The Talent Code – Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How

Introduction – The Girl Who Did a Month’s Worth of Practice in Six Minutes: * Media coverage tends to treat each hotbed as a singular phenomenon, but in truth they are all part of a larger and older pattern * Consider the artists of the Italian Renaissance, during which the city of Florence (population 70,000) suddenly produced an explosion of geniuses that has never been seen before * The questions echo – where does this extraordinary talent come from? How does it grow? * Clarissa, part of a study by music psychologists that tracked her progress at the clarinet for several years * Based on her aptitude tests and the testimony of her teacher, parents and her self, she possessed no music gifts * Good musical ear, but her motivation was below average * In the study’s written section, she responded “because I’m supposed to” as her reason for practicing * Nonetheless, she had become famous in music-science circles * Since on an average morning, the camera would capture this average kid doing something un-average, in 5 minutes and 40 seconds, she accelerated her learning speed by 10x and she didn’t even notice * Her music sounded pretty bad, common sense would lead us to believe that Clarissa is failing, but this would be wrong * She has a blueprint in her mind that she’s constantly comparing herself too, she’s not ignoring errors, she’s hearing them and fixing them, scaffolding herself to a higher level * This wasn’t ordinary practice; this was a highly targeted, error-focused process. Song began to emerge, as did a quality within Clarissa * She goes from worse than normal to brilliant and then back again and has no idea she’s doing it * This is not a talent created by genes, its 6 minutes of an average person entering a magically productive zone, one where more skill is created with each second * Clarissa and the talent hotbeds are doing the same thing * Tapped into a neurological mechanism in which certain patterns of targeted practice build skill * Without realizing, they have entered a zone of accelerated learning * They’ve cracked the talent code * Talent code built on revolutionary scientific discovery * Involves myelin (neural insulator) which is considered the holy grail of acquiring skill * Every human skill (baseball, playing Bach) is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying an electrical impulse through a circuit * Myelin wraps those nerve fibers to make the signals stronger and faster by preventing electrical impulses from leaking out * When we fire out circuits properly (when we practice swinging that bat or playing that note), our myelin responds by wrapping layers of insulation around that neural circuit, each layer adding a bit more skill and speed * The thicker the myelin gets, the faster and more accurate our movements/thoughts become * Why is myelin important? * Its universal * Its indiscriminate (growth enables all manner of skills, mental and physical) * Its imperceptible (cant see it or feel it, but can sense its increase by its seeming effects) * Provides us with a vivid new model for understanding skill (skill = a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and grows in response to certain signals) * The more time and energy you invest in practice, the longer you stay in the Clarissa zone (firing the right signals through your circuits, the more skills you get or the more myelin you earn) * All skill acquisitions/all talent hotbeds operate on the same principles * Idea that all skills grow by the same cellular mechanism * Tennis players, singers and painters don’t have much in common, but they all gradually get better by improving timing, speed and accuracy, by honoring neural circuitry, by obeying talent code rules and in short, by growing more myelin * 3 basic elements of the talent code; deep practice, ignition and master coaching (each element useful on its own, but their convergence is the key to creating the skill)

I: Deep Practice

Chapter 1 – The Sweet Spot:
Chicken-Wire Harvard’s * Being a prodigy is an unreliable indicator of longer-term success * Talent is defined as the possession of repeatable skills that don’t depend on physical size * A man went on a journey to visit talent hotbeds * Expected to see world-class speed, power and grace * Expectations were met half of the time, and for that half of the time, being in a talent hotbed felt like standing amid a herd of running deer (everything moved faster and more fluently than in everyday life) * The other half of the time, he witnessed moments of slow, fitful struggle (similar to the Clarissa video) * Pattern: fail – stop and think, do it more slowly the next time, fail – stop and think, stop and think again, break down the move to its component parts, nail the move * When you see people practice effectively, we usually describe it with words like willpower, concentration or focus, but those words don’t fit * People inside talent hotbeds are engaged in an activity, they are seeking out the slippery hills, they are purposely operating at the edges of their ability so that they will screw up and somehow, screwing up is making them better * Every day, Brazil accomplishes something difficult and unlikely, in a game at which the entire world is competing, it continues to produce a high percentage of the most skilled players * Conventional way to explain this is a combination of genes and environment (nature and nurture) * Slight problem with this explanation, Brazil wasn’t always a great producer of soccer players * So how does Brazil produce so many great players? Since the 1950s, Brazilian players have trained in a particular way, with a particular tool that improves ball-handling skill * Like a nation of Clarissa’s, they have found a way to increase their learning velocity and are barely aware of it * This kind of training = deep practice (applies to more than soccer) * Practicing harder vs. practicing deeper * Ex: if you are at a party and are trying to remember someone’s name, if someone gives you that name, odds are you’re forgetting it. But if you manage to retrieve the name on your own, to fire the signal yourself as oppose to receiving the information, you’ll engrave it in your memory simply because you practiced deeper * Deep practice is built on paradox – struggling in certain targeted ways, operating at the edges of your ability where you make mistakes, all makes you smarter * Experiences where you’re forced to slow down, make errors and correct them end up making you swift and graceful without you realizing it * Things that appear to be obstacles turn out to be desirable in the long haul * Experiment group A studied a paper for 4 sessions, group B student only once but were tested 3 times * Group B scored higher, studied less, yet learned more * We tend to think of our memory as a tape recorder, but that’s wrong. It’s like a scaffold, the more we generate impulses, encountering and overcoming difficulties, the more scaffolding we build, the faster we learn – Bjork * When you practice deeply, you use time more efficiently, your small efforts produce big lasting results, you have positioned yourself at a place of leverage where you can capture failure and turn it into skill * Trick – choose a goal beyond your abilities, to target the struggle * All about finding the sweet spot, when you find it, learning takes off – Bjork * Deep practice cuts against our intuition about talent and takes events we normally strive to avoid (mistakes) and turns them into skills
Edwin Link’s Unusual Device * Early pilot training was built on the belief that good pilots are born, not made * Most programs followed an identical procedure, take the prospective student up in the plane, loop around, roll around, if the student does not get sick, he was deemed to have the capability to become a pilot * Was there a better way to learn to fly? (too many pilots died in crashes around 1934 when Roosevelt was president) * Answer came from Edwin Link * Fascination about flying * His mind kept circling around the notion of improving pilot training * Invented the Link Aviation Trainer (a device that compressed the key elements of a plane) * No one seemed interested in this device * Air Corps grew desperate when the winter got really bad in 1934 and persuaded a group of Air Corp officers to take a look at Link’s trainer * Link explained his trainer and the officers started noticing its potential and went on to ordering the first shipment * In WWII with its need to transform millions of unskilled youth into pilots as quickly as possible, the need was answered by 10 thousand Link trainers * Links trainers worked so well because they permitted pilots to practice more deeply, to stop, struggle, make errors and learn from them * The Air Corp pilots who trained in Links were no braver or smarter than the ones who crashed, they just had the opportunity to practice more deeply
