THE TALENT CODE

DANIEL COYLE

INTRODUCTION - Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural

• Talent hotbeds are mysterious places, and the circuits and that grows in response to certain
most mysterious thing about them is that they signals
bloom without warning - The more time and energy you put in the right
• Media coverage tends to treat each hotbed as a kind of practice, the more skill you get, or, to put
single phenomenon, but in truth they are all part of it in a slightly different way, the more myelin you
a larger, older pattern. earn.
• The Girl Who Did a Month’s Worth of Practice in
Six Minutes All skills, all language, all music, all movements, are
- Clarissa: 13 years old made of living circuits, and all circuits grow according
- study by Australian music psychologist Gary to certain rules. [DR. GEORGE BARTZOKIS]
McPherson and James Renwick that tracked
her progress at the clarinet for several years
DIVIDED INTO THREE PARTS
- highly targeted, error focused process
Corresponds to the three basic elements of the talent
• This book is about a simple idea: Clarissa and the code
talent hotbeds are doing the same thing. - Each element is useful on its own, but their
- they tapped into a neurological mechanism in
convergence is the key to creating skill.
which certain patterns of targeted practice build
skill • DEEP PRACTICE
• IGNITION
Talent Code • MASTER COACHING
• built on revolutionary scientific discoveries involving a
neural insulator called myelin, which some
neurologists now consider to be the holy grail of
acquiring skill.
• every human skill is created by chains of nerve
fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse - basically,
a signal traveling through a circuit
MYELIN
- VITAL ROLE: to wrap those nerve fibers the same
way the rubber insulation wraps a copper wire,
making the signal stronger and faster by preventing
the electric impulses from leaking out.
- When we fire our circuits the right way, 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.
- IMPORTANT FOR SEVERAL REASONS:
• UNIVERSAL
- everyone can grow it, most swiftly during
childhood but also throughout life
• INDISCRIMINATE
- its growth enables all manner of skills, mental
and physical
• IMPERCEPTIBLE
- we can’t see it or feel it, and we can sense its
increase only by its magical-seeming effects
• PROVIDES US WITH A VIVID NEW MODEL FOR
UNDERSTANDING SKILL
I. DEEP PRACTICE Chapter 2 The Deep Practice Cell
Chapter 1 The Sweet Spot
- Talent: the possession of repeatable skills that do not I have always maintained that excepting fools,
depend on physical size men did not differ much in intellect,
- Great Expedition only in zeal and hard work.
• FIRST CLUE: FORM OF AN UNEXPECTED - Charles Darwin
PATTERN
• The conventional way to explain this kind of Installing Natural Broadband
concentrated talent is to attribute it to a - Deep practice is a powerful idea because it seems
combination of genes and environment, a.k.a. magical. The fact that a targeted effort can increase
nature and nurture learning velocity tenfold sounds like a fairy tale in
- The best way to understand the concept of deep which a handful of tiny seeds grows into an
practice is to do it. enchanted vine turns out to be something close to
- Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in neurological fact.
certain targeted ways - operating at the edges of your
ability, where you make mistakes - make you smarter. THE REVOLUTION IS BUILT ON THREE SIMPLE
• Experiences where you’re forced to slow down, FACTS
make errors, and correct them. 1. Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a
- When you’re practicing deeply, the world’s usual rules precisely timed electric signal traveling through a
are suspended. chain of neurons - a circuit of nerve fibers
• You use time more efficiently. 2. Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers
• Your small efforts produce big, lasting results and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy
• You have positioned yourself at a place of leverage 3. The more we fire a particular circuit, the more
where you can capture failure and turn it into skill. myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster
and more fluent our movements and thoughts
• The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your become.
present abilities; to target the struggle.

