The Little Book of Talent

cover

CONTENTS

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Daniel Coyle

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

PART ONE: GETTING STARTED: Stare, Steal, and Be Willing to Be Stupid

Tip #1: Stare at Who You Want to Become

Tip #2: Spend Fifteen Minutes a Day Engraving the Skill on Your Brain

Tip #3: Steal Without Apology

Tip #4: Buy a Notebook

Tip #5: Be Willing to be Stupid

Tip #6: Choose Spartan Over Luxurious

Tip #7: Before You Start, Figure Out if it’s a Hard Skill or a Soft Skill

Tip #8: To Build Hard Skills, Work Like a Careful Carpenter

Tip #9: To Build Soft Skills, Play Like a Skateboarder

Tip #10: Honor the Hard Skills

Tip #11: Don’t Fall for the Prodigy Myth

Tip #12: Five Ways to Pick a High-Quality Teacher or Coach

PART TWO: IMPROVING SKILLS: Find the Sweet Spot, Then Reach

Tip #13: Find the Sweet Spot

Tip #14: Take Off Your Watch

Tip #15: Break Every Move Down into Chunks

Tip #16: Each Day, Try to Build One Perfect Chunk

Tip #17: Embrace Struggle

Tip #18: Choose Five Minutes a Day Over an hour a Week

Tip #19: Don’t Do “Drills.” Instead, Play Small, Addictive Games

Tip #20: Practice Alone

Tip #21: Think in Images

Tip #22: Pay Attention Immediately After You Make a Mistake

Tip #23: Visualize the Wires of Your Brain Forming New Connections

Tip #24: Visualize the Wires of Your Brain Getting Faster

Tip #25: Shrink the Space

Tip #26: Slow it Down (Even Slower than You Think)

Tip #27: Close Your Eyes

Tip #28: Mime it

Tip #29: When You Get it Right, Mark the Spot

Tip #30: Take a Nap

Tip #31: To Learn a New Move, Exaggerate it

Tip #32: Make Positive Reaches

Tip #33: To Learn from a Book, Close the Book

Tip #34: Use the Sandwich Technique

Tip #35: Use the 3 × 10 Technique

Tip #36: Invent Daily Tests

Tip #37: To Choose the Best Practice Method, Use the R.E.P.S. Gauge

Tip #38: Stop Before You’re Exhausted

Tip #39: Practice Immediately after Performance

Tip #40: Just Before Sleep, Watch a Mental Movie

Tip #41: End on a Positive Note

Tip #42: Six Ways to be a Better Teacher or Coach

PART THREE: SUSTAINING PROGRESS: Embrace Repetition, Cultivate Grit, and Keep Big Goals Secret

Tip #43: Embrace Repetition

Tip #44: Have a Blue-Collar Mind-Set

Tip #45: For Every Hour of Competition, Spend Five Hours Practicing

Tip #46: Don’t Waste Time Trying to Break Bad Habits—Instead, Build New Ones

Tip #47: To Learn it More Deeply, Teach it

Tip #48: Give a New Skill a Minimum of Eight Weeks

Tip #49: When You Get Stuck, Make a Shift

Tip #50: Cultivate Your Grit

Tip #51: Keep Your Big Goals Secret

Tip #52: “Think Like a Gardener, Work Like a Carpenter”

Glossary

Appendix: The New Science of Talent Development

Further Reading

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Book

Don’t fall for the prodigy myth
Take off your watch
Embrace struggle
Take a nap
To learn it more deeply, teach it

The Little Book of Talent is packed full of 52 simple, practical, proven tips that will help improve any skill. Whether you want a better singing voice, a more powerful golf swing or success in the business world, The Little Book of Talent’s method will help you realise your potential.

About the Author

DANIEL COYLE is the author of The Talent Code, Hardball: A Season in the Projects, and the New York Times bestseller Lance Armstrong’s War, and is a contributing editor for Outside magazine. He divides his time between Cleveland, Ohio, and Homer, Alaska, with his wife, Jen, and their four children.

Also by Daniel Coyle

Hardball: A Season in the Projects

Waking Samuel

Lance Armstrong’s War

The Talent Code

For Jen

We are what we repeatedly do.

Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

—ARISTOTLE

INTRODUCTION

The Story of the Little Book

A few years back, on assignment for a magazine, I began visiting talent hotbeds: tiny places that produce large numbers of world-class performers in sports, art, music, business, math, and other disciplines. Places such as:

A ramshackle Moscow tennis club that had, over the previous three years, produced more Top 20 women players than the entire United States.
A humble Adirondacks music camp where students accomplish one year’s worth of progress in seven weeks.
A San Mateo, California, inner-city charter school that, in four years, transformed a student population perennially ranked at the bottom of state math scores into one that scored in the ninety-sixth percentile.
A Dallas vocal studio that has, over the past decade, developed millions of dollars’ worth of pop-music talent.
A ski academy in Vermont with an enrollment of a hundred that has produced fifty Olympic skiers over the past forty years.