Brazil’s Secret Weapon * Simon Clifford fascinated by the supernatural skills of Brazilian soccer players * Went to Brazil to find out how they developed those skills * Saw many things he expected to find, the passion, tradition, highly organized training centers, long practice sessions * Saw something he didn’t expect, a strange game that resembled soccer but with a ball half the size, weighed a lot, didn’t bounce and players trained on a basketball-sized court * Game resembled basketball or hockey more than soccer given its blinding speed * Called “soccer in the room” or futsal * It was clear to him that this was where Brazilian skills were born * Every great Brazilian player played futsal as a kid and spend thousands of hours playing it * “Great players come from the futsal court” * Futsal players touch the ball more often that soccer players, sharp passing is paramount, ball control and vision are crucial * Brazilian soccer is different from the rest of the world’s because Brazil employs the sporting equivalent of a Link trainer * Futsal compresses soccer’s essential skills into a small box * It places players inside the deep practice zone, making and correcting errors * Futsal isn’t the only reason Brazilian soccer is great (other factors such as climate, passion and poverty play a role) * Clifford went home and founded the Clifford’s Brazilian Soccer school in Leeds that later expanded to other countries * 14 years later his team of under-fourteens defeated the Scottish national team of the same age

Chapter 2 – The Deep Practice Cell:
Installing Natural Broadband * Deep practice is such a powerful idea – the fact that a targeted effort can increase learning velocity tenfold sounds like a fairy tale, but this enchanted vine is something close to neurological fact * How did Clarissa begin as an average musician and in 6 minutes accomplish a months worth of work? * Myelin is the key to talking, reading, learning skills and being human (most believe that the key to learning skills reside in our brains neurons) * While neurons and synapses are important, the traditional neuron-centric view is being altered * Myelin plays a key role in the way our brains function, particularly when it comes to acquiring skill * Revolution built in 3 facts; * Every human movement, thought or feeling is a timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons (a circuit of nerve fibers) * Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed and accuracy * The more we fire a particular circuit, the more effective the myelin is and the stronger, faster and more fluent our movements and thoughts become * “Tiger Woods has lots of myelin” * The workings of myelin link the various talent hotbeds to each other * Skill = myelin insulation that wraps around neural circuits and that grows according to certain signals * The story of skill and talent = the story of myelin * When Clarissa was deep practicing, she was firing and optimizing a neural circuit and growing more myelin * Why is targeted, mistake-focused practice so effective? * Because the best way to build a good circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, and then fire it again. Struggle is a biological requirement. * Why are passion and persistence key ingredients of talent? * Because wrapping myelin around a circuit requires immense energy and time, if you don’t love it, you’ll never work hard enough to be great * All actions are the result of electrical impulses sent along chains of nerve fibers, whenever you do something, your brain sends signals through those chains of nerve fibers to your muscles * Input paths (sensory info, decisions) processing output paths (muscle movements) * Input = all the stuff that happens before we perform an action (ex: seeing the ball) * Output = the performance itself (signals that move the muscles with the right timing and force us to take a step) * These circuits are the true control center of every human movement, thought and skill * The circuit is the movement, it dictates the precise strength and timing of each muscle contraction, the content of each thought * A fast circuit = a fast movement * The more we develop a skill circuit, the less we’re aware the we’re using it * The process of automaticity is making skills automatic and stashing them in our unconscious mind * This process creates a convincing illusion; a skill, once gained, feels natural, as if it’s something we’ve always possessed * Skills as brain circuits and automaticity create a paradoxical combination * We’re forever building circuits, as we’re simultaneously forgetting that we built them – where myelin comes in * Myelin wraps around a nerve fiber like electrical tape, preventing the electrical impulses from leaking out * Neurons and synapses can indeed explain almost every class of mental phenomena; memory, emotion, muscle control, sensory perception etc., but there is a key question that neurons can’t explain – why does it take so long to learn a complex skill? * Only in the 2000s did researchers attention go away from neurons and synapses and began to link structural deficiencies in myelin to a variety of disorders * Researchers were also interested in the role that myelin might play in normal, high functioning individuals aside from its role with disease * 2005 – study where a researcher scanned the brains of concert pianists and found a proportional relationship between hours of practice and white matter (consists of glia cells and myelinated axons) * Dr. Fields uncovered the mechanism by which these myelin increases happen * Supporter cells (oligodendrocytes and astrocytes) sense the nerve firing and respond by wrapping more myelin around the nerve fibers * The more nerve fires, the more myelin wraps around it. The more myelin that wraps around it, the faster the signals travel * Myelin can regulate velocity, speeding or slowing signals so they hit synapses at the optimal time * Timing is vital because neurons are binary (they either fire or they don’t) * Whether they fire depends on whether the incoming impulse is big enough to exceed their threshold of activation * Neurons cant time things so precisely, but building myelin can * Nerve firings grow myelin, myelin controls impulse speed, and impulse speed is skill * Signals have to travel at the right speed and at the right time, myelination is the brain’s way of controlling that speed * Oligodendrocytes are cells that produce myelin * When a nerve fiber fires, the oligo senses it, grabs hold and starts wrapping * The myelin, attached to the oligo, proceeds to wrap over the nerve fiber with precision * Each time we deeply practice, we are installing broadband in our circuitry translates to more skill and speed * In order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must fire the circuit suboptimally (must make mistakes and pay attention to them, you must teach your circuit, you must keep firing that circuit, ex: practicing, in order to keep myelin functioning properly) * Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes myelin and myelin makes perfect * How myelin operates; * The firing of the circuit is paramount * Myelin is not built to respond to wishes, it is built to respond to actions (electrical impulses traveling down nerve fibers) and urgent repetition * Myelin is universal * Myelin wraps – it doesn’t unwrap * Myelination happens in one direction * Once a skill circuit is insulated, you can’t un-insulate it (reason why habits are hard to break) * Only way to change them is to built new habits by repeating new behaviors and thus myelinating new circuits * Age matters * We retain the ability to myelinate throughout life, but anyone who has tried to learn something (musical instrument, language) later in life can agree that it takes a lot more time to built the requisite circuitry * Why the vast majority of the world-class experts start young * Ability to build myelin as you get older changes * Myelin works similarly to muscles * If you use your muscles every day, those muscles will respond by getting stronger * If you fire your skill circuits the right way (trying harder to do things in deep practice) then your skill circuits will respond by getting faster and more fluent * We’ve growing up believes, thanks to Darwin, in nurture and nature * That genes are unique gifts and that environment offers unique opportunities for expressing those gifts * Myelin model shows that hotbeds succeed not because they are trying harder by because they are trying harder in the right way (practicing more deeply and earning more skill)
Anders Ericsson’s Big Adventure * Ericsson appeared to be mostly without talent until he realized he was good at chess, then one of his fellow classmates, one of the worst players in the group, suddenly improved and started beating Ericsson every time * Ericsson wanted to know why that boy beat him so easily, and from that point on he deliberately tried to avoid getting good at something, he became more obsessed with studying experts than being one * When he was studying psychology in university, a movement called the cognitive revolution was beginning * Held that the human mind operated like a computer that had been designed by evolution and obeyed certain universal rules * He decided to explore what talent was, what made successful people different from the rest of us, and where greatness comes from * His first project was to explore the belief that short-term memory is an innate, fixed quality * Tested Miller’s theory about the limit (channel capacity) of the human short-term memory * Found, through experimentation, that there wasn’t a universal limit * Showed that memory could be improved through training * If short-term memory wasn’t limited, then what was? Every skill is a form of memory… * Ericsson’s 30 year odyssey * He explored all dimensions of skilled performance, did not measure myelin, but measured practice (the time and characteristics of practice) * Every expert in every field is the result of 10 thousand hours of committed practice, named by Ericsson as “deliberate practice” * Deliberate practice defined as working on technique, seeking constant critical feedback and focusing on shoring up weaknesses * Consider deliberate practice as deep practice, but Ericsson’s term referred to the mental state rather than to myelin * The rule of having at least a decade of committed practice in every domain to achieve expertise is used to determine the ideal start of training (if girls peak physically at 17, they ought to start at 7) * The expertise of geniuses (Mozart) resides in their ability to deep practice * There is no cell-type that geniuses have that the rest of us don’t

