book review: the talent code
From time to time I like to share thoughts on books I think fit well with the theme of this blog. I’ve reviewed Leo Babauta’s The Power of Less, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, and a multitude of ebooks. I’m happy to add The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle to the ranks of thesimplerlife.net recommended reading.
I saw this book a long time ago at a bookstore and even had a picture of the cover sitting in my cell phone. Fast forward to last month and the hockey coaching conference I was attending in Florida. During one of the sessions one of the presenters mentioned the book and I decided that it would be perfect beach reading material (gotta love ice hockey conferences in tropical locations).
I’m happy I picked it up because the content was entertaining, insightful, and most of all, inspiring. Coyle’s driving question is, “What is the secret of talent?” He travels to talent hotbeds across the world to try understanding why some locations seem to produce a disproportionate of world-class talent. For instance, soccer players from Brazil, a classical music academy in New York and baseball players from the Dominican Republic.
Coyle discovers that the key to developing talent lies in the laboratory of neurologists and a nearly magical substance called myelin. Every time you take any action such as bringing a fork to our mouth or throwing a 101 mile per hour strike on the outside corner, a set of nerves fire in a pre-determined pattern. The nerves that activate when you do a pushup are the same nerves that activate every single time you do a pushup. Myelin is the “insulation” that wraps these nerve fibers. The more often a certain neuron circuit gets used the more myelin that wraps around it to insulate it. Myelin improves the transmitting efficiency and speed of your neurons. Coyle uses the analogy of a broadband T1 line (heavily mylelinated connections) versus a dialup modem (connections with little myelin): one allows much more information at a much higher rate to be transmitted.
Coyle identifies three keys to “cracking” the talent code; what he calls deep practice, ignition, and master coaching.
- Deep Practice: Deep practice is different than the practice you might remember from middle school band. It isn’t enough to just sit down and noodle around on an instrument for a predetermined set of time. Deep practice is what allows myelin to wrap your nerves. To practice deeply Coyle says that you must first “chunk” up the information. Put in another way, you must take it “one step at a time.” The second rule of deep practice is repetition. As you begin to master the individual chunks of a skill, repeating it allows you to build speed and efficiency. Lastly, Coyle says that you must “learn to feel it” if you expect to practice deeply. You can think of this as quality of practice or attention to detail. It is useless to practice if unnoticed errors are being made.
- Ignition: Ignition is the term Coyle uses for the motivation to become a world class talent. To become world class at anything requires an extremely high level of commitment and passion. Some sort of ignition is required to get that fire burning. The most interesting type of ignition is what Coyle calls the HSE (Holy Shit Effect). This can best be seen when a trailblazer accomplishes something remarkable on a world stage. For example, South Korean golfer Se Ri Pak won the LPGA Championship in 1998. At that time she was the ONLY South Korean golfer on the LPGA Tour. In 2007 there were 33. The same could be said about Russian tennis players (3 ranked in the top 100 in 1998, 15 in 2007). In each case young people from the champion’s country were ignited by their success. They saw someone who looked like them, talked like them, and was from the same area as them succeed on an extreme level and thought, “Holy shit, that could be me.”
- Master Coaching: The third component of unlocking talent is the role of coaching. Master coaches are the people behind the scenes that are driving the talent hotbeds around the world. They tend to be older, perceptive, deliver information to their students in short bursts, and even tend to be somewhat theatrical. However, not all master coaches fall into this pattern as a lot of their style depends on what they are coaching. For example, Brazilian soccer coaches are much more quiet than their classical music counterparts. In the end, these master coaches guide their ignited students and teach them how to practice deeply.
I loved this book because of its very positive message: talent can be grown and developed. Much like the 10,000 hours in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers,” reading this book will give you the urge to set it down and start practicing your chosen skill. Heck, I felt driven to write this review because writing is the talent that I want to develop.
The second thing, among many, that stood out to me is the connection Coyle found between training environment and success. Almost every talent hotbed across the world that he visited was junky, run-down, and in a nearly dilapidated state. He discovered that training in less than ideal conditions helps drive a person toward success. Training in a posh environment subconsciously tells the mind that you’ve already achieved success. It’s a subtle difference that evidently has a huge impact on overall success. I’ve been trying to think about and apply this same principle to my own life. For instance, not having access to the Internet most of the day is my somewhat lame attempt at emulating the “less than ideal” conditions of some of the greatest talent hotbeds.
I encourage you to pick up this book from Amazon (aff. link), the library, BookMooch (if it becomes available at some point) or borrow it from a friend. Just get your mitts on it somehow and sit down for a quick, stimulating, and inspirational read.
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