The talent code by Daniel Coyle is The Secret Behind Successful Performers.

The girl did a month of practice in six minutes.

She has a plan in her mind that she constantly compares herself to. She is working in complete thoughts. She is fixing errors, not ignoring them. She is fitting small parts into the whole, drawing the lens in and out all the time, scaffolding herself to a higher level. After introducing talent hotbeds, places that regularly produce top performers, and Clarissa, a girl studied by Australian music psychologists Gary McPherson and James Renwick, who watched her make a month’s worth of progress in 6 minutes, Coyle talked about her.

Myelin is the holy grail of acquiring skill, which grows through practice. Clarissa practices not thinking, not learning, not building, and just wasting time.

The Sweet Spot is the first chapter. Deep practice is part 1

A shared facial expression of taut/intense squint is what makes progress. It was only half the time that being in a talent hotbed felt like standing among a herd of deer. I saw moments of slow, fitful struggle instead of what I had seen on the Clarissa video.

It’s possible to engrave things into memory by active retrieval. When learners try a move, they fail, stop and think, do it again more slowly, fail again, stop to think again, and then break the move down into component parts.

It’s not good for learning if effortlessness is good for performance. It makes you smarter when you struggle at the edges of your ability. Experiences that make you slow down, make errors, and correct them will make you swift and graceful without realizing it.

History students were divided into 2 groups. The first group studied 4x, the second group studied 1x, and the third group studied 3x. The more we generate brain impulses, the faster we learn. Make mistakes into skills.

The more our brains are able to overcome difficulties, the quicker we learn. They had studied one-fourth as much as they had learned.

How are the Brazilian soccer players? The first pilot trainers were created by Link.

Futsal players touch the ball 600% more often than soccer players, the smaller, heavier ball is harder to handle. It makes soccer easier to play. Futsal is played using a ball half the size and twice the weight of the real thing, in a basketball-court sized concrete/wood field. It is all about controlled action.

Chapter 2 deals with the deep practice cell. Good advertising uses these ideas to put viewers at their optimum level of ability. The holidays are not the same without J&B.

The more you fire a circuit, the stronger it becomes, and the more fluent you become. The circuits control everything. It seems like deep practice is a powerful idea. Clarissa does a month’s worth of work in just six minutes.

We are forever building circuits, and we forget that we built them. The more automatic our skills are, the less aware we are of the circuits. We have always had a skill that is natural.

The Bill Greenough 1980s experiment showed that rats in an enriched environment had increased brain synapses. Your brain has more than half its mass made up of myelin.

Researchers began linking myelin deficiencies to a number of disorders. The concepts of brain plasticity and developmental windows were established by Greenough.

The timing is important because the neurons are either fire or not. If 2 neuron have to combine their impulses to make a fire, they have to arrive at the same time. The relationship between hours of practice and white matter was found by Fredrik Ullen.

Myelination is very slow. It takes days to weeks per neuron for it to be wrapped. Fields said that it was like a transatlantic cable. Your genes can’t code the neurons to time things so precisely, but you can build myelin to do it.

You have to teach your circuit and make mistakes to do that. Struggle is neurologically required and not optional.

Myelin does not unwrap. Deep practice is aided by aprimal state where you are attentive, hungry, focused, and desperate.

The cognitive revolution started in the 70s. The mind works like a computer and obeys universal rules. In 1976, the author worked on a thesis on people’s accounts of their mental states. When we reach our 30’s, myelin comes in waves and we will gain it until 50, but even then 5% of oligodendrocytes stay ready to learn. Most world-class experts start young.

A skill is a form of memory. Herbert Simon brought him to the US.

Skills are built with the same mechanisms. Work on technique, seek feedback, and shore up weaknesses.

Ellen Winner has a term for people with an obsessive desire to improve. Mozart studied 3,500 hours of music by age 6 according to Michael Howe.

Elizabeth Gaskell has a story about the romantic creativity of the Bronte sisters. Juliet Barker said that the Brontes lived in a home full of stimulating ideas. The Z-Boys and the Renaissance are included in Chapter 3.