Chapter 3 – The Brontes, The Z-Boys and the Renaissance:
The Girls from Nowhere * The real story of the Brontes * The Brontes were natural born novelists * They wrote a great deal in a variety of forms and their writing, while complicated and fantastic, wasn’t very good * Produced a volume of literature at such a young age * The unskilled quality of their early writing isn’t a contradiction of the literary heights they achieved, but rather a prerequisite to it (deep practice and myelin) * They became great writers because they were willing to spend vast amounts of time and energy being immature and imitative, building myelin * Their childhood writings were deep practice (it was no surprise that years later, one of the sisters’ books was amazing) * The little books they wrote functioned as the equivalent of a Link trainer, a place where the Bronte sisters fired millions of circuits and created hundreds of works that were artistic failures, however, each book made them happy and each earned them a bit of skill * Skill = insulation that wraps neural circuits and grows according to certain signals
The Myelin Skaters * Z-boys – turned up the world of skateboarding in the mid 1970s * Dedicated ocean surfers and on days when the waves were weak, would take their skills to the street on a skateboard * A factor in their rise to greatness was the discovery of a myelin accelerant that allowed them to improve their circuitry at a ferocious speed * Would go around the neighborhood finding empty pools to skate in * Ken (one of the skaters) identifies the space and shape of the pool that constrain his efforts and narrow his focus to certain connections that are either made or not made, its fly high or fall hard, no grey areas * From a deep practice point of view, the empty swimming pool created a world not unlike that of the little books of the Bronte sisters or the futsal courts of Brazil * Circuits are fired, mistakes are made and corrected, myelin flourishes, talent blooms * For the last hundred years, Western culture has understood/explained talent using the idea of unique identity (the cosmic dice that makes everyone different, and a few lucky people special) * According to this way of thinking, the Brontes and the Z-boys succeeded because they were exceptional (mysteriously gifted outsiders, destiny-kissed Kids from Nowhere) * Seen through the lens of deep practice, uniqueness still matters, but its significance resides in the way that the Brontes and the Z-boys do the things necessary to build their remarkable skills * Firing the right signals, sharpening circuits, making tiny books and filling them with childish stories, searching out empty pools so that they can spend hours riding and falling inside them * Myelin doesn’t care about who you are, it cares about what you do * Deep practice and myelin illuminate the talents of small groups of people
The Michelangelo System * Geniuses tend to appear in clusters * Why are some periods/places more productive than the rest? * Banks singled out 3 main clusters of greatness; Athens from 440 B.C. to 380 B.C., Florence from 1440 to 1490 and London from 1570-1640 * A solitary genius is easy to understand, but dozens of them? * Conventional-wisdom explanations for the Renaissance * Prosperity (provided money and markets to support art) * Peace (provided the stability to seek artistic/philosophical progress) * Freedom (liberated artists from state/religious control) * Social mobility (allowed talented poor people to enter the arts) * The paradigm thing (brought new perspectives and mediums that created a wave of originality and expression) * Banks believed that the existence of most of these factors is contradicted historical record * Florence in the 1400s wasn’t prosperous, peaceful or free * Banks paper illustrates the endless cycle of tail-chasing when you apply nature/nurture thinking to questions of talent * The more you try to distill the ocean of potential factors into a concentrate of uniqueness, the more contradictory the evidence becomes and the more you are nudged toward the inescapable conclusion that geniuses are born and that phenomena, such as the Renaissance, was blind luck * Myelin doesn’t care about prosperity, peace or paradigms, instead, it asks “what did Florentine artists do, how did they practice and for how long” * Apprentices (a person learning from a skilled employer, like Vinci studying under Verrocchio) spent thousands of hours solving problems, trying and failing and trying again, within the confined of a world built on the systematic production of excellence * Michelangelo – from age 6-10 he learned how to handle a hammer and a chisel before being able to read and write * A promising, but little known artist until the release of his Pieta at age 24 * People called it pure genius, but if people knew how hard he had to work to gain his mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all (said by Michelangelo himself) * The apprenticeship system, with its long period of study and early acquaintance with various materials allowed ordinary boys to be turned into men possessing a high degree of artistic skill * Tend to think of the Renaissance artists as a homogenous group, but they were like any other randomly selected group of people who had one thing in common spending hours inside a practice hothouse firing and optimizing circuits, correcting errors, competing and improving skills
Meet Mr. Myelin * Bartzokis, later referred to as Mr. Myelin, explained that teens make bad decisions because all the neurons are there, but they are not fully insulated * Until the whole circuit is insulated, that circuit will not be instantly available to alter impulsive behavior as it’s happening * Wisdom is more commonly found in older people because their circuits are fully insulated and instantly available to them * Monkeys, who have the same neuron types and neurotransmitters that we have, can’t use language the way we do because we have 20% more myelin * Babies that breast-feed have higher IQs because the fatty acids in breast milk are the building blocks of myelin * The more myelin you have, the smarter you can be * “We are myelin beings” – Bartzokis * Since Darwin, the traditional way of thinking about talent was based on nature (genes) and nurture (environment) combined * Genes are the cards we are dealt, the environment is the game in which they are played * Fate produces a perfect combination of genes and environment resulting in high levels of talent/genius * Thinking that talent comes from genes and environment is meaningless and vague * How genes actually work * They are not cosmic playing cards, they are evolution-tested instruction books that build us * They contain blueprints to construct our minds and bodies * The genes instruct the cells to make a part of our body like this, and another part of our body like that * When it comes to behavior, genes are forced to deal with a challenge * Things in this world happen quickly, which means behavior/skills need to change quickly – the challenge is, how do you write an instruction book for behavior? How do our genes help us adapt to an ever-changing world? * Our genes have evolved to contain instructions to build our circuitry with preset urges, proclivities (predispositions) and instincts * Genes construct our brains so that when we encounter a stimuli, a neural program kicks into gear, using emotions to guide our behavior in a useful direction (ex: feeling hungry when we smell food) * This strategy works well for creating behaviors to deal with simple matters, but what about creating complex behaviors (ex: playing the saxophone) * What’s the strategy for writing instructions to build a machine that can learn complicated skills? * For the genes to prewire for the skill (for the genes to build step-by-step instructions to build the precise circuits needed to perform the desired skill so that when the proper stimulus comes along, the talent would appear * This strategy has 2 problems; its biologically expensive and it’s a gamble with fate * Different strategy: if the genes dealt with the skill issue by building millions of broadband installers and distributing them throughout the circuits of the brain (insulating the circuits to make them go faster) * World work according to a simple rule – whatever circuits are fired most and most urgently are the ones where the installers will go * Skill circuits that are fired often will receive more broadband * From our perspective, the increased skill would feel like a gift, as if we were expressing a natural-born quality, but the real gift would be the broadband installers insulating whatever circuits were being fired (ex: for music, a sport) * The broadband = myelin * This broadband installing system is flexible and responsive - gives all human beings the innate potential to earn skill where they need it * Einstein’s brain was autopsied to contain an unusual amount of myelin compared to the average brain * Although talent looks predestined, we have a good deal of control over what skills we develop

