecting it before you move on. Pay attenion to errors, and fix them, particularly at the start. Learning fundamentals only SEEMS boring--in fact, it's the key moment of investment. If you build the right pathway now, you'll save yourself a lot of time and trouble down the line.
pp.18-19
Soft skills tend to be found in broader, less-specialized pursuits, especially those that involve communication, such as:
• a soccer player sensing a weakness in the defense
and deciding to attack;
• a stock trader spotting a hidden opportunity
amid a chaotic trading day;
• a novelist instintively shaping the twists of a
complicated plot;
• a singer subtly interpreting the music to highlight
emotion;
• a polic officer on a late-night patrol, assessing
potential danger;
• a CEO “reading a room” in a tense meeting or negotiation.
p.19
With [soft] skills, we are not trying to for Swiss-watch precision, but rather for the ability to quickly recognize a pattern or possibility, and to work past a complex set of obstacles. Soft skills are about the three Rs: Reading, Recognizing, and Reacting.
p.19
Soft skills are about the three Rs: Reading, Recognizing, and Reacting.
The point of this tip is that hard skills and soft skills are different (literally, they use different structures of circuits in your brain), and thus are developed through different methods of deep practice.
p.19
which skills need to be flexible, and variable, and depend on the situation? Which depend on instantly recognizing patterns and selecting one optimal choice? These are the soft skills.
p.27
As you probably recognize, most talents are not exclusively hard skills or soft skills, but rather a combination of the two. For example, think of a violinist's precise finger placement to play a series of notes (a hard skill) and her ability to interpret the emotion of a song (a soft skill). Or a quarterback's ability to deliver an accurate spiral (a hard skill) and his ability to swiftly read a defense (a soft skill).
p.27
The point of this tip is simple: Prioritize the hard skills because in the long run they're more important to your talent.
p.27
“Technique is everything”, said coach, Larisa Preobrazhenskaya. “If you begin playing without technique it is big mistake.”
p.28
They resist the temptation of complexity and works on the task of honing and maintaining their hard skills, because those form--quite literally--the foundation of everything else.
p.33
Look for someone who:
Watches you closely: He is interested in figuring you
out--what you want, where you're coming from, what
motivates you.
Is action-oriented: She often won't want to spend a
lot of time chatting--instead, she'll want to jump
into a few activities immediately, so she can get a
feel for you and vise versa.
Is honest, sometimes unnervingly so: He will tell you
the truth about your performance in clear language.
This stings at first. But you'll come to see that
it's not personal--it's the information you can
use to get better.
p.34
the word “coach” originally came from from kocsi, the Hungarian word for “carriage”.
p.34
John Wooden, the UCLA basketball coach who is widely considered one of the greatest teachers of all time, was once the subject of a yearlong study that captured everything he said to his team. Wooden didn't give long speeches; in fact, his average utterance lasted only four seconds.
p.34
This underlines a large truth: Teaching is not an eloquence contest; it is about creating a connection and delivering useful information.
p.34
Seek someone who loves teaching fundamentals.
p.34
This might seem strange, but it reflects their understanding of a vital reality: These fundamentals are the core of your skills (see Tip #10). The more advanced you are, the more crucial they become.
p.39
But in the talent hotbeds I visited, practice was the big game, the center of their world, the main focus of their daily lives. This approach succeeds because over time, practice is transformative, if it's the right kind of practice. Deep practice.
p.39
It means creating a practice space that enables you to reach and repeat, stay engaged, and improve your skills over time.
p.45
Every skill is built out of smaller pieces--what scientists call chunks.
Chunks are to skill what letters of the alphabet are to language. Alone, each is nearly useless, but when combined into bigger chunks (words), and when those chunks are combined into still bigger things (sentences, paragraphs), they can build something complex and beautiful.
p.45
1) What is the smallest single element of this skill that I can master?