MYELIN
“It’s all about finding the sweet spot. There’s an - It promises to provide insights into the biological roots
optimal gap between what you know and what you’re of learning and cognitive disorders.
trying to do. When you find that sweet spot, learning - The workings of myelin link the various talent hotbeds
takes off. [BJORK] to each other and to the rest of us.
- Myelination bears the same relationship to human
DEEP PRACTICE IS A STRANGE CONCEPT: skill as plate tectonics does to geology, or as natural
1. It cuts against our intuition about talent selection does to evolution.
• Our intuition tells us that practice relates to talent - It explains the worlds complexity with a simple,
in the same way that a whetstone relates to a elegant mechanism
knife: it’s vital but useless without a solid blade of
so called natural ability Skill is myelin insulation that wraps neural circuits and
• Raises an intriguing possibility: that practice might that grows according to certain signals. The story of
be the way to forge the blade itself skill and talent is the story of myelin.
2. It takes events that we normally strive to avoid -
namely, mistakes, and turns them into skills
QUESTION: Why is targeted, mistake-focused practice
• To understand how deep practice works, then, it’s so effective?
first useful to consider the unexpected but crucial
ANSWER: Because the best way to build a good circuit
importance of errors to the learning process.
is to fire it, attending to mistakes, then fire it again, over
and over. Struggle is not an option: it’s a biological
requirement.

QUESTION: Why are passion and persistence key

ingredients of talent?
ANSWER: Because wrapping myelin around a big
circuit requires immense energy and time. If you don’t
love it, you’ll never work hard enough to be great.

USEFUL BRAIN SCIENCE INSIGHT NUMBER 1: All

actions are really the result of electrical impulses sent
along chains of nerve fibers.
- Basically, our brains are bundles of wires - 100 billion TO SUM UP: IT’S TIME TO REWRITE THE MAXIM
wires called neurons, connected to each other by THAT PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT.
synapses.
- Whenever you do something, your brain sends a THE TRUTH IS, PRACTICE MAKES MYELIN AND
signal through those chains of nerve fibers to your MYELIN MAKES PERFECT. And myelin operates by
muscles. Each time you practice anything - sing a a few fundamental principles.
tune, swing a club, read this sentence - a different 1. The firing of the circuit is paramount.
highly specific circuit lights up in your mind, sort of
• Myelin is not built to respond to fond wishes or
like a string of Christmas lights.
vague ideas or information that washes over us
- The simplest skill involves a circuit made up of like a warm bath. The mechanism is built to
hundreds of thousands of fibers and synapses. respond to actions: the literal electrical impulses
traveling down nerve fibers. It responds to urgent
repetition.
• Deep practice is assisted by the attainment of a
primal state, one where we are attentive, hungry
and focused, even desperate
2. Myelin is universal
• One size fits all skills. Our myelin doesn’t know
whether it’s being used to playing shortstop or
playing Schubert: regardless of its use, it grows
according to the same rules.
• Myelin is meritrocratic: circuits that fire get
The input is all the stuff that happens before we insulated. Myelin doesn’t care who you are - it
perform an action: seeing the ball, feeling the racquet’s cares what you do.
position in our hand, deciding to swing it. 3. Myelin wraps - it doesn’t unwrap.
The output is the performance itself: the signals that • Myelination happens in one direction. Once a skill
move the muscles with the right timing and force to take circuit is insulated, you can’t uninsulate it (except
a step, turn the hips, the shoulders, the arm. through age or disease) That’s why habits are hard
to break
USEFUL BRAIN SCIENCE INSIGHT NUMBER 2: The • The only way to change them is to build new habits
more we develop a skill circuit, the less we’re aware by repeating new behaviors - by myelinating new
that we’re using it. circuits
- We’re built to make skills automatic, to stash them in 4. Age matters
our unconscious mind. This process, which is called • In children, myelin arrives in a series of
automaticity exists for powerful evolutionary waves ,some of them determined by genes, some
reasons. dependent on activity.
- It also creates a powerfully convincing illusion: a skill, • The waves last into our thirties, creating critical
once gained, feels utterly natural, as if it’s something periods during which time the brain is
we’ve always possessed. extraordinarily receptive to learning new skills.
• Thereafter we continue to experience a net of gain
These two insights - skills as brain circuits and of myelin until around the age of fifty, when the
automaticity - create a paradoxical combination: we’re balance tips towards loss.
forever building vast, intricate circuits, and we’re • We retain the ability to myelinate throughout life -
simultaneously forgetting that we built them. thankfully, 5% of our oligos remain immature,
always ready to answer the call.
MYELIN • BUT anyone who has tried to learn a language or a
- It’s composed of a mundanity known as phospholipid musical instrument later in life can testify that it
membrane, a dense fat that wraps like electrical tape takes a lot more time and sweat to build the
around a nerve fiber, preventing the electrical requisite circuitry.

