Title: The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How
Author: Daniel Coyle
Scope: 3 stars
Readability: 5 stars
My personal rating: 5 stars
See more on my book rating system.
Topic of Book
Coyle tries to explain why talent hotbeds arise in specific times and places.
My Comments
One of the most underrated factors in progress and economic growth is learning new skills. Without skills technology and organizations become irrelevant. Coyle gives us an interesting theory on the biological components for learning a new skill and how we can apply it to our lives.
My notes below mainly focus on the biology section, but the rest of the book is interesting as well.
Key Take-away
- Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows in response to certain signals. The more time and energy you put into the right kind of practice, the more skill you get.
- Every human skill, whether it’s playing baseball or playing Bach, is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse—basically, a signal traveling through a circuit.
- Myelin plays a key biological role in learning new skills by insulating those nerve fibers, making the signal stronger and faster by preventing the electrical impulses from leaking out.
- The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates, and the faster and more accurate our movements and thoughts become.
- This system is flexible, responsive, and economical, because it gives all human beings the innate potential to earn skill where they need it.
- The Talent Code is:
Master Coaching > Ignition > Deep Practice > Talent.
Important Quotes from Book
“The talent code is built on revolutionary scientific discoveries involving a neural insulator called myelin, which some neurologists now consider to be the holy grail of acquiring skill. Here’s why. Every human skill, whether it’s playing baseball or playing Bach, is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse—basically, a signal traveling through a circuit. Myelin’s vital role is to wrap those nerve fibers the same way that rubber insulation wraps a copper wire, making the signal stronger and faster by preventing the electrical impulses from leaking out. When we fire our circuits in the right way—when we practice swinging that bat or playing that note—our myelin responds by wrapping layers of insulation around that neural circuit, each new layer adding a bit more skill and speed. The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates, and the faster and more accurate our movements and thoughts become.”
“myelin is important because it provides us with a vivid new model for understanding skill. Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows in response to certain signals. The more time and energy you put into the right kind of practice—the longer you stay in the Clarissa zone, firing the right signals through your circuits—the more skill you get, or, to put it a slightly different way, the more myelin you earn.”
“The revolution is built on three simple facts. (1) Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons—a circuit of nerve fibers. (2) Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy. (3) 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.”
“What do good athletes do when they train?” Bartzokis said. “They send precise impulses along wires that give the signal to myelinate that wire. They end up, after all the training, with a super-duper wire—lots of bandwidth, a high-speed T-3 line. That’s what makes them different from the rest of us.”
“Skill is myelin insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows according to certain signals. The story of skill and talent is the story of myelin.”
“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.”
“Prewiring a million-wire circuit for a complex higher skill is a stupid and expensive bet for genes to make.”
“Instead of prewiring for specific skills, what if the genes dealt with the skill issue by building millions of tiny broadband installers and distributing them throughout the circuits of the brain? The broadband installers wouldn’t be particularly complicated—in fact, they’d all be identical… They would work according to a single rule: whatever circuits are fired most, and most urgently, are the ones where the installers will go.”
“This system is flexible, responsive, and economical, because it gives all human beings the innate potential to earn skill where they need it.”
“There is, biologically speaking, no substitute for attentive repetition. Nothing you can do—talking, thinking, reading, imagining—is more effective in building skill than executing the action, firing the impulse down the nerve fiber, fixing errors, honing the circuit.”
“What’s the simplest way to diminish the skills of a superstar talent?… The answer: don’t let them practice for a month”
Diagram of the talent code (in Epilogue):
Master Coaching > Ignition > Deep Practice > Talent.
“Carol Dweck, the psychologist who studies motivation, likes to say that all the world’s parenting advice can be distilled to two simple rules: pay attention to what your children are fascinated by, and praise them for their effort. To which I would add, tell them how the myelin mechanism works.
The Ratchet of Technology, a site by Michael Magoon 