The early writing of the Brontes is needed for their eventual literary success. They spent a lot of time being immature and imitative in the safe space of their little books. The writing of the Brontes was complicated and fanciful, but it wasn’t very good.

To write a book, you have to play a game. They were working on a project.

David Banks shows that there are certain groups of people that tend to show up. Each one of the books was terrible, but each one made them happy, and each one quietly earned them some skill.

Florence, in the year 1440. Athens was in the 4th century BC.

What is the reason? Prosperity, peace, freedom, social mobility were predicted by people. 1570–1640 London.

The rise of craft guilds was based on the apprenticeship system, where young kids would live with a master for 5–10 years and learn. The predictions are not true.

Monkeys have the same brain cells as us, but they have less myelin and can’t talk past the age of 3 years old. It would not seem so wonderful if people knew how hard I had to work to get my mastery.

It’s good for preventing memory loss if you eat fish with fat. There is more myelin in breast milk.

In a few hundred miles of time, certain higher skills become trivial and crucial become obsolete. Building myelin is expensive.

We have a lot of control over what skills we develop, and we each have more potential than we might think. Our genes are not important.

The Holy Shit Effect. The feeling of seeing talent grow in people like you. There are three rules of deep practice.

The chunks are like Russian dolls because they are made ofcrete small circuits. It’s all about chunking at lightning speed. Chess masters use chunking to memorize boards.

There are rules for myelination. It feels like practicing in a dark room. You start slowly, then you stop, think and start again.

At the age of 22, Ray LaMontagne bought dozens of used albums by people like Etta James, Ray Charles, Al Green, Stephen Stills, and spent 2 years singing along to the records, ignoring everyone else. His first album sold nearly half a million copies. Look at the task as a whole and listen to the song you want to play over and over. We are pre-wired to imitate. Break it into smaller pieces. To avoid mistakes, you have to feel them immediately.

It is a big mistake to begin playing without proper technique. Preobrazhenskaya made a big mistake. Spartak is a term for rallying in slow motion with an imaginary ball. Students work on simple, precise motions with an emphasis on technique. For the first 3 years, no one can play a tournament.

Music is cut into strips, put in envelopes, and pulled out randomly. Meadowmount music academy was created by Ivan Galamian. In 7 weeks, students learn 5 times as much as anyone else.

If a passerby can recognize the song being played, you are not practicing right. It’s slower than ever. If you do this for 3 hours with one page of music, you can practice for a couple of weeks.

The strips are cut into smaller pieces. What is the goal? Break a skill into component pieces/circuits and link them together into larger groups.

It isn’t how fast you can do it. It is how slow you can do it correctly. Slowing down lets you pay more attention to errors and gets you more precise with your firing.

In terms of chunks, experts think of a private skill language. Barry studies how people coach themselves. They observe, judge, plan, set goals, self-monitor.

attentive repetition is not a substitute. There is action. Not talking, thinking, imagining, or reading.

Every note is being played for a purpose when I click in. I connect them and get a foundation, it feels like I am building a house. I connect the walls and roof. John Henry Crawford is a student at Meadowmount.

I notice if I don’t practice for a day. My wife notices if I skip practice. The world notices if I skip for three days. Stop practicing for 30 days. Myelin is going to break down.

At Meadowmount, she taught students. There is a limit to how much deep practice people can do in a day. For all skills, 3–5 hours max.

The deep practice cycle can be lengthy. Athletes don’t do tricks when they practice. Athletes and musicians are both athletes. Go and tune your ear. You have to be aware of the mistakes. Hearing a string that is out of tune is something that should bother you a lot.

To get good, it is helpful to be willing, even enthusiastic, about being bad. Evaluate the gap between Target and Reach Repeat.

The beginner students were taught how to hit by W Timothy Gallwey. The road to skill is the baby steps.

Deliberate practice isn’t natural, effortless, routine, or genius.