Coyle - The talent code: greatness isnt born. its grown. heres how

ALSO BY DANIEL COYLE

Hardball: A Season in the Projects

Waking Samuel

Lance Armstrong's War

The Talent Code

GREATNESS ISN'T BORN.

IT'S GROWN. HERE'S HOW.

Daniel Coyle

BANTAM BOOKS

THE TALENT CODE

A Bantam Book / May 2009

Published by

Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

All rights reserved.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Daniel Coyle

Book design by Glen M. Edelstein

Bantam Books and the Rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Coyle, Daniel.

The talent code : Greatness isn't born.

It's grown. Here's how. / Daniel Coyle.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-553-8068-4 (hardcover)ISBN 978-0-553-90649-3 (ebook) 1. Ability. 2. Motivation (Psychology) I. Title.

BF431.C69 2009

153.9dc22

2008047674

Printed in the United States of America

Published simultaneously in Canada

www.bantamdell.com

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

BVG

For Jen

Contents

Introduction ............................................................ 1

PART I. Deep Practice .............................................. 9

Chapter 1: The Sweet Spot ....................................................... 11

Chapter 2: The Deep Practice Cell ......................................... 30

Chapter 3: The Brontes, the Z-Boys, and the Renaissance ..54

Chapter 4: The Three Rules of Deep Practice ..................... 74

PART II. Ignition ................................................... 95

Chapter 5: Primal Cues ............................................................. 97

Chapter 6: The Curacao Experiment .................................... 121

Chapter 7: How to Ignite a Hotbed ....................................... 139

Part III. Master Coaching ...................................... 157

Chapter 8: The Talent Whisperers ........................................ 159

Chapter 9: The Teaching Circuit: A Blueprint ................... 177

Chapter 10: Tom Martinez and the $60 Million Bet ............ 196

Epilogue: The Myelin World ................................. 205

Notes on Sources ...................................................................... 223

Acknowledgments .................................................................... 233

Index ........................................................................................... 237

The Talent Code

Then [David] took his staff in his hand, chose five smooth stones from the stream, put them in the pouch of his

shepherd's bag and, with his sling in his hand, approached Goliath.

1 Samuel 17:40

THE GIRL WHO DID A MONTH'S WORTH

OF PRACTICE IN SIX MINUTES

Every journey begins with questions, and here are three: How does a penniless Russian tennis club with one indoor court create more top-twenty women players than the entire United States?

How does a humble storefront music school in Dallas,

Texas, produce Jessica Simpson, Demi Lovato, and a succession of pop music phenoms?

How does a poor, scantily educated British family in a

remote village turn out three world-class writers?

Talent hotbeds are mysterious places, and the most mysterious thing about them is that they bloom without warning.

The first baseball players from the tiny island of the

Dominican Republic arrived in the major leagues in the 1950s; they now account for one in nine big-league players. The first 2 Introduction

South Korean woman golfer won a Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) tournament in 1998; now there are forty-five on the LP GA Tour, including eight of the top twenty money winners. In 1991 there was only one Chinese entry in the Van Cliburn piano competition; the most recent competition featured eight, a proportional leap reflected in top symphony orchestras around the world.

Media coverage tends to treat each hotbed as a singular phenomenon, but in truth they are all part of a larger, older pattern. Consider the composers of nineteenth-century Vienna, the writers of Shakespearean England, or the artists of the Italian Renaissance, during which the sleepy city of Florence, population 70,000, suddenly produced an explosion of genius that has never been seen before or since. In each case, the identical questions echo: Where does this extraordinary talent come from? How does it grow?

The answer could begin with a remarkable piece of video showing a freckle-faced thirteen-year-old girl named Clarissa.

Clarissa (not her real name) was part of a study by Australian music psychologists Gary McPherson and James Renwick

that tracked her progress at the clarinet for several years.

Officially, the video's title is shorterclarissa3.mov, but it should have been called The Girl Who Did a Month's Worth of Practicein Six Minutes.

On screen, Clarissa does not look particularly talented.

She wears a blue hooded sweatshirt, gym shorts, and an expression of sleepy indifference. In fact, until the six minutes captured on the video, Clarissa had been classified as a musical mediocrity. According to McPherson's aptitude tests and the testimony of her teacher, her parents, and herself, Clarissa possessed no musical gifts. She lacked a good ear; her sense of rhythm was average, her motivation subpar. (In the study's Introduction 3

written section, she marked "because I'm supposed to" as her strongest reason for practicing.) Nonetheless, Clarissa had become famous in music-science circles. Because on an average morning McPherson's camera captured this average kid doing something distinctly un-average. In five minutes and fifty-four seconds, she accelerated her learning speed by ten times, according to McPherson's calculations. What was

more, she didn't even notice.

McPherson sets up the clip for us: It's morning, Clarissa's customary time for practice, a day after her weekly lesson.

She is working on a new song entitled "Golden Wedding,"

a 1941 tune by jazz clarinetist Woody Herman. She's listened to the song a few times. She likes it. Now she's going to try to play it.

Clarissa draws a breath and plays two notes. Then she stops.

She pulls the clarinet from her lips and stares at the paper.

Her eyes narrow. She plays seven notes, the song's opening phrase. She misses the last note and immediately stops, fairly jerking the clarinet from her lips. She squints again at the music and sings the phrase softly. "Dah dah dum dah," she says.

She starts over and plays the riff from the beginning, making it a few notes farther into the song this time, missing the last note, backtracking, patching in the fix. The opening is beginning to snap togetherthe notes have verve and feeling.

When she's finished with this phrase, she stops again for six long seconds, seeming to replay it in her mind, fingering the clarinet as she thinks. She leans forward, takes a breath, and starts again.

It sounds pretty bad. It's not music; it's a broken-up, fitful, slow-motion batch of notes riddled with stops and misses.

Common sense would lead us to believe that Clarissa is failing. But in this case common sense would be dead wrong.