Chapter 4 – The Three Rules of Deep Practice:
Adriaan De Groot and the HSE * Holy Shift Effect – mix of disbelief, admiration and envy we will when talent appears out of nowhere * The feeling we get when we see talent bloom in people we thought were just like us * The feeling of, where did that come from? * How do people, who seem just like us, suddenly become talented while barely aware of how talent they’ve become? * De Groot * Dutch psychologist, played chess in his spare time * Experienced HSE when players from his chess club, people just like him in age and experience were able to perform chess mastery * De Groot puzzled over his losses, which led him to ask what exactly made these guys so great * The best players possessed photographic memories – De Groot didn’t buy this theory and wanted to find out more * Conducted an experiment using master players and ordinary ones * Master players recalled the pieces and arrangements 4-5x better than the ordinary players * When he set up the chess pieces in a random arrangement and reran the recall test, the masters’ advantage vanished * Master players did have photographic memories, when the game stopped resembling chess, their skill evaporated * They were recognizing patterns, but when the pieces became random, the masters were lost because their grouping strategy was useless * The difference between master chess players and ordinary ones was not the difference between a “cannon and a popgun” but rather a difference of organization * Skill consists of identifying important elements and grouping them into a meaningful framework – chunking (name psychologists use for organization) * If you read two sentences, one that makes sense and one with the same characters but the order is reversed, the reason you would be able to understand the first sentence is that, like chess, you have spent many hours learning/practicing a cognitive game called reading * You’ve learned letter shapes and practiced chunking letters from left to right into words and then you’ve learned how to group those into bigger chunks, sentences * Your skill at reading is the skill of packing and unpacking chunks * Physical acts and cognitive pursuits, like the skill of playing chess, are built by making chunks * When a gymnast learns a floor routine, he assembles it via a series of chunks, which in turn are make up of other chunks * He’s grouped a series of muscle movements together in the same way that you grouped a series of letters together to form a word * The fluency happens when the gymnast repeats the movements often enough that he knows how to process those chunks as one big chunk, the same way your able to process a sentence * He doesn’t have to think of each chunk individually, just like you don’t have to process each letter of the word Tuesday, he just simply fires the backflip circuit that he’s built and honed through deep practice * What separates the two levels, master players and ordinary players, is a slow act of construction and organization
Rule One: Chunk It Up * Deep practice is all about constructing and insulating circuits * Deep practice is like exploring a dark and unfamiliar room (start slowly, bump into things, stop, think and start again, explore the space over again, attending to errors, building a mental map until you can move through it) * Instinct to slow down and break skills into their components is universal (one step at a time) * In talent hotbeds, chunking takes place in 3 dimensions * The participants look at the task as a whole, one big chunk, mega circuit * They divide it into its smallest possible chunks * They play with time, slowing the action down, speeding it up, learning its inner architecture
Absorb the Whole Thing * Spending time starting/listening to the desired skill * Absorbing a picture of the kill until you can imagine yourself doing it * We’re prewired to imitate – Ericsson * Imitation is not always conscious, you could be a tennis prodigy with a very distinct swing that resembles another tennis prodigies swing, and not even know it, even though you would watch all his videos and unconsciously absorb his style * Imitatsiya – rallying in slow motion with an imaginary ball * All Spartak’s players do it, from 5 years old to the pro’s * Technique is everything
Break It Into Chunks * Meadowmount school of music * Defined by the camp’s stories alumni’s * Motto: in 7 weeks, most students will learn a years worth of material and increase about 500% in learning speed * Teachers at this school take chunking to its extreme * Students scissor each measure of their sheet music into horizontal strips and then break those strips into smaller fragments by altering rhythms * This technique forces the player to quickly link notes in series * Goal is the same – break a skill into its components (circuits), memorize those pieces individually, then link them together in progressively larger groupings (interconnected circuits)
Slow It Down * When the Meadowmount teachers teach a class, he spends hours covering a single page of music. Students are surprised at the slow pace, but when they’re finished, they have learned to play the page perfectly * Myelin model offers 2 reasons for why going slow works so well * Going slow allows you to attend more closely to errors, “its not how fast you can do it, its about how slow you can do it correctly” * Going slow helps the practice to develop a working perception of the skill’s internal blueprints (the shape and rhythm of the interlocking skill circuits) * Barry Zimmerman is fascinated by the kind of learning that goes on when people observe, judge and strategize their own performance (coaching themselves) * This type of learning is known as self-regulation * Asked the question – is it possible to judge ability by the way people describe their way of practice? * Through practice, experts develop something more important than skill; they grow a conceptual understanding that allowed them to control/adapt their performance, to fix problems and to customize their circuits to new situations * They were thinking in chunks and built those chinks into a language of skill
Rule 2: Repeat it * Nothing is more effective in building skill than attentive repetition * Myelin is in a constant cycle of breakdown and repair, that’s why daily practice matters * “If I skip one day of practice, I notice, if I skip 2 days, my wife notices, if I skip 3 days, the whole world notices” * With conventional practice, more is always better * With deep practice, spending more time is effective if you’re still at the edge of your capabilities, attentively building circuits. What’s more is that there seems to be a limit for how much deep practice humans can do in one day Rule 3: Learning to Feel It * Get a balance point where you can sense the errors when they come * To avoid the mistakes, you have to feel them immediately * If you hear a string out of tune, it should bother you a lot, that’s what you need to feel * Its not possible to feel myelin growing along your nerve fibers, but its possible to sense the set of secondary feelings associated with acquiring new skills * Evoking a feeling of reaching, falling short and reaching again * Divine dissatisfaction * Robert Bjork’s “the sweet spot” – that productive, uncomfortable terrain located just beyond our current abilities, where our reach exceeds our grasp * Deep practice isn’t just about struggling, its about seeking out that struggle which involves a cycle of distinct actions; * Pick a target, reach for it, evaluate the gap between the target and the reach, return to step one * Phenomenon in Japanese schools * Sample of Japanese 8th graders spent 44% of their class time inventing, thinking and actively struggling with underlying concepts * Sample of American students spent less than 1% of their time in that state * Japanese want their kids to struggle * American teachers want to move past any struggle that comes along, keeping the class gliding along, but you don’t learn by gliding * Study to see what made babies improve at walking – key factor wasn’t height, weight or brain development, but the amount of time spent firing their circuits trying to walk * Deep practice feels like being a staggering baby, clumsily lurching toward a goal and toppling over it, it’s a discomforting sensation that anyone would seek to avoid, yet the longer the babies remained in that state, the more willing they were to endure it and to permit themselves to fail * The more myelin they built, the more skill they earned * To get good, its helpful to be bad II: Ignition Chapter 5 – Primal Cues: If She Can Do It, Why