impulses from leaking out.
- It arrives in a series of long, rounded shapes that DEEP PRACTICE X 10,000 HOURS
more than one neurologist unpoetically describes as = WORLD-CLASS SKILL
“sausagey”

Struggle is not optional - it’s neurologically required: in

order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must
by definition fire the circuit suboptimally; you must
make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes;
you must slowly teach your circuit. You must also
keep firing that circuit - i.e., practicing - in order to
keep myelin functioning properly. After all, myelin is a
living tissue
Chapter 3 The Brontes, the Z-Boys, and the THE MICHELANGELO SYSTEM
Renaissance - The Problem of Excess Genius
BRONTE SISTERS • Geniuses are not scattered uniformly through time
- established by Elizabeth Gaskell in her 1857 Life of and space; to the contrary, they tend to appear in
Charlotte Bronte clusters
- 3 motherless sisters (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne) • 3 Main Clusters of Greatness
wrote marvelous books before dying at a young age - Athens
• Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey and - Florence
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - London
- real story was uncovered by Juliet Barker, an Oxford-
trained historian who spent 6 years as curator of the
Banks listed the conventional-wisdom explanations
Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth.
for the Renaissance:
• Barker’s work conclusively established two facts
• Prosperity, which provided money and markets to
about the Brontes’ little books:
support art
- FIRST, They wrote a great deal in a variety of
• Peace, which provided the stability to seek artistic and
forms - 22 little books averaging 8 pages each
philosophical progress
in 1 15-month period
- SECOND, their writing, while complicated and • Freedom, which liberated artists from state or
religious control
fantastical, wasn’t very good
• Social mobility, which allowed talented poor people
to enter the arts
Deep Practice and Myelin
• The paradigm thing, which brought new
- The unskilled quality of their early writing isn’t a perspectives and mediums that created a wave of
contradiction of the literary heights they eventually originality and expression.
achieved - it’s a prerequisite to it.
- They became great writers not in spite of the fact that Banks's paper neatly illustrates the endless cycle of
they started out immature and imitative but because tail- chasing that ensues when you apply traditional
they were willing to spend vast amounts of time and nature/nurture thinking to questions of talent.
energy being immature and imitative, building myelin
in the confided, safe space of their little books - The more you try to distill the vast ocean of potential
- Their childhood writings were collaborative deep factors into a golden concentrate of uniqueness, the
more contradictory the evidence becomes, and the
practice where they developed storytelling muscles
more you are nudged toward the seemingly
"The fact that the creative activity of writing about an inescapable conclusion that geniuses are simply born
invented world was a joint exercise contributed and that phenomena like the Renaissance were thus
enormously to the authors' enjoyment. It was a a product of blind luck.
marvelous game, in which each participant eagerly
ingested and responded to their sibling's latest
installment." Deep Practice
Myelin doesn't care about prosperity, peace, or
Skill is insulation that wraps neural circuits and paradigms.
grows according to certain signals.
- As it turns out, Florence was an epicenter for the rise
of a powerful social invention called craft guilds.
THE MYELIN SKATERS (Z-BOYS) • Guilds (the word means "gold") were associations
- Most of the Z-Boys were dedicated ocean surfers, of weavers, painters, gold- smiths, and the like
having logged hundreds of hours on their boards. On who organized themselves to regulate competition
days when the waves failed to show, they had simply and control quality.
transferred their aggressive.low-slung surfer style to • Guilds worked like employee- owned corporations.
the street They had management, dues, and tight policies
- Another factor in their rise to greatness was more dictating who could work in the craft.
accidental: the discovery, in the early 1970s, of a • What they did best, however, was grow talent.
unique tool, a myelin accelerant that allowed them to • Guilds were built on the apprenticeship system,
improve their circuitry at a ferocious speed. That tool in which boys around seven years of age were
was an empty swimming pool. sent to live with masters for fixed terms of five to
ten years
- Apprentices learned the craft from the bottom
up, not through lecture or theory but through
action: mixing paint, preparing canvases,
sharpening chisels.
MEET MR MYELIN DESIGN STRATEGY
- George Bartzokis is a professor of neurology at UCLA A.