2) What other chunks link to that chunk?
p.46
Practice one chunk by itself until you've mastered it--then connect more chunks, one by one, exactly as you would combine letters to form a word. Then combine those chunks into still bigger chunks. And so on.
p.46
No matter what skill you set out to learn, the pattern is always the same: See the whole thing. Break it down to its simplest elements. Put it back together. Repeat.
p.47
But the real goal isn't practice; it's progress. As John Wooden put it, “Never mistake mere activity for accomplishment.”
p.47
For example, a tennis player might choose the service toss; a salesperson might choose the 20-second pitch he'll make to an important client.
p.48
You are built to improve little by little, connection by connection, rep by rep.
p.49
However, when it comes to developing your talent, struggle isn't an option--it's a biological necessity. This might sound strange, but it's the way evolution has built us. The struggle and frustration you feel at the edges of your abilities--that uncomfortable burn of “almost, almost”--is the sensation of constructing new neural connections, a phenomenon that the UCLA psychologist Robert Bjork calls “desirable difficulty”.
p.50
Shinichi Suzuki: “Practice on the days you eat.”
pp.50-51
Hans Jensen, a cello teacher at Northwestern University, provided an example when he taught a time-strapped medical student who desired to practice only 2 minutes a day. Working systematically, they broke a piece into its component passages, tackling the toughest ones first. The student was able to successfully learn a complex étude in six weeks. “We were shocked at how well it went”, Jensen said. “The key was total focus and being ruthless about noticing and fixing every tiny mistake from the start.”
p.51
The other advantage of practicing daily is that it becomes a habit. The act of practicing--making time to do it, doing it well--can be thought of as a skill in itself, perhaps the most important skill of all. Give it time.
p.56
The images are far easier to grasp, recall, and perform. This is because your brain spent millions of years evolving to register images more vividly and memorably than abstract ideas. (After all, in prehistoric days, no one ever had to worry about getting eaten by a hungry idea. But they did have to worry about lions.)
p.56
The imagine don't have to be elaborate, just easy to see and feel.
Daniel Coyle, The little book of talent, 2012 [ ]
pp.60-61
SHIRK THE SPACE
A good example is used by FC Barcelona, widely considered the world's best soccer team. The method is simple: one room slightly bigger than a bathroom, two players, and one ball--whoever can keep the ball from the other player longest wins. This little game isolates and compresses a vital skill--ball control--by creating a series of urgent, struggle-filled crises to which the players respond and thus improve. “It looks very crazy”, says a former Barcelona academy coach named Rodolfo Borrell. “But it works.”
p.60
I used a version of this idea to teach my Little League baseball team defensive situation (which player covers which base), and we had several productive sessions in a space no bigger than a living room. My favorite part? Not having to shout across the field.
p.61
This tip does not apply to just physical space. Poets and writers shrink the field by using restrictive meters to force themselves into a small creative form--such as with haiku and micro-writing exercises. Comedy writers use the 140-character arena of Twitter as a space to hone their skills.
p.61
Businesses can also benefit from compression: Toyota trains new employees by shrinking the assembly line into a single room filled with toy-sized replicas of its equipment. The company has found that this mini-training is more effective than training on the actual production line.
p.61
Ask yourself: What's the minimum space needed to make these reaches and reps? What is extra space hindering fast and easy communication?
(Coyle, Daniel., The little book of talent : 52 tips for improving skills / Daniel Coyle., 1. ability., 2012, BF431.C685 2012, 153.9--dc23, )
p.63
“It's not how fast you can do it. It's how slowly you can do it correctly.”
p.64
One of the quickest ways to deepen practice is also one of the simplest: Close your eyes. Musicians have long used this technique to improve feel and accuracy, but it also works for other skills.
p.64
Michael Jordan practiced free throws with his eyes shut; ... ; yoga and martial-arts practitioners frequently close their eyes to improve body awareness and balance.
p.64
The reason, in each case, is the same. Closing your eyes is a swift way to nudge you to the edges of your ability, to get you into your sweet spot. It sweeps away distraction and engages your other senses to provide new feedback. It helps you engrave the blueprint of a task on your brain by making even a familiar skill seem strange and fresh.
([ why do couple sometimes make sensual pleasure and intercourse in the dark ])
([ try eating, chewing your food, taking shower, or some other activity in the dark, or, with your eyes close ])
([
Close your eyes, breath in, breath out, keep on breathing, when you are ready, open your eyes, breath in, breath out, keep on breathing, now, ask yourself, is it the same or is it different?
“Can you think of a different way to tell me what you want?”
