The Talent Code

1 Greatness Isn t Born. It s Grown. here s CoyleBantam BooksThe Talent Codethe Talent codeA Bantam Book / May 2009 Published byBantam DellA Division of Random House, York, New YorkAll rights 2009 by Daniel CoyleBook design by Glen M. EdelsteinBantam Books and the Rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataCoyle, Talent code : Greatness isn t born. It s grown. Here s how. / Daniel bibliographical references and 978-0-553-80684-7 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-553-90649-3 (ebook)1. Ability. 2. Motivation (Psychology) I. dc222008047674 Printed in the United States of AmericaPublished simultaneously in 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 BVGCHICKEN-WIREHARVARDSIn December 2006 I began visiting tiny places that produceEverest-size amounts of Talent .* My journey began at a ram-shackle tennis court in Moscow, and over the next fourteenmonths it took me to a soccer field in S o Paolo, Brazil, a vocalstudio in Dallas, Texas, an inner-city school in San Jose, Cali -fornia, a run-down music academy in New York s Adirondacks,a baseball-mad island in the Caribbean, and a handful of otherplaces so small, humble, and titanically accomplished that afriend dubbed them the chicken-wire Harvards.

2 * The word talentcan be vague and loaded with slippery overtones about potential, par-ticularly when it comes to young people research shows that being a prodigy is an un-reliable indicator of long-term success (see page 223). In the interest of clarity, we lldefine talentin its strictest sense: the possession of repeatable skills that don t depend onphysical size (sorry, jockeys and NFL linemen).Chapter 1 The Sweet SpotYou will become clever through your mistakes. German proverbUndertaking the journey presented me with a few chal-lenges, the first of which was to explain it to my wife and fouryoung kids in as logical (read: un-harebrained) a way as possi-ble. So I decided to frame it as a Great Expedition, sort of likethose undertaken by nineteenth-century naturalists. I madestraight-faced comparisons between my trip and CharlesDarwin s voyage aboard the Beagle;I sagely expounded howsmall, isolated places magnify larger patterns and forces, sortof like petri dishes.

3 These explanations seemed to work atleast for a moment. Daddy s going on a treasure hunt, I overheard my ten-year-old daughter Katie patiently explain to her younger sis-ters. You know, like at a birthday party. A treasure hunt, a birthday actually that wasn t too faroff. The nine hotbeds I visited shared almost nothing exceptthe happy unlikeliness of their existence. Each was a statisticalimpossibility, a mouse that had not only roared but that hadsomehow come to rule the forest. But how?The first clue arrived in the form of an unexpected I started visiting Talent hotbeds, I expected to be daz-zled. I expected to witness world-class speed, power, andgrace. Those expectations were met and exceeded abouthalf the time. For that half of the time, being in a talenthotbed felt like standing amid a herd of running deer: every-thing moved faster and more fluently than in everyday life.(You haven t had your ego truly tested until an eight-year-oldtakes pity on you on the tennis court.)

4 But that was only half of the time. During the other half Iwitnessed something very different: moments of slow, fitfulstruggle, rather like what I d seen on the Clarissa video. It wasas if the herd of deer suddenly encountered a hillside coatedwith ice. They slammed to a halt; they stopped, looked, and12 The Talent Codethought carefully before taking each step. Making progressbecame a matter of small failures, a rhythmic pattern of botches,as well as something else: a shared facial expression. Theirtaut, intense squint caused them to take on (I know this soundsweird) an unaccountable resemblance to Clint Brunio. He s eleven years old, working on a new soc-cer move on a concrete playground in S o Paolo, Brazil. Hemoves slowly, feeling the ball roll beneath the sole of his cheapsneaker. He is trying to learn the elastico,a ball-handling ma-neuver in which he nudges the ball with the outside of hisfoot, then quickly swings his foot around the ball to flick it theopposite direction with his instep.

5 Done properly, the movegives the viewer the impression that the player has the ball ona rubber band. The first time we watch Brunio try the move,he fails, then stops and thinks. He does it again more slowlyand fails again the ball squirts away. He stops and thinksagain. He does it even more slowly, breaking the move downto its component parts this, this,and that. His face is taut; hiseyes are so focused, they look like they re somewhere something clicks: he starts nailing the Jennie. She s twenty-four years old, and she s in acramped Dallas vocal studio working on the chorus of a popsong called Running Out of Time. She is trying to hit thebig finish, in which she turns the word timeinto a waterfall ofnotes. She tries it, screws up, stops, and thinks, then sings itagain at a much slower speed. Each time she misses a note, shestops and returns to the beginning, or to the spot where shemissed. Jennie sings and stops, sings and stops.