"Why do teenagers make bad decisions?" he asks, One obvious design strategy would be for the
not waiting for an answer "Because all the neurons genes to prewire for the skill.
are there, but they are not fully insulated. Until the
whole circuit is insulated, that circuit, although - The genes would provide detailed step- by-step
capable, will not be instantly available to alter instructions to build the precise circuits needed to
impulsive behavior as it's happening. Teens per- form the desired skill: to play music, or juggle, or
understand right and wrong, but it takes them time to do calculus.
figure it out. - When the right stimulus came along, all the prebuilt
wiring would connect up and start firing away, and the
"Why is wisdom most often found in older people? talent would appear
Because their circuits are fully insulated and instantly
available to them; they can do very complicated
processing on many levels, which is really what TWO BIG PROBLEMS
wisdom is. The volume of myelin in the brain 1. First, it's expensive, biologically speaking. Building
continues to increase until around fifty, and you have those elaborate circuits takes resources and time,
to remember that it is alive: it is breaking down, and which have to come at the expense of some other
we are rebuilding it. Complex tasks like ruling design feature.
countries or writing novels—these are most often 2. it's a gamble with fate.
better done by people who have built the most myelin.
Prewiring a million-wire circuit for a complex higher
skill is a stupid and expensive bet for genes to make.
"Why can't monkeys—which have every neuron type
Our genes, however, having survived the gauntlet of
and neurotransmitter we have—use language the way
the past few million years, aren't in the business of
we do?" he continues. "Because we've got twenty
making stupid and expensive bets.
percent more myelin. To talk like we are now takes a
lot of information-processing speed, and they have no
broadband. Sure, you can teach a monkey to
communicate at the level of a three-year-old, but B.
beyond that, they are using the equivalent of copper Instead of prewiring for specific skills, what if the
wires." genes dealt with the skill issue by building
millions of tiny broadband installers and
"Why is wisdom most often found in older people? distributing them throughout the circuits of the
Because their circuits are fully insulated and instantly brain?
available to them; they can do very complicated - The broadband installers wouldn't be particularly
processing on many levels, which is really what complicated—in fact, they'd all be identical, wrapping
wisdom is. The volume of myelin in the brain
wires with insulation to make the circuits work faster
continues to increase until around fifty, and you have
to remember that it is alive: it is breaking down, and and smoother.
we are rebuilding it. Complex tasks like ruling - They would work according to a single rule: whatever
countries or writing novels—these are most often circuits are fired most, and most urgently, are the
better done by people who have built the most myelin. ones where the installers will go.
- Skill circuits that are fired often will receive more
broadband; skills that are fired less often, with
In selecting for myelin, "evolution made the same less urgency, will receive less broadband.
choice that any engineer designing the Internet would
make,"
"We are myelin beings," Bartzokis says finally.
"We are myelin beings,"
"It's the way we're built. You can't avoid it."
- We are myelin beings. This is a big statement. It - The broadband is myelin, and the installers are the
offers a potentially revolutionary alternative to the green squidlike oligodendrocytes, sensing the signals
traditional way we think about skill, talent, and human we send and insulating the corresponding circuits.
nature itself. To see what Mr. Myelin really means by - When we acquire higher skills, we are co-opting this
it, however, we first must back- track a moment. ancient adaptive mechanism to our individual ends,
an event made possible by the fact that our genes let
Thinking that talent comes from genes and us—or more accurately, they let our needs and our
environment is like thinking that cookies come from actions—determine what skills we grow.
sugar, flour, and butter. It's true enough, but not - This system is flexible, responsive, and economical,
sufficiently detailed to be useful. To get beyond the
outmoded nature/nurture model, we need to begin because it gives all human beings the innate potential
with a clear picture of how genes actually work. to earn skill where they need it.

