Today, I spoke with Daniel Coyle, who is a contributing editor for Outside magazine, and a New York Times bestselling author. His latest book is called The Talent Code, which he discusses in the below interview. Daniel defines talent, gives some great examples of talented people, explains the attributes of talent, how he’s used his talent to gain recognition as a writer and much more.
How do you define talent? Has the requirement for talent changed in the past decade?
“I define talent as the possession of a repeatable skill.”
It’s not potential. As an old Texas football coach used to say: “Potential means you ain’t done it yet.” We all can get lucky—a long shot, an unexpected victory – but the point is to develop our skill circuit so we can do it again, and again (and again). In the past decade the bar for talent has been raised a lot. Businesses can find talent faster, test it faster — just as in sports, art, music, and math.
What’s changing in a deeper way is our understanding of talent, and what genius is truly made of. The bottom line: we’re at a tipping point in the way we understand talent and skill. The fog of mystery is lifting; we’re understanding how skill circuits really grow. And it turns out there are some dazzling connections that can be drawn between Michelangelo and Michael Jordan – and the rest of us. There are some basic systems at work here that seem mysterious, until you understand them.
We’ve seen this story before. A hundred and fifty years ago, disease was a mystery. Some people got sick and died; other people lived. Then we discovered how the immune system works.
Forty years ago, endurance was a mystery. A few lucky people (genetic freaks, we presumed) could run marathons; most of us couldn’t. Then we discovered how the aerobic system works. It turns out, we can maximize our aerobic system if we train it the right way – and now millions of people run marathons.
Today, talent and skill are the last and greatest mystery: some people seem to be born talented, others aren’t. But now, as David Brooks pointed out here, we’re in the midst of discovering how the human skill-acquiring system really works. Here’s the news: it turns out we can maximize our skill system – which are literally electrical circuits inside our brains – if we train them in the right way.
What traits/characteristics do all talented people have in common from your research?
For the book, I visited nine talent hotbeds around the world – from a tiny club in Russia that produced more top-20 players than the entire United States (on a single indoor court!) to the music academy that helped develop Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman, to a pop music school in Texas that produced Demi Lovato, Jessica Simpson, and Idol finalists, to the baseball fields of the Caribbean.
In all of these farflung places, a holy trinity of common factors kept showing up.
- They practiced slowly, deeply, attentively – operating right at the raw edges of their ability, making errors and fixing them. It’s a zone I call Deep Practice, and it increases skill acquisition by ten times over regular practice.
- They were motivated by certain kinds of signals that released huge amounts of unconscious energy, a process that I call Ignition.
- They were coached by the same kind of person – a quiet, usually older, usually low-key person. A talent whisperer.
One of them isn’t enough, because you have to understand that talent is a system, a process. Through the right kind of practice, you are literally altering the electrical circuits of your brain—you are growing it. Just like a car engine is useless without a fuel tank, so is Deep Practice useless without being attached to motivation. Combine them, and things take off.
Does everyone have an equal chance of finding their talent and using it to become successful?
It would be nice if that were true, but the truth is, the world’s not built that way. The playing field is not level; the opportunities are sometimes pure luck.
What is true, however, is that everybody shares the same path forward, the same fundamental system for adding skill. For most of us, it’s not about growing up to be Tiger Woods or Warren Buffett or Michelangelo. It’s about making the most of our potential – and by definition, that potential is a lot greater than we might imagine.
What I saw at the talent hotbeds – and have witnessed in other ways – is just how powerful this mechanism is. For instance, in the book we meet Clarissa, an average kid who accomplishes a month’s worth of clarinet practice in six minutes – when she combines that holy trinity of practice, motivation, and coaching. The kids playing soccer in Brazil were doing essentially the same thing – as are the inner-city schoolkids, and the Toyota executives whose stories I tell. All are ignited and growing skill circuits.
I think we’re all acquainted with Clarissas in our own lives: average people who zoom off unexpectedly to heights of what looks like “natural-born” talent. But when you look at it through this particular lens, Clarissa makes sense, as does Toyota, as do the schoolkids. They all get better because they are tapping into the basic human mechanism that grows skill.