My research also took me to a different sort of hotbed: the laboratories and research centers around the country investigating the new science of talent development. For centuries, people have instinctively assumed that talent is largely innate, a gift given out at birth. But now, thanks to the work of a wide-ranging team of scientists, including Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, Dr. Douglas Fields, and Dr. Robert Bjork, the old beliefs about talent are being overturned. In their place, a new view is being established, one in which talent is determined far less by our genes and far more by our actions: specifically, the combination of intensive practice and motivation that produces brain growth.¹ My project evolved into a book called The Talent Code, which was about how the hotbeds succeed by aligning themselves with the brain’s natural mechanisms for acquiring skill.

Along the way, however, the journey had an unexpected side effect. Besides being a journalist, I happen to be the father of four, a volunteer baseball coach, and the husband of a hockey-playing wife. As a family, we struggled daily with the usual questions and anxieties that revolve around the process of acquiring and developing skills. How do we help our daughter learn her multiplication tables? How do we tell a genuine talent from a momentary interest? What’s the best way to spark motivation? How do we encourage improvement without becoming psycho parents or creating stressed, unhappy kids? As it turned out, visiting these remarkable places was not just a chance for me to be a journalist. It was also a chance to become a better coach and a better dad.

It started when I visited my first talent hotbed, the Spartak Tennis Club in Moscow. On my first morning there, I walked in to see a line of players swinging their racquets in slow motion, without the ball, as a teacher made small, precise adjustments to their form. I noticed the way the teachers routinely mixed age groups. I noticed the riveted, laserlike looks in the younger players’ eyes as they watched the older stars, as if they were burning images of perfect forehands and backhands onto their brains. In my brain, a thought began to take shape.

I could really use this stuff back home.

From that point on, whenever I spotted a nugget of advice or a potentially useful method, I jotted it in my notebook and marked the page with an electric-pink Post-it. I scribbled down tips like Always exaggerate new moves; Shrink the practice space; and (my personal favorite) Take lots of naps. Over the course of the year, a forest of pink grew along the edges of my notebook.

The advice turned out to work well—quite well, judging by the swift, steady progress of my kids’ violin and piano playing, my wife’s hockey skills, and the win-loss record of the Little League team I coached (10-3; the all-star team I coached, which had historically done poorly, nearly advanced to regionals). After The Talent Code was published, I began hearing from groups that were using the principles of the book to create talent-development programs of their own—a charter school in Maine, a nursing program in Minnesota, a golf academy in Florida, an SAT-prep course in California, a Division I college basketball team, a software company, military special-ops training organizations, and several professional sports teams. I kept traveling, visiting more talent hotbeds, talking to more master teachers, and adding more pink Post-its. At some point I realized that I needed to organize all this advice and put it in one place.

This book is that place.

What follows is a collection of simple, practical tips for improving skills, taken directly from the hotbeds I visited and the scientists who research them. The advice is field-tested, scientifically sound, and, most important, concise. Because when it comes down to it, we’re all navigating busy, complex lives. Parent or teacher, kid or coach, artist or entrepreneur, we all want to make the most of our time and energy. When it comes to developing our talents, we could use an owner’s manual, something to say Do this, not that. We could use a master coach that tucks in our pocket. We could use a little book.

How to Use This Book

Let’s start with the basics:

We all possess talents.
We’re unsure how to develop those talents to their full potential.

For most of us, the problem revolves around one word: “how.” How do we recognize talents in ourselves and in those near us? How do we nurture talent in its early stages? How do we gain the most progress in the least time? How do we choose between different strategies, teachers, and methods?

This book is built on the idea that the best way to develop your talents is to follow the proven techniques of the talent hotbeds. The tips I’ve collected fall into three natural categories, which form the sections of this book:

Getting Started: ideas for igniting motivation and creating a blueprint for the skills you want to build.
Improving Skills: methods and techniques for making the most progress in the least time.
Sustaining Progress: strategies for overcoming plateaus, keeping motivational fires lit, and building habits for long-term success.

Each section consists of a series of tips. The tips are brief—not because they’re oversimplified, but because simplicity is the point. While the underlying neuroscience is fascinating and complex, it all adds up to the basic truth: Small actions, repeated over time, transform us. As the master vocal coach Linda Septien put it, “This ain’t magic, and it ain’t rocket science. It’s about working hard, and working smart.”