The Talent Code – Daniel Coyle

Since I was a kid I hated books for presents. (To tell you the truth I still do). Nevertheless, yesterday a friend of mine brought me the audiobook version of “The Talent Code” by Daniel Coyle. [Amazon Link]

For the first 5 minutes I thought I’d never make it to the end. The book is read by the author which *could* have a more engaging voice. I decided to keep on listening anyways as my friend may ask me if I liked the audio book she gave me next time we meet. And then I was blown away. The content is amazing. I’m just almost done listening to this and I paused just to write this review.

CLICK HERE TO BUY THIS BOOK FROM AMAZON
(perfect gift for a teenager, by the way!)

Here’s a “teaser” part that caught my attention – and after that I couldn’t stop listening .. (I transcribe as I listen to the audiobook)

Things that appear to be obstacles turn out to be desirable in the long haul Bjork said. One real encounter, even for a few seconds is far more useful than several hundred observations. Bjork sites an experiment by psychologist Henry Rediger at Washington university of St. Lewis, where students were divided into two groups to study a natural history text. Group A studied the paper for 4 sessions. Group B studied only once but was tested three times.A week later both groups were tested again and group B scored 50% higher than group A. They had studied 1/4 as much, yet learned far more. Cathrin Fritz, one of Bjork’s students said she applied these ideas to her school work and raised her GPA by a full point, while studying half as much.The reason, Bjork explains resides in the way our brains are built. We tend to think of our memory as a tape recorder, but that’s wrong he said. It is a living structure, a scaffold of nearly infinite size. The more we generate impulses, encountering and overcoming difficulties, the more scaffolding we build. The more scaffolding we build, the faster we learn.

There is an optimal gap between what you know and what you are trying to do. When you find that sweet spot learning takes off. “Deep Practice” is a strange concept for two reasons. The first reason is that it cuts against our intuition about talent. Our intuition tells us that practice relates to talent in the same way that a whetstone relates to a knife. Its vital but useless with out a solid blade of so called natural ability. “Deep Practice” raises and intriguing  possibility that practice may be a way to forge the blade itself. The second reason deep practice is a strange concept is that it takes events that we normally strive to avoid, namely mistakes and turns them into skills. To understand how deep practice works then, it is first useful to consider the unexpected but crucial importance of errors to the learning process. In fact, let’s consider an extreme example, which arrives in the form of a question. How do you get good at something when making a mistake has a decent chance of killing you?

Daniel Coyle has looked at the research and he also went on a road trip to what he calls “talent hotbeds”, places where great talent has been produced out of proportion to their size and perceived stature  (for example, a Russian tennis club, a music school in Dallas, a soccer field in Brazil, and others). He talks about Deep practice which  is important to world-class performance. “Deep Practice” is the kind of practice that separates the great from the not-so-great. The understanding of “deep practice” involves an understanding of myelin.  (Myelin is the insulation that wraps around nerve fibers. According to Coyle, myelin turns out to be a very big deal in the development of skill.)

NLP was born to be the art and science of studying, modeling and replicating human excellence, so if you are into NLP you will love this audio/book.

CLICK HERE TO BUY THIS BOOK FROM AMAZON

Daniel Coyle is a contributing editor for Outside magazine and the author of three books, including the New York Times bestseller Lance Armstrong’s War. He has written for Sports Illustrated, The New York Times Magazine, and Play (including this March 2007 cover story which sparked The Talent Code), and is a two-time National Magazine Award finalist.  Coyle lives with his wife, Jen, and their four children in Homer, Alaska.