“Here’s something to remember: your brain has enough wiring in it to stretch around the world—twice. That’s the definition of human potential.”
How do you know what your talent is? Does someone have to tell you?
We all know the cliché – that it’s all about passion, following your bliss, blah blah. There’s some truth in that (as with all clichés). But what’s interesting, as the research shows, the ignition of this passion happens largely in the unconscious mind. It has to do with our identity. When we link our identity to a skill, when we envision ourselves doing it far into the future, we are tapping into a massive evolutionary energy source.
There’s this great study in the book that shows how this works. A scientist named Gary McPherson took several hundred kids and started studying their musical progress. He started before they even picked out an instrument, and followed them for a dozen years – an amazingly comprehensive study. So the kids start playing and soon they’re sorted as we’d expect: a few of the kids zoom off, progressing really quickly. A few hardly progress at all. Most are somewhere in the middle.
So McPherson goes back and asks, so what key factor is causing this? Why do some kids zoom and some plod along? He analyzes all the data he’s gathered on the kids (and he’s got tons). Is it IQ? (No.) Ability to identify a tone? (No.) Is it math ability? (No.) Ability to keep rhythm? (No.) Is it socioeconomic status? Income? Parents? (No, no, no.)
The only thing it is – the factor that determined their progress – was their answer to a question he’d asked them BEFORE they even started. The question was: how long do you think you’re going to play this instrument?
The kids who said, “I’m going to play for a year or so” – they hardly progressed at all. The kids who said, “I’m going to play for through elementary school” – they were in the middle. And the kids who were ignited, who said, “I am going to play this my whole life” – they zoomed off, progressing 400 percent faster than the others.
The lesson here is that their progress had nothing to do with their aptitude. It had everything to do with some mysterious moment where the kids got this idea: I am a musician. This idea wasn’t logical (remember it didn’t correlate with any tonal or rhythmic ability they had). But this tiny idea had huge consequences. When our identity gets wrapped up in a goal, we’re tapping into a huge fuel source.
What is your talent and how have you used it to gain recognition?
I used a lot of these ideas in writing the book. I copied what they did in the talent hotbeds – pushing myself to the edges of my ability, making mistakes, fixing them. Throughout, I made a LOT of mistakes—false starts, areas of reporting that didn’t pan out, outlines that got scrapped, introductions that proved, on reflection, kind of stupid. One of the problems with writing is that the eventual outcome is so polished that it’s easy to forget the foundation on which it is built. But one thing I like about the idea behind this book is that it casts our failures into a new light. Those are not screwups; they are not verdicts—they are information. They are, quite literally, me building the skill circuit to write this book. You can’t build the circuit if you don’t make those errors, because the mistakes tell you where to go. No screwups, no book.
Beyond writing? I found myself using these principles when I was playing hockey. I started a couple years ago, and I was pretty terrible – I couldn’t do a real hockey stop, or crossover, and pretty much got schooled by any decent ten-year-old. But I applied these rules – I practiced deeply—and I’ve gotten a lot better. (Added factor: my wife plays on a team – so I guess you could say I had plenty of motivation.) It helped with playing guitar, which I’m also less mediocre at than I was – and I can learn songs a lot faster now.
Mostly, though, I used it coaching Little League. I’ve coached on and off for ten years, and only this past year did I feel like I was really coaching, as opposed to being a Friendly Encourager and Chief Suggester. Basically, I stole a bunch of ideas from the master coaches I met at the hotbeds – their way of teaching to the individual (as opposed to broadcasting general information to the team), of seeking to create and correct errors (as opposed to avoiding/ignoring them) really helped. Plus they had lots of concepts—like slowing down the game, or shrinking it into a tiny space –that had a huge effect. We had a great year – nearly went to state. This year, I’m coaching a girls’ team – I’ll keep you posted.
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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. His latest book is called The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How. Daniel Coyle was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. After college, he worked as a sportswriter for the Anchorage Times then attended journalism school in Chicago, where he landed a job at Outside magazine.