Can’t I? * Growing a skill requires deep practice, which requires energy, passion commitment and motivational fuel * Ignition and deep practice work together to produce skill * Ignition supplies the energy, deep practice translates that energy over time into forward progress (wraps of myelin) * In talented hotbeds, you see a lot of passion providing the emotional fuel that kept them firing their circuits and getting better * Pattern of hotbeds: breakthrough of success followed by a massive bloom of talent (bloom grows slowly because deep practice takes time) * To chalk it up to self-belief and positive thinking is missing the point, change doesn’t come from inside the athletes, they were responding to something outside them * Deep practice is a cool, conscious act, while ignition is a hot, mysterious awakening * Deep practice is wrapping, ignition works through lightning flashes of image and emotion, neural programs that tap into the mind’s vast reserves of energy and attention * Deep practice is all about staggering-baby steps, ignition is about the set of signals and subconscious forces that create our identity, the moments that lead us to say “this is who I want to be” * We think of passion as an inner quality, but its really something that comes first from the outside world * Ignition burns within our unconscious mind, but that doesn’t mean it cant be understood * Our built-in ignition systems take seemingly insignificant cues which over time create gigantic differences in skill The Tiny, Powerful Idea * McPherson set out to investigate a mystery that has parents and music teachers constantly questioning – why do certain children progress quickly at music lessons and others don’t? * First 9 months of practice, kids were a typical mixed bag, some zoomed off while others had barely budged, most were in the middle * Skill was scattered along a bell curve, but what caused the curve? Was there some hidden X factor that explained/predicted each child’s success and failures? * He tested a factor, the children’s answers to a question given to them before they started their first lesson – “how long do you think you’ll play your instrument?” * They mostly say they don’t know, but when you keep digging and ask a few times, they give a solid answer, they’ve picked up something in their environment that’s made them say, yes, that’s for me * Their answers were grouped into categories: short-term commitment, medium-term commitment, long-term commitment * He then measured how much each child practiced/week * Progress was determined by a tiny, powerful idea the child had before even starting the lessons * With the same amount of practice, the long-term commitment group outperformed the short-term commitment group by 400% * The long-term commitment group, with 20 minutes of weekly practice, progressed faster than the short-termers who practice for 30 minutes weekly * When the long-term commitment group combined high levels of practice, skills skyrocketed * Each student is a blank slate, the ideas they bring to the first lesson are more important than anything a teacher can do or any amount of practice the student will have * Its all about their perception of self, at some point early on, they had an experience that brings the idea that tells them, I am a musician * The teachers playing caused Clarissa to experience an intense emotional response, called fascination, which instantly connected Clarissa to a high fuel tank of motivation, which powered her deep practice * What ignites the progress isn’t any innate skill/gene, it was a small powerful idea, a vision of their ideal future selves, a vision that energized and accelerated progress and that originated in the outside world * Clarissa’s wanting to be a musician from a signal (from her family, her home, her teacher, a set of images) * That signal sparked an intense, unconscious response that manifested itself as an idea “I want to be like them” * Its not necessarily a logical idea (doesn’t correlate with any mathematic/rhythmic skills they possess) * They idea comes by accident Flipping the Trigger * Being motivated is like saying “I want X later, so I better do Y like crazy now” * Motivation isn’t a rational assessment of cause and effect, its like a bet, and a highly uncertain one * Ignition is reactive, although it may have felt like it originated within them, but it did not * It’s a response to a signal that arrived in the form of an image * What do these signals have in common? Each has to do with identity and groups and the links that form between them * Each signal is about future belonging * Future belonging is a primal cue – a direct signal that actives our built-in motivational triggers, funneling our energy/attention toward a goal * We all feel motivated to connect ourselves to high-achieving groups * Those triggers are powerful and unconscious * Cohen – a psychologist specialized in uncovering the unconscious mechanisms that govern our choices, motivations and goals * Him and his colleagues are like the garage mechanics of ignition * They trace the invisible connections between our motivations and the environmental signals that quietly activate them * Our brains are always looking for a cue of where to spend energy, we’re swimming in an ocean of cues, constantly responding to them, but we just don’t see it * Talent hotbeds shared this disheveled ambience (gross environments in which they practiced), starting to sense a link between the beat-up state of the incubators and the talent they produced * If it were a pleasant environment, we would naturally shut off effort, why work? * If people get the signal that its rough, they get motivated * Scrooge principle – our unconscious mind is a stingy banker of energy reserves, keeping its wealth locked in a vault. Direct plea’s to open the vault doesn’t work, Scrooge can’t be fooled, but when he’s hit with the right combination of primal cues, the vault of energy flies open * Ignition is determined by if/then propositions, if I want this, then I need to do this * Bargh and his colleagues performed a number of experiments, where they used tiny environmental cues (inspirational words hidden in a crossword puzzle) to manipulate motivation and effort among subjects * Appeals to the unconscious is so effective * Demonstration of the relationship between motivation and primal cues done by Eisenstadt * He was testing a theory he’d developed relating genius and psychosis to the loss of a parent or parents at an early age * When we looked at parental loss as a signal hitting a motivational trigger, the connection becomes clearer * Losing a parent is a primal cue – you are not safe, there is an outpour of energy that is created by a lack of safety * This signal can alter a child’s relationship to the world, redefine his identity and energize his mind to address the dangers/possibilities of life (as Eisenstaedt put it, a springboard of immense compensatory energy) * Such adverse events nurture the development of a personality strong enough to overcome many obstacles standing in the path of achievement * Losing a parent at a young age was not what gave each individual (ex: Michelangelo) talent, it was the primal cue (you are not safe) that provided energy for their efforts, so that they built their various talents over the course of years, step by step, wrap by wrap * The superstars on Eisenstaedt’s list (who lost a parent or their parents at a young age) are not gifted exceptions, but the logical extensions of the universal principles that govern all of us * Talent requires deep practice * Deep practice requires vast amounts of energy * Primal cues trigger energy * Second example of ignition originates closer to home * Took a survey of my friends’ children – pattern seemed to be that the youngest kids were frequently the fastest younger (his youngest kid was also the speediest) * Histories fasted runners, or top-ten NFL running backs, all scored an average birth rank of 4th in families of 4.6 children, or 3.2 in families of 4.4 kids * Striking because speed looks like a gift * This pattern suggests that speed is not a gift, but a skill that grows through deep practice and that is ignited by primal cues – in this case, the cue is, “you’re behind, keep up” * This signal is sent by older siblings to younger siblings * This goes to say that being fast, like any other talent, involves a confluence of factors that go beyond genes and are directly related to intense, subconscious reactions to motivation signals that provide the energy to practice deeply and grow myelin O Lucky Me * Safety and future belonging are 2 powerful primal cues, but not the only ones useful for igniting talent * If talent is a gift sprinkled randomly throughout the worlds children, we could expect Wadleigh’s program to be the one to succeed, but if talent is a process that is ignited through primal cues, then the reason for PS 233’s success is obvious * The genetic potential in both schools was the same, the teaching was the same * The difference was, the students at Wadleigh received the motivational equivalent of a gentle nudge, while the PS 233 students were ignited by primal cues of scarcity and belonging * In the case of Tom Sawyer convincing Ben to help paint the fence * Tom’s signals worked because Ben watched every move and was absorbed * Ignition is designed to give us energy for whatever tasks we chose, or for whatever tasks fate chooses for us Chapter 6 – The Curacao Experiment: The Earthquake * Curacao’s underdog success can be traced to a single moment of ignition * Jones’ two consecutive homeruns * A burst of media attention followed * The shock wave was most prominent in Jones’ hometown * Curacao’s Little League founder remembers the sound he heard when Jones hit the home runs * A few weeks later, Little League sign ups were insane * Their motivation was stronger since they knew that Jones hadn’t even been one of the best players on the island of Curacao * With this infusion of enthusiastic recruits, Curacao’s talent bloom took time to develop * Curacao’s success wasn’t caused solely by primal signals that created ignition, the matric of other causes includes a disciplined culture, top-notch coaching, supportive parents, the love of the game and deep practice * Aruba, similar to Curacao in every way right down to motivational spark, fields quality little league teams and competed well against Curacao’s and yet curacao ignited while Aruba didn’t * Curacao has found a way to keep the motivational fire lit The Sistine Chapel Effect * For every breakthrough performance that ignites a talent bloom, there are a lot of breakthroughs that fade away to nothing * Why do breakthrough performances sometimes ignite talent blooms and sometimes not? * Talent hotbeds possess more than a single primal cue, they contain collections of signals that keep ignition going for the years the skill-growing requires * The practicing baseball field in Curacao looks like crap, but in fact its covered with primal cues * For the kids at Frank Curiel Field, these re not gauzy dreams or posters, they are tangible steps on a primal ladder of selection, distinct possibilities reflected in the crackle of the radio, the clutter of the trophies, the chrome flint of the major-league scouts’ sunglasses * To be 6 years old at this field is like standing in the Sistine Chapel, the proof of paradise is right here, you just need to open your eyes * Return to the Curacao and Aruba situation, why didn’t Aruba ignite? * Consider the fate of the respective igniters, ex: Ponson, Aruban pitcher who was a great prospect turned out to have a drinking problem * Curacao possessed tools to keep the ignition of Jones’s success lit * Curacao grew talent because the message of Jones’s success was translated into reliable primal cues * Frank Curiel Field looks like a beat baseball diamond, but it steadily transmits a powerful stream of signals/images that ass up to a thrilling whisper “hey, that could be you” The Language of Ignition * Our ignition switch can be trigger by certain signals/primal cues, how can it be triggered by the signals we use most: words * Z-boys * All got systematic about skateboarding, practiced a couple of hours a day * Wanted to be part of the equation * When the showed up to a contest, the Z-boys knew what was going to happen, they knew how good they were * Skip Engblom helped to create this skateboarding team * He sais that its important to give kids credit at a younger age for feeling stuff out more acutely, when you say something to a kid, you have to know what your saying and be careful, what skill-building really is, is confidence building, first they have to earn it and then they’ve got it * Engblom didn’t do that much, his communication with the team consisted of a few mumbled words * Its as if those few, offhand phrases helped ignite them to new levels of motivation and effort * According to theories developed by Carol Dweck, Engblom’s verbal cues, however minimal, are just the kind to send the right signal * Her research involves the relationship between motivation and language * When we get a clear cue, a message that sends a spark, then boing, we respond * The boing phenomenon was been seen in a series of experiments she did * One of her experiments, The Princess and he Pea, was to see how much a single sentence of praise can affect performance and effort, and what kind of signal is most effective * Dweck’s experiment * First, Dweck gave every child a test that consisted of easy puzzles * After, the researcher informed all the children of their scores, adding a single sentence of praise * Half of the kids were praised for their intelligence (you must be smart at this), the other half were praised for their effort (you must have worked really hard) * The kids were tested a second time and were offered a choice between a harder test and an easier test * 90% of the kids who had been praised for their effort chose the harder test * A majority of the kids praised for their intelligence chose the easy test, why? Because when you praise the children for their intelligence, you tell them it’s the name of the game, look smart, don’t risk making mistakes * The third level of tests were harder, none of the kids did well, however the two groups of kids responded differently to the situation * The effort group grew very involved with the test, trying solutions and testing strategies * The group praised for intelligence hated the harder test, they took it as proof that they weren’t smart * The experiment came full circle, returning to a test of the same difficulty level as the first test * The praised-for-effort group’s score improved their initial score by 30% and the praise-for-intelligence group’s score declined by 20% all because of that sentence of praise they were given at the beginning of the study * Promoting usage of language that values effort and slow progress rather than innate talent or intelligence * Of all the talent hotbeds that Dweck visited, praise was only given when it was earned * Motivation does not increase with increased levels of praise but often dips – Dweck * Motivational language refers to language that speaks hopes, dreams and affirmations * High motivation is not the kind of language that ignites people, what works is the opposite, reaching down, speaking to the ground-level effort, affirming the struggle * Phrases like “you try really hard” motivates far better than empty praise * Praising effort works because it reflects biological reality * Skill circuits are not easy to build * Deep practice requires effort and passionate work * When you start out, you do not play tennis, you struggle, fight, pay attention and slowly get better, we learn in staggering baby steps * Effort-based language works because it speaks directly to the core of the learning experience and when it comes to ignition, there is nothing more powerful Chapter 7 – How to Ignite a Hotbed: Mike and Dave’s Ridiculous Idea * Talent hotbeds such as Curacao, Russia and South Korea were ignited by a lightening strike – a breakthrough star, a magical victory * Different kinds of ignitions occur that don’t require a lightening strike, and yet motivation and talent bloom * Most frustrating machine ever invented – the American inner-city public school system * Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin decided that they would stop fighting the system and start their own school with more class time, quality teachers, parental and administrative support * Called it the Knowledge is Power program (KIPP) * Their manifesto got a shot (a single room in the corner of an Elementary school, not a whole school, where they would be free to take the next step on their idealistic journey) * They stole (nabbed lesson plans, teaching techniques etc.) * They later were called “innovative” but at the time, they were as innovative as a shoplifter * They took every good idea that wasn’t nailed down * From this pile of stolen parts, they assembled an educational environment * Featured old-fashioned hard work, innovative techniques * It was clear to them that college was really the key to the whole thing, when you get out there in the public school system, you realize how screwed up it is * They recruited subjects for their experiment whose parents were as frustrated with the status quo as were Feinberg and Levin * When the students walked into the tiny room for their first day, college seemed a long way off * Then something strange happened, the KIPP students lived up to their slogan, they were nice and they worked hard despite the yucky classroom conditions * Each year they did this experiment, KIPP students’ test scores kept rising, higher than any other public schools in their districts * Good-hearted underdogs who caught lightning, or, an example of ignition – the creation of a talent hotbed from the ground up Curtain Up * KIPP culture – very strict and precise rules/routines for the students to follow * Goal is that every single student gets to go to college * “Here at KIPP we believe in you, if you work really hard and are nice, you will go to college and have a successful life. Here we work really hard, and that makes you smart. You will make mistakes, you will mess u, we will too, but you will all have beautiful behavior, because everything here is earned” * Results are clear that these kids are responding and engaging to all these rules and motivational talks * Primal cues that KIPP students received in the first few minutes of their first day of school * You belong to a group, your group is together in a strange and dangerous new world, that new worked is shaped like a