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" participants look at the task as a whole—as one big chunk, the megacircuit. Second, they divide it into its smallest possible chunks. Third, they play with time, slowing the action down, then speeding it up, to learn its inner architecture "
― Daniel Coyle , The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Everything Else
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" To sum up: it's time to rewrite the maxim that practice makes perfect. The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect. And myelin operates by a few fundamental principles. The firing of the circuit is paramount. Myelin is not built to respond to fond wishes or vague ideas or information that washes over us like a warm bath. The mechanism is built to respond to actions: the literal electrical impulses traveling down nerve fibers. It responds to urgent repetition. In a few chapters we'll discuss the likely evolutionary reasons, but for now we'll simply note that deep practice is assisted by the attainment of a primal state, one where we are attentive, hungry, and focused, even desperate. Myelin is universal. One size fits all skills. Our myelin doesn't “know” whether it's being used for playing shortstop or playing Schubert: regardless of its use, it grows according to the same rules. Myelin is meritocratic: circuits that fire get insulated. If you moved to China, your myelin would wrap fibers that help you conjugate Mandarin verbs. To put it another way, myelin doesn't care who you are—it cares what you do. Myelin wraps—it doesn't unwrap. Like a highway-paving machine, myelination happens in one direction. Once a skill circuit is insulated, you can't un-insulate it (except through age or disease). That's why habits are hard to break. The only way to change them is to build new habits by repeating new behaviors—by myelinating new circuits. "
― Daniel Coyle , The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Everything Else
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" She said she learned it in three weeks—but somebody else told me she really did it in two.” These feats are routine at Meadowmount, in part because the teachers take the idea of chunking to its extreme. Students scissor each measure of their sheet music into horizontal strips, which are stuffed into envelopes and pulled out in random order. They go on to break those strips into smaller fragments by altering rhythms. For instance, they will play a difficult passage in dotted rhythm (the horses' hooves sound—da-dum, da-dum). This technique forces the player to quickly link two of the notes in a series, then grants them a beat of rest before the next two-note link. The goal is always the same: to break a skill into its component pieces (circuits), memorize those pieces individually, then link them together in progressively larger groupings (new, interconnected circuits). "
― Daniel Coyle , The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Everything Else
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" As Vladimir Horowitz, the virtuoso pianist who kept performing into his eighties, put it, “If I skip practice for one day, I notice. If I skip practice for two days, my wife notices. If I skip for three days, the world notices. "
― Daniel Coyle , The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Everything Else
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" to paint a vivid picture of what deep practice feels like. It's the feeling, in short, of being a staggering baby, of intently, clumsily lurching toward a goal and toppling over. It's a wobbly, discomfiting sensation that any sensible person would instinctively seek to avoid. Yet the longer the babies remained in that state—the more willing they were to endure it, and to permit themselves to fail—the more myelin they built, and the more skill they earned. The staggering babies embody the deepest truth about deep practice: to get good, it's helpful to be willing, or even enthusiastic, about being bad. Baby steps are the royal road to skill. "
― Daniel Coyle , The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Everything Else