])
p.66
When you get it right, mark the spot
p.66
When this happens, freeze. Rewind the mental tape and play the move again in your mind. Memorize the feeling, the rhythm, the physical and mental sensation.
p.66
This is not the finish--it's the new starting line for perfecting the skill until it becomes automatic. As Kimberly Meier-Sims of the Sato Center for Suzuki Studies says, “Practice begins when you get it right.”
p.81
STOP BEFORE YOU'RE EXHAUSTED
In many skills, particularly athletic, medical, and military ones, there's a long tradition of working until total exhaustion. This tradition has its use, particularly for improving fitness and mental toughness, and for forging emotional connection within a group.
But when it comes to learning, the science is clear: Exhaustion is the enemy. Fatigue slows brains. It triggers errors, lessens concentration, and leads to shortcuts that create bad habits. It's no coincidence that most talent hotbeds put a premium on practicing when people are fresh, usually in the morning, if possible. When exhaustion creeps in, it's time to quit.
([ the idea of studying the things you want to remember - when you are fresh after a good night of rest and sleep - in the morning is a longheld folklore tradition that has been passed on from generation to generation, from parents to children, from brothers to sisters, from grandparent to grandchildren, it is an age old practice. ])
p.83
Before falling asleep, play a movie of the idealized performance in their heads.
This is a useful habit I've heard about from dozens of top performers, ranging from surgeons to athletes to comedians. Just before falling asleep, they play a movie of their idealized performance in their heads. A wide body of research supports this idea, linking visualization to improved performance, motivation, mental toughness, and confidence.
p.84
End on a positve note
p.102
Don't waste time trying to break bad habits--instead, build new ones.
When it comes to dealing with bad habits, many of us try to attack the problem head-on, by trying to break the habit. This tactic, of course, doesn't work, and we're left with the old truth--habits are tough to break. The blame lies with our brains. While they are really good at building circuits, they are awful at unbuilding them. Try as you might to break it, the bad habit is still up there, wired into your brain, waiting patiently for a chance to be used.
pp.102-103
A good example of this technique is found in the work of the Shyness Clinic, a program based in Los Altos, California, that helps chronically shy people improve their social skills. The clinic's therapists don't delve into a client's personal history; they don't try to “fix” anything. Instead, they focus on building new skills through what they call a social fitness model: a series of simple, intense, gradually escalating workouts that develop new social muscles. One of the first workouts for a Shyness Clinic client is to walk up to a stranger and ask for the time. Each day the workout grows more strenuous--soon clients are asking five strangers for the time, making phone calls to acquaintances, or chatting with a stranger in an elevator. After a few months, some clients are “socially fit” enough to perform the ultimate workout. They walk into a crowded grocery store, lift a watermelon above their head, and purposely drop it on the floor, triumphantly enduring the stares of dozens of strangers (The grocery store cleanup crew doesn't enjoy this quite as much as the clients do.)
p.103
To build new habits, start slowly. Expect to feel stupid and clumsy and frustrated at first--after all, the new wires haven't been built yet, and your brain still wants to follow the old pattern. Build the new habit by gradually increasing the difficulty, little by little. It takes time, but it's the only way new habits grow. For more insights on this process, read The Powers of Habit, by Charles Duhigg.
p.111
To take Duckworth's test, do a computer search for “Grit Survey” (or go directly to www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/tests/SameAnswers/t.aspx?id=1246).
p.111
For instance, when you hit an obstacle, how do you react? Do you tend to focus on a long-term goal, or move from interest to interest? What are you seeking in the long run? Begin to play attention to places in your life where you've got grit, and celebrate them in yourself and others.
p.112
Keep your big goals secret
p.112
Telling others about your big goals makes them less likely to happen, because it creates an unconscious payoff--tricking our brains into thinking we've already accomplished the goal. Keeping our big goals to ourselves is one of the smartest goals we can set.
pp.117-118
myelin
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.
p.118
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.
p.118
“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.”
p.118
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.
p.118
Myelin wraps--it doesn't unwrap.
p.118
Once a skill circuit is insulated, you can't uninsulated it (except through age or disease). This is why habits [and addictions] are tough to break (see Tip #46).
p.119
Studies have linked practice to myelin growth and improved performance in such diverse skills as reading, vocabulary, music, and sports. ([ essentially almost every kind of activities (like learning, studying, reading, writing, eating, etc.), conditioning (stimuli, trigger and response), and addiction (food, sex, drugs, and other) create myelin sheath ])
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