mountain with college at the top * These are identical to the primal cues that young Brazilian soccer players or Russian tennis players might have received (replace the word college with being Ronaldinho or Kournikova) * KIPPS physical environs radiate signals (like Frank Curiels Field in Curacao) * Attention to detail is a big part of what makes someone academically so successful (in response to KIPPs extremity) * The rules are ways of getting students to practice being detailed and precise * In a study by Seligman and Duckworth, results showed that self-discipline was twice as accurate as IQ in predicting the students’ grade-point average * One of the ways KIPP creates change is through a technique called “stopping the school” * When someone violates a significant rule, classes are cancelled and teachers hold meetings to discuss what happened, how to fix it * It creates an environment for deep-practicing good behavior * KIPP has found that it’s the most efficient way to establish group priorities, locate errors and build the behavioral circuits that KIPP desires * KIPPs most important signal is college * When students get to KIPP, their lives are like a single dot on a map, and you can’t do anything with a dot. But when they connect that dot to another dot, to a college somewhere, then you get a connection * KIPP, like other talent hotbeds, is a projection of deep practice * What’s striking is not how hard KIPP students work, but how swiftly and completely they take on the KIPP identity that provides the fuel for that hard work * KIPP alters students’ instinctive notion of character * Usually we think of character is a deep and unchanging innate quality showing itself through behavior * KIPP shows that character is more like a skill, ignited by certain signals and sharpened through deep practice * Every time a KIPP student imagines himself in college, a movement of energy is created * Every time a KIPP student forces himself to obey one of the rules, a circuit is fired, insulated and strengthened III: Master Coaching Chapter 8 – The Talent Whisperers: The ESP of Hans Jensen * 20th century – American bank robbers weren’t very skilled * Their approach worked well for a time, but by the early 1920s, banks caught up with new technological innovations (alarm systems, blast-proof vaults) * Bank authorities expected a new era of safety and security, but that didn’t happen, bank robbers became more skilled (as if bank robbers evolved into a more talented species) * Evolution could be traced to the man who led the Denver gang: Herman Mann (originator and teacher of the modern bank-robbing skill, applied military principles * Herman Mann * Insight was that robbing banks was not about guts or guns, but about technique which involved a lot of preparatory work * Assigned each man on his team a well-defined role, organized rehearsals, practiced obedience to the clock * His system was called the Baron Lamm Technique * After his death, it was taught to John Dillinger * His ideas still work today because he was able to communicate his ideas and translate them into the seamless performance of a difficult task * He was an innovator that taught discipline and exactitude * He was a master coach * Skill = cellular process that grows through deep practice * Ignition supplies the unconscious energy for that growth * Meet the rare people who have the knack for combining those forces to grow talent in others (master coaches) * Most people think of a great leader as someone who possess a core ability of knowing something that the rest of us don’t and who share that knowledge to us in a motivating way * When visiting talent hotbeds, the coaches were quiet and reserved, mostly older, having taught for years, listened more than they spoke, allergic to giving pep talks, spent most of their time offering small, targeted and highly specific adjustments, were very sensitive to the person they were teaching (talent whisperers) * Hans Jensen – cello teacher from Meadowmount music school * Regarded as special * His students think he has ESP * What we see with him has nothing to do with his qualifications as a cello player or professional, it has to do with his skill at sensing the students’ needs and instantly producing the right signal to meet those needs * He didn’t only tell his students what to do, he became they should do, communicating the goal with gesture, tone, rhythm and gaze The Wizard’s Secret * John Wooden – one of the most amazing UCLA basketball coaches * He didn’t give speeches, didn’t give out punishments or praise, he didn’t sound or act like any coach * All the study that Gallimore and Tharp (two educational psychologists) had associated with coaching was all wrong * How was this great coaching? * Gallimore and Tharp kept attending practices, insight began to flow, it came from watching the team improve and from the data they collected * 2,326 acts of teaching, 6.9% were compliments, 6.6% were expressions of displeasure and 75% was pure information; what to do, how to do it, when to intensity an action * Wooden’s most frequent forms of teaching was a 3 part instruction where he modeled the right way to do something, showed the incorrect way and then remodeled it the right way (M+, M-, M+) * His demonstrations take long, but are of such clarity that they leave an image in memory * The information was combined with mental and emotional conditions * His planning included specific goals for the team and for individuals * He could pack into a practice a rich basketball curriculum and deliver information at precisely the moments it would help students learn the most * What made Wooden a great coach wasn’t praise, denunciation or pep talks, his skill resisted in the targeted information he fired at his players (This, not that. Here, not there) * His words/gestures showed his players the correct way to do something, he was seeing/fixing errors, sharpening circuits) * He was a person of deep practice * He taught in chunks (teach players an entire move and then break it down to work on its elements) * Formulated laws of learning (explanation, demonstration, imitation, correction and repetition) * Repetition = the key to learning * New focus on lesson-planning, information-oriented teaching * Gallimore and Tharp used this new focus for KEEP and slowly, it started to take off (reading scores rose, comprehension improved, school was exceeding) Coaching Love * Dr. Benjamin Bloom undertook a study of world-class talents * Surprising fact - many world-class talents started out with seemingly average teachers * Miss Mary the piano teacher (little old lady) * Each interaction vibrates with Miss Mary’s interest and emotion * To have a better hand position is to earn a jolt of praise, to play something incorrectly brings an “I’m sorry” and a request to “please play it again” * Like the other so-called average first piano teachers in Bloom’s study, Mary and the others are not average teachers * They are disguised as average because their crucial skill does not show up on conventional measures of teaching ability * They are creating and sustaining motivation by teaching love * The effect of this first phase of learning is to get the learner involved, captivated and to get the learner to need and want more information/expertise * Certain teachers have the rare ability to make something boring (learning piano) fun * Perhaps the major quality of these so called “average” teachers was that they made the initial learning pleasant and rewarding * Teachers gave positive reinforcement while expecting the child to make progress * Wooden uses the deep practice part of the talent mechanisms by speaking the language of information and correction, sharpening circuitry * Miss Mary deals in matters of ignition using emotional triggers to fuel tanks with love and motivation Chapter 9 – The Teaching Circuit; A Blueprint: The Four Virtues of Master Coaching * Great teaching is a skill (a set of myelinated circuits built through deep practice) * Teachers have great knowledge, are able to recognize students’ abilities and connect with them * THESIS: skill is insulation that wraps neural circuits and grows according to certain signals * Master coaches are the human delivery system for the signals that fuel/direct the growth of a given skill circuit (fire here and not there) * A coaches true skill lies in his ability to locate the sweet spot on the edge of each individuals ability and to send the right signals to help that student reach the right goal * With any complex skill, it’s a combination of the 4 virtues The Matrix: The First Virtue * Matrix is Gallimore’s word for the vast grid of task-specific knowledge that distinguishes the best teachers and allows them to creatively and effectively respond to a student’s efforts * Years of work go into myelinating a master coach’s circuitry, which is a mixture of technical knowledge, strategy, experience and instinct to be put to use to locate and understand where the students are and where they need to go * People aren’t born with this depth of knowledge, it is something that grows over time through the combination of ignition and deep practice (as is any other skill) * Linda Septien (eventually founded the Septien Vocal studio) * Possesses a natural quality that allows her to move past obstacles that would