Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Everything Else
Rating
3/5
Date Started
1/29/2023
Date Completed
2/6/2023
Five Powerful Quotes from the Book
Quote 1
“Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways—operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes—makes you smarter. Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you’re forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them—as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go—end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it…
“When you’re practicing deeply, the world’s usual rules are suspended. You use time more efficiently. Your small efforts produce big, lasting results. You have positioned yourself at a place of leverage where you can capture failure and turn it into skill. The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your present abilities; to target the struggle. Thrashing blindly doesn’t help. Reaching does.”
Quote 2
“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.”
Quote 3
“Q: Why is targeted, mistake-focused practice so effective?
“A: Because the best way to build a good circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again, over and over. Struggle is not an option: it’s a biological requirement.
“Q: Why are passion and persistence key ingredients of talent?
“A: Because wrapping myelin around a big circuit requires immense energy and time. If you don’t love it, you’ll never work hard enough to be great.”
Quote 4
“Skill is insulation that wraps neural circuits and grows according to certain signals. In the most literal sense, master coaches are the human delivery system for the signals that fuel and direct the growth of a given skill circuit, telling it with great clarity to fire here and not here. Coaching is a long, intimate conversation, a series of signals and responses that move toward a shared goal. A coach’s true skill consists not in some universally applicable wisdom that he can communicate to all, but rather in the supple ability to locate the sweet spot on the edge of each individual student’s ability, and to send the right signals to help the student reach toward the right goal, over and over.”
Quote 5
“Patience is a word we use a lot to describe great teachers at work. But what I saw was not patience, exactly. It was more like probing, strategic impatience. The master coaches I met were constantly changing their input. If A didn’t work, they tried B and C; if they failed, the rest of the alphabet was holstered and ready. What seemed like patient repetition from the outside was actually, on closer examination, a series of subtle variations, each one a distinct firing, each one creating a worthwhile combination of errors and fixes that grew myelin.
“Of the many phrases I heard echoing around the talent hotbeds, one stood out as common to all of them. It was: ‘Good. Okay, now do (blank).’ A coach would employ it when a student got the hang of some new move or technique. As soon as the student could accomplish the feat (play that chord, hit that volley), the coach would quickly layer in an added difficulty. Good. Okay, now do it faster. Now do it with the harmony. Small successes were not stopping points but steppingstones.”
About the Book
Original Date Published
[Title]: [Subtitle] – Audiobook | Ebook | Hardcover – “
About the Author
Daniel Coyle – “
Additional Resources
Tags
Business | Nonfiction | Self-Improvement | Sports & Recreations