-
Chapter 4 The Three Rules of Deep Practice
ADRIAAN DE GROOT AND THE HSE BREAK IT INTO CHUNKS
HOLY SHIT EFFECT - the goal is always the same: to break a skill into its
- heady mix of disbelief, admiration and envy (not component pieces (circuits), memorize those pieces
necessarily in that order) we feel when talent individually, then link them together in progressively
suddenly appears out of nowhere larger groupings (new, interconnected circuits)
- feeling of seeing talent bloom in people who we
thought were just like us SLOW IT DOWN
- operates in one direction; the observer is dumbstruck, Why does it work so well? The myelin model offers two
amazed and bewildered while the talent’s owner is reasons:
unsurprised, even blase. 1. Going slow allows you to attend more closely to
errors, creating a higher degree of precision with
Adriaan Dingeman de Groot each firing - and when it comes to growing myelin,
- failed math teacher precision is everything
- dutch psychologist who played chess in his spare 2. Going slow helps the practicer to develop something
time even more important: a working perception of the
skill’s internal blueprints - the shape and rhythm of
Skill consists of identifying important elements and the interlocking skill circuits.
grouping them into a meaningful framework. The
name psychologists use for such organization is
chunking. Through practice, they had developed something
more important than mere skill; they’d grown a
- When chunking has been done effectively, it creates detailed conceptual understanding that allowed them
a mirage that gives rise to the HSE. to control and adapt their performance, to fix
- What separates these two levels is not innate problems, and to customize their circuit to new
superpower but a slowly accrued act of construction situations.
and organization: the building of a scaffolding, bolt by - They were thinking in chunks and had built those
bolt and circuit by circuit - or as Mr. Myelin might say, chunks into private language of skill
wrap by wrap.

RULE TWO: REPEAT IT

RULE ONE: CHUNK IT UP - There is no substitute for attentive repetition.
Deep practice feels a bit like exploring a dark and - Nothing you can do - talking, thinking, reading,
unfamiliar room. You start slowly, you bump into imagining - is more effective in building skill than
furniture, stop, think and start again. executing the action, firing the impulse down the
The instinct to slow down and break skills into their nerve fiber, fixing errors, honing the circuit.
components is universal. Repetition is invaluable and irreplaceable

THREE DIMENSIONS OF CHUNKING IN TALENT - With conventional practice, more is always better.
HOTBEDS - Deep practice, however, doesn’t obey the same math.
1. Participants look at the task as a whole - as one big • Spending more time is effective - but only if you’re
chunk, the mega circuit still in the sweet spot at the edge of your
2. They divide it into its smallest possible chunks capabilities, attentively building and honing circuits.
3. They play with time, slowing the action down, then • There seems to be a universal limit for how much
speeding it up, to learn its inner architecture deep practice human beings can do in a day.

ABSORB THE WHOLE THING RULE THREE: LEARN TO FEEL IT

- This means spending time staring at or listening to - It is not possible to sense myelin growing along your
the desired skill - the song, the move, the swing - as a nerve fibers any more than you can sense your heart
single coherent entity and lungs becoming more efficient after a workout
- amounts to absorbing a picture of the skill until you - Iti is possible, however, to sense the telltale set of
can imagine yourself doing it secondary feelings associated with acquiring new
skills - the myelin version of “feeling the burn”
“We’re prewired to imitate, When you put yourself in
the same situation as an outstanding person and
Sensation of their most productive practice:
attack a task that they took on, it has a big effect on
your skill” • Attention
- Anders Ericsson • Connect
- Imitation need not be conscious, and in fact it often • Build
isn’t. • Whole
• Alert
• Focus
• Mistake
• Repeat
• Tiring
• Edge
• Awake
It’s the feeling of straining towards a target and falling
just short, what Martha Graham called “divine
dissatisfaction”

SWEET SPOT: Productive, uncomfortable terrain

located just beyond our current abilities, where our
reach exceeds our grasp

Deep practice is not simply about struggling; it’s

about seeking out a particular struggle, which
involves a cycle of distinct actions

1. Pick a target
2. Reach for it
3. Evaluate the gap between the target and the reach
4. Return to step one

Baby steps are the royal road to skill.