discourage most people (this is shown through how she approaches the ups and down of life) * Had a successful opera career which later stalled out as did her marriage * Wanted to make a transition to popular music and recording a Christian album * When she went to audition, the producers told her she was horrible. They didn’t care about the notes, they cared about the feeling and said that she had sung with no feeling, no passion and no story * She wanted to figure out how to do this * She studied the way big pop and rock acts sang * She studied pop music like a medical student, systematically dissecting its various systems * Despite all this work, her singing career failed to lift off * She began giving voice lessons at home because she saw a growing group of kids who wanted to be pop stars in Dallas * She realized that her job was to find out what worked for someone and connect it to what worked in pop music (artist-focused system) * She created a curriculum that applied the structure of classical training to the world of pop * She was constantly experiment with new approaches, discarding, trying again * Her expansion as a voice teacher expanded when Jessica Simpson showed up at her studio * Simpson was later hailed as an overnight success, something that continues to entertain Septien because Jessica worked hard to become the singer she was * “Someone can walk into my door an I know I can figure them out in 20 seconds” – Septien * “She has the cognitive understanding of what my vocal chords are doing at any moment and exactly how they could be better” - student * “What I do for myself as a teacher is no different than what I ask my students to do, I know what I’m doing because I put a lot of work into it, I am not different from them” Perceptiveness: The Second Virtue * Master coaches train their eyes to be like cameras, the gaze is about information, its about figuring you out * Coach John Wooden believed that every body on his team deserves different treatment, since nobody is the same, he believed that each person deserved individual treatment that is best for them and that he would decide what that treatment would be * Almost all master coaches followed this rule * Wanted to know about each student so they could customize their communications to fit the patterns in the student’s life * The coaches approached new students with the curiosity of an investigative reporter (sought out details about their lives, relationships etc.) – macro level * Coaches would also monitor the student’s reactions to their coaching, checking whether the coaches messages were being absorbed – micro level * Always checking after delivering a speech because they need to know when the student’s don’t know The GPS Reflex: The Third Virtue * You have to give students a lot of information, you have to shock them * Most master coaches deliver their information to their students in a series of short, vivid bursts (never begin sentences with please), they spoke in short imperatives (now do X, you will do this) * Directions are given in a more urgent done rather than dictatorial, as if they were being emitted by a compelling GPS navigating through a maze (turn left, right, go straight, arrival complete) * GPS reflex in action – linking a series of vivid, just-in-time directives that zap the student’s circuit, guiding it in the right direction (that wasn’t good, do it like this…add this...use this…get this back on track…now go do this) * Septien’s skill is not only her matrix of knowledge but the connections she makes between that matric and her students efforts, linking where her student is now with actions that will take her where she wants to go * Master coaches had strategic impatience, constantly changing their input (if A didn’t work, they tried B and C) * A series of subtle variations, each one a distinct firing, each one creating a combination of errors and fixes that grew myelin * Common phrase of coaches “Good. Okay, now do ___” * A coach would employ it when a student got the hang of some new move or technique and would quickly add difficulty * Small successes were not stopping points, but stepping stones * The second a student gets to a new spot, PUSH them Theatrical Honesty: The Fourth Virtue * Many coaches radiate a subtle theatrical air * Master coaches use drama and character to reach the student with the truth about their performance * Theatrical honesty works best when teachers are performing their most essential myelinating role – pointing out errors Circuit-Growing: Why Teaching Soccer is Different from Teaching Violin * It is often the case that master coaches are busy, always zapping students with helpful signals, forming myelin connections * Many other times, the most masterful coaches are completely silent * Both Brazilian soccer academies and Suzuki violin instruction programs are good at developing world-class talent * Brazilian soccer coaches talk very little, and violin coaches talk a lot – why? * Brazilian futsal practices are the essence of simplicity * The coach is attentive, rarely says a word, doesn’t stop to praise, critique or exert any control * This laid back approach seems to violate the percepts of master coaching, how can you build a skill if you don’t stop the action, give information, praise and correct? * Suzuki violin coaches teach with microscopic precision * 100% structure, 0 free play * Both coaching techniques work well though… * Answer lies in the nature of the skill circuits that each technique is trying to develop * Myelin point of view: the two coaches are doing exactly what they should do, they are helping the right circuit to fire as often as possible, the difference is the shape of the circuits each is trying to grow * Different skills require different patterns of action, thus differently structured circuits * The idea soccer players circuitry is fast, changing fluidly in response to each obstacle, capable of producing various outcomes that can fire in succession (now this, this, this and that) * Speed and flexibility for soccer players are everything (the faster and more flexible the circuit, the more obstacles can be over come and the greater the players skill) * The circuitry that fires when a violinist plays are a tightly defined series of pathways to create a single set of ideal movements (when the violinist plays an A-minor chord, it must always be an A-minor chord) * Violinists have circuit precision and stability * In Futsal, to stop the game in order to highlight a technical detail or give praise would be to interrupt the flow of attentive firing, failing and learning that is the heart of the flexible-circuit deep practice * The lessons the players are teaching themselves are more powerful than anything the coach can say * The violinist represents the opposite case * The circuit needs not to be just fired, but to be fired correctly * High level of coaching input is needed, the coaches actions direct the beginners growth precisely where it needs to go * Sports, writing, comedy and such are flexible-circuit skills (require us to grow vast circuits that we can flick through to navigate every-changing sets of obstacles) * Playing violin, golf, gymnastics and figure skating are consistent-circuit skills (dependent on a solid foundation of a technique that enables us to recreate the fundamentals of an ideal performance) * Universal rule remains the same – good coaching supports the desired circuit * The Brazilian coach and Suzuki teacher use different methods but their goal is the same as John Wooden or Mary Epperson to get inside the deep-practice zone, to maximize the firings that grow the right myelin for the task, and to move closer toward the students becoming their own teachers * You have to make the student an independent thinker Chapter 10 – Tom Martinez and the $60 Million Bet * There are unexpected moments when the world’s spotlight shines on the art of the master coach * Tom Martinez – reason the Oakland Raisers football team was facing a $60 million problem * They were given the right to choose the most talented college player in the nation * Raiders manager wasn’t sure who the player might be * They had 2 options (2 players) * This was a $60 million dollar bet * Raiders office analyzed all the data and phoned Tom Martinez (retired junior college coach) * Parties on both sides of the most high-stakes sports decision of the year had sought out the wisdom of Martinez * He said when he looks for a kid, he looks for something to take their connection to a different spot * The question was about coaching, and Martinez didn’t describe anything about football, he described a delicate human connection of language, gesture and emotion * When he met one of his football players, Russel, he was able to reach into his matric of knowledge and to improvise a bridge of trust and respect * If I teach you, I’m concerned about what you think and how you think, I want to teach you how to learn in a way that’s right for you - Martinez * The Raiders listened to Martinez because he can walk up to someone he’s never met in an unfamiliar atmosphere and forge a connection and can use that connection to find the truth about someone whose talent is unknown to the world * You cant just give a guy $60 million and say go win games, he needs mentoring, consistency, he needs somebody