#the talent code

The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle

Why certain children progress quickly at music lessons and others don't. A long-term study sought to analyze the musical development of 157 randomly selected children.

After the first nine months of lessons the kids were a typical mixed bag: a few had zoomed off like rockets; a few had barely budged; most were somewhere in the middle.

The children were asked (before they had even started their first lesson) to identify how long they planned to play (the options were: through this year, through primary school, through high school, all my life), and their answers were condensed into three categories:

Short-term commitment

Medium-term commitment

Long-term commitment

They have an idea, even then. They've picked up something in their environment that's made them say, yes, that's for me.

Progress was determined not by any measurable aptitude or trait, but by a tiny, powerful idea. With the same amount of practice, the long-term-commitment group outperformed the short-term-commitment group by 400 percent. The long-term-commitment group, with a mere twenty minutes of weekly practice, progressed faster than the short-termers who practiced for an hour and a half.

"The ideas they bring to that first lesson are probably far more important than anything a teacher can do, or any amount of practice. It's all about their perception of self."

Experts practice differently and far more strategically.

You should sense the errors when they come.

Words that describe the sensations of the most productive practice:

Attention

Connect

Build

Whole

Alert

Focus

Mistake

Repeat

Tiring

Edge

Awake

We're all familiar with the adage that practice is the best teacher. There is, biologically speaking, no substitute for attentive repetition. Nothing you can do - talking, thinking, reading, imagining - is more effective in building skill than executing the action.

Myelin is a living tissue. Like everything else in the body, it's in a constant cycle of breakdown and repair. That's why daily practice matters, particularly as we get older.

There seems to be a universal limit for how much deep practice human beings can do in a day. Ericsson's research shows that most world-class experts practice between three and five hours a day, no matter what skill they pursue. (Deep practice tends to leave people exhausted: they can't maintain it for more than an hour or two at a sitting.)"

"Deep practice feels like exploring a dark and unfamiliar room. You start slowly, you bump into furniture, stop, think, and start again. Slowly, and a little painfully, you explore the space over and over, attending to errors, extending your reach into the room a bit farther each time, building a mental map until you can move through it quickly and intuitively.

The instinct to slow down and break skills into their components is universal. (Just take it one step at a time.)"

"Absorb the whole thing.

Spend time staring at or listening to the desired skill - the song, the move, the swing - as a single coherent entity.

We're prewired to imitate. Imitation need not be conscious, and in fact it often isn't."

"Break it into chunks.

Break a skill into its component pieces (circuits), memorize those pieces individually, then link them together in progressively larger groupings (new, interconnected circuits)."

" Slow it down.

Going slow allows you to attend more closely to errors, creating a higher degree of precision with each firing.

"It's not how fast you can do it. It's how slow you can do it correctly." Going slow helps the practicer to develop a working perception of the skill's internal blueprints."

We climbed Mount Everest on a Tuesday morning.

Gn inromya Dseut Anotser ev e Tnuomde bmilcew.

The reason you can understand, recall, and manipulate the first sentence is that, like the chess masters or baseball fans, you have spent many hours learning and practicing (repeating) a cognitive game known as reading."

Genes contain instructions to build our circuitry with preset urges, proclivities, instincts.

Prewiring a million-wire circuit for a complex higher skill is a stupid and expensive bet for genes to make (our needs and actions determine what skills we grow).

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.

The trick is to figure out how to do that."