6 Then all of asudden, she gets it. The pieces snap into place. The sixth timethrough, Jennie sings the measure we see people practice effectively, we usually de-scribe it with words like willpoweror concentration orfocus. ButThe Sweet Spot13those words don t quite fit, because they don t capture the ice-climbing particularity of the event. The people inside the tal-ent hotbeds are engaged in an activity that seems, on the faceof it, strange and surprising. They are seeking out the slip-pery hills. Like Clarissa, they are purposely operating at theedges of their ability, so they will screw up. And somehowscrewing up is making them better. How?Trying to describe the collective Talent of Brazilian soccerplayers is like trying to describe the law of gravity. You canmeasure it the five World Cup victories, the nine hundredor so young talents signed each year by professional Europeanclubs. Or you can name it the procession of transcendentstars like Pel , Zico, Socrates, Rom rio, Ronaldo, Juninho,Robinho, Ronaldinho, Kak , and others who have deservedlyworn the crown of world s best player.

7 But in the end youcan t capture the power of Brazilian Talent in numbers andnames. It has to be felt. Every day soccer fans around theworld witness the quintessential scene: a group of enemy play-ers surround a Brazilian, leaving him no options, no space, nohope. Then there s a dancelike blur of motion a feint, aflick, a burst of speed and suddenly the Brazilian player is inthe clear, moving away from his now-tangled opponents withthe casual aplomb of a person stepping off a crowded day, Brazil accomplishes something extremely difficultand unlikely: in a game at which the entire world is feverishlycompeting, it continues to produce an unusually high percent-age of the most skilled conventional way to explain this kind of concentratedtalent is to attribute it to a combination of genes and environ-ment, nature and nurture. In this way of thinking,Brazil is great because it possesses a unique confluence of fac-14 The Talent Codetors: a friendly climate, a deep passion for soccer, and a genet-ically diverse population of 190 million, 40 percent of whomare desperately poor and long to escape through the beauti-ful game.

8 Add up all the factors and voil ! you have theideal factory for soccer there s a slight problem with this explanation: Brazilwasn t always a great producer of soccer players. In the 1940sand 1950s, with its trifecta of climate, passion, and poverty already firmly in place, the ideal factory produced unspectac-ular results, never winning a World Cup, failing to defeatthen-world-power Hungary in four tries, showing few of thedazzling improvisational skills for which it would later becomeknown. It wasn t until 1958 that the Brazil the world now rec-ognizes truly arrived, in the form of a brilliant team featuringseventeen-year-old Pel , at the World Cup in Sweden.* Ifsometime during the next decade Brazil should shockinglylose its lofty place in the sport (as Hungary so shockinglydid), then the Brazil-is-unique argument leaves us with noconceivable response except to shrug and celebrate the newchampion, which undoubtedly will also possess a set of char-acteristics all its how does Brazil produce so many great players?

9 The surprising answer is that Brazil produces great playersbecause since the 1950s Brazilian players have trained in a par-ticular way, with a particular tool that improves ball-handlingskill faster than anywhere else in the world. Like a nation of Clarissas, they have found a way to increase their learning* Soccer historians trace the moment to the opening three minutes of Brazil s 1958 World Cup semifinal victory against the heavily favored Soviet Union. The Soviets,who were regarded as the pinnacle of modern technique, were overrun by the ball-handling skills of Pel , Garrincha, and Vav . As commentator Luis Mendes said, Thescientific systems of the Soviet Union died a death right there. They put the first man inspace, but they couldn t mark Garrincha. The Sweet Spot15velocity and like her, they are barely aware of it. I call thiskind of training deep practice, and as we ll see, it applies tomore than best way to understand the concept of deep practice isto do it.

10 Take a few seconds to look at the following lists;spend the same amount of time on each / breezebread / b_tterleaf / treemusic / l_ricssweet / soursh_e / sockmovie / actressphone / bo_kgasoline / enginechi_s / salsahigh school / collegepen_il / paperturkey / stuffingriver / b_atfruit / vegetablebe_r / winecomputer / chiptelevision / rad_ochair / couchl_nch / dinnerNow turn the page. Without looking, try to remember asmany of the word pairs as you can. From which column doyou recall more words?If you re like most people, it won t even be close: you willremember more of the words in column B, the ones that con-tained fragments. Studies show you ll remember three timesas many. It s as if, in those few seconds, your memory skills16 The Talent Codesuddenly sharpened. If this had been a test, your column Bscore would have been 300 percent IQ did not increase while you looked at column didn t feel different. You weren t touched by genius (sorry).