42
" strategy of kaizen, which is Japanese for “continuous improvement” and which just as easily could be called corporate deep practice. Kaizen is the process of finding and improving small problems. Each employee, from the janitor on up, has authority to halt the production line if they spot a problem. (Each factory has pull cords on the factory floor, called andons.) The vast majority of improvements come from employees, and the vast majority of those changes are small: a one-foot shift in the location of a parts bin, for instance. But they add up. It's "
― Daniel Coyle , The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Everything Else
45
" (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. "
― Daniel Coyle , The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Everything Else
53
" 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. All skill acquisitions, and therefore all talent hotbeds, operate on the same principles of action, no matter how different they may appear to us. As Dr. George Bartzokis, a UCLA neurologist and myelin researcher, put it, “All skills, all language, all music, all movements, are made of living circuits, and all circuits grow according to certain rules. "
― Daniel Coyle , The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Everything Else
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" 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. "
― Daniel Coyle , The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Everything Else
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" 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. "
― Daniel Coyle , The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Everything Else