"Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

“See someone you want to become? Better get busy. Want to catch up with a desirable group? Better get busy.”

Because the best way to build a good circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again, over and over. Struggle is not an option: it's a biological requirement : in order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit suboptimally; you must make mistakes and pay.

Why is targeted, mistake-focused practice so effective?

<ul><li>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.</li><li>The more we develop a skill circuit, the less we're aware that we're using it. We're built to make skills automatic, to stash them in our unconscious mind .</li></ul>

Why are passion and persistence key ingredients of talent?

<ul><li>ABSORB THE WHOLE THING. This means spending time staring at or listening to the desired skill.</li><li>It sounds rather Zen, but it basically amounts to absorbing a picture of the skill until you can imagine yourself doing it.</li></ul>

RULE ONE: CHUNK IT UP

Brains are always looking for a cue as to where to spend energy now. Now? Now? We're swimming in an ocean of cues, constantly responding to them, but like fish in water, we just don't see it."

Ocean Of Cues

"If we're in a nice, easy, pleasant environment, we naturally shut off effort, Why work? But if people get the signal that it's rough, they get motivated now. A nice, well-kept tennis academy gives them the luxury future right now—of course they'd be demotivated. They can't help it."

Excellence is a habit.

“High motivation is not the kind of language that ignites people. What works is precisely the opposite: not reaching up but reaching down, speaking to the ground-level effort, affirming the struggle.”

<ol><li>Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons—a circuit of nerve fiber.</li><li>Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy.</li><li>The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become.</li></ol>

How A Skill Is Formed? 

<ol><li>Talent requires deep practice;</li><li>Deep practice requires vast amounts of energy;</li><li>Primal cues trigger huge outpourings of energy. Safety and future belonging are two powerful primal cues.</li></ol>

The Talent Code

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.

RULE THREE : LEARN TO FEEL IT

"If I skip practice for one day, I notice. If I skip practice for two days, my wife notices. If I skip for three days, the world notices."

Myelin wraps it doesn't unwrap. Like a highway-—paving machine, myelination happens in one direction. Once a skill circuit is insulated, you can't uninsulate it (except through age or disease). That's why habits are hard to break. The only way to change them is to build new habits by repeating new behaviors—by myelinating new circuits.

Why Are Habits Hard To Break? 

Every expert in every field is the result of around ten thousand hours of committed practice. Ericsson called this process "deliberate practice" and defined it as working on technique, seeking constant critical feedback, and focusing ruthlessly on shoring up weaknesses.

10,000 Hours Of Deep Practice 

<ul><li>Going slow allows you to attend more closely to errors, creating a higher degree of precision with each firing—and when it comes to growing myelin, precision is everything.</li><li>"I am slow to learn and slow to forget what I have learned," Lincoln wrote. "My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch anything on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out."</li></ul>

Why does slowing down work so well? 

<ul><li>Ignition: The moments that lead us to say that is who you want to be. We usually think of passion as an inner quality. But it is something that came first from the outside world.</li><li>Future belonging is a primal cue. </li><li>It's not as simple as saying I want X. It's rather saying: I want X later, so I better do Y like crazy right now.</li></ul>

Future Belonging 

<ul><li>There is, biologically speaking, no substitute for attentive repetition.</li><li>Myelin is 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.</li></ul>

RULE TWO: REPEAT IT

<ul><li>Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways—operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes—makes you smarter.</li><li>Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you're forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them—as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go—end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it.</li></ul>

Deep Practice 

Greatness isn't born, it's grown. Here's how.....

What is the secret of talent? How do we unlock it? This groundbreaking work provides readers with tools they can use to maximize potential in themselves and others. Whether you’re coaching soccer or teaching a child to play the piano, writing a novel or trying to improve your golf swing, this revolutionary book shows you how to grow talent by tapping into a newly discovered brain mechanism. Drawing on cutting-edge neurology and firsthand research gathered on journeys to nine of the world’s talent hotbeds—from the baseball fields of the Caribbean to a classical-music academy in upstate New York—Coyle identifies the three key elements that will allow you to develop your gifts and optimize your performance in sports, art, music, math, or just about anything. • Deep Practice Everyone knows that practice is a key to success. What everyone doesn’t know is that specific kinds of practice can increase skill up to ten times faster than conventional practice. • Ignition We all need a little motivation to get started. But what separates truly high achievers from the rest of the pack? A higher level of commitment—call it passion—born out of our deepest unconscious desires and triggered by certain primal cues. Understanding how these signals work can help you ignite passion and catalyze skill development. • Master Coaching What are the secrets of the world’s most effective teachers, trainers, and coaches? Discover the four virtues that enable these “talent whisperers” to fuel passion, inspire deep practice, and bring out the best in their students. These three elements work together within your brain to form myelin, a microscopic neural substance that adds vast amounts of speed and accuracy to your movements and thoughts. Scientists have discovered that myelin might just be the holy grail: the foundation of all forms of greatness, from Michelangelo’s to Michael Jordan’s. The good news about myelin is that it isn’t fixed at birth; to the contrary, it grows, and like anything that grows, it can be cultivated and nourished. Combining revelatory analysis with illuminating examples of regular people who have achieved greatness, this book will not only change the way you think about talent, but equip you to reach your own highest potential.

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What is the secret of talent? How do we unlock it? This groundbreaking work provides readers with tools they can use to maximize potential in themselves and others. Whether you’re coaching soccer or teaching a child to play the piano, writing a novel or trying to improve your golf swing, this revolutionary book shows you how to grow talent by tapping into a newly discovered brain mechanism.Drawing on cutting-edge neurology and firsthand research gathered on journeys to nine of the world’s talent hotbeds—from the baseball fields of the Caribbean to a classical-music academy in upstate New York—Coyle identifies the three key elements that will allow you to develop your gifts and optimize your performance in sports, art, music, math, or just about anything.• Deep Practice Everyone knows that practice is a key to success. What everyone doesn’t know is that specific kinds of practice can increase skill up to ten times faster than conventional practice.• Ignition We all need a little motivation to get started. But what separates truly high achievers from the rest of the pack? A higher level of commitment—call it passion—born out of our deepest unconscious desires and triggered by certain primal cues. Understanding how these signals work can help you ignite passion and catalyze skill development.• Master Coaching What are the secrets of the world’s most effective teachers, trainers, and coaches? Discover the four virtues that enable these “talent whisperers” to fuel passion, inspire deep practice, and bring out the best in their students.These three elements work together within your brain to form myelin, a microscopic neural substance that adds vast amounts of speed and accuracy to your movements and thoughts. Scientists have discovered that myelin might just be the holy grail: the foundation of all forms of greatness, from Michelangelo’s to Michael Jordan’s. The good news about myelin is that it isn’t fixed at birth; to the contrary, it grows, and like anything that grows, it can be cultivated and nourished.Combining revelatory analysis with illuminating examples of regular people who have achieved greatness, this book will not only change the way you think about talent, but equip you to reach your own highest potential.

Daniel Coyle is the author of the upcoming book The Culture Code (January 2018). He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Talent Code, The Little Book of Talent, The Secret Race (with Tyler Hamilton), and other books. Winner (with Hamilton) of the 2012 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Prize, he is a contributing editor for Outside magazine, and also works a special advisor to the Cleveland Indians. Coyle lives in Cleveland, Ohio during the school year and in Homer, Alaska, during the summer with his wife Jen, and their four children.

DANIEL COYLE

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