You can progress more in 6 minutes than you would in a month | Daniel Coyle

00:00We live in this moment of peak individualism. And so, whenever we see achievement, we focus on that individual. We focus on what  makes them special. We focus on their habits, their behaviors. We just see them. If you were  look at Hemingway and look at him through the lens of individualism, you would say, "Well, what what  makes you great?"

00:16And it would be about his hard work. It would be about his particular gift, his  talent. And that's a very sexy story to tell. It's a very beautiful story to tell that he's sort of  a magical person. And that Steve Jobs is a magical person.

00:30That Michael Jordan is a magical person. That Baryshnikov is a magical person. We get kind of addicted looking at through this  individualistic lens. But when we do that, we're blind to all the other forces that are actually,  truthfully, generating that talent.

00:40Generating that performance. Generating that fulfillment. I'm Daniel Coyle. I write about the science of human potential. I'm the author of The Talent  Code, The Culture Code, and my new book Flourish. Thank you for watching Big Think. If you'd like  to support our work, we encourage you to join our members community.

01:02As a member, you'll receive our  quarterly print magazine, a beautifully designed collection of the ideas and interviews that  matter most. Big Think is for curious people who want to take deep dives into big ideas. To  support the media you want to see in the world, go to bigthink.com/membership.

01:16And now, back to the interview. Where talent actually comes from. When you actually scratch the surface of a great  performer, when you actually look into what made a Hemingway or a Jordan or a Baryshnikov, what  you will invariably find is an elite environment.

01:37A bunch of relationships, a bunch of connection. Oh, who Mr. Hemingway? He's a great writer. Well, who taught him to love words? What models  served him as he began to develop? What kind of environment was he in? And when you begin to take  this environmental lens and put it on, it opens up new opportunities for leadership.

01:53It's really in  the end about creating conditions where people can grow together. There's a great saying in the Tao  Te Ching, where there's a good leader, people say, "What a good leader that is." But where there's a  great leader, people say, "We did it ourselves."

02:10That's not how we typically have thought about  leadership in the past. We often focus on control, we often focus on results, we often focus  on sort of treating people as if they're separate from others. But when we take this more  ecological approach, it opens up opportunity.

02:18It opens up new ways to create more growth. So  I spent 5 years visiting talent hotbeds all over the world, like places that produced  impossible numbers of talented performers. A Russian tennis club that produced more top  25 players than the entire United States or a Bulgarian chess club.

02:39And the places that  I visited had a sort of common features in their environment that I saw over and over again. The first thing is that they were kind of junky. I started to call them chicken wire Harvards. You  know, you'd go to the music camp and there'd be like cinder blocks holding up the stairs and  the camp hadn't been repaired in a long time.

02:59They didn't put their attention on creating a  luxurious environment. They explicitly did not. They actually kept it very spartan. An elite  development environment is not one where every luxury is given to you. It's a place of work. It's  a place of craft.

03:11The second thing I noticed is that they really had a different relationship  to mistakes. There's something called learning velocity and the best story I know to get a handle  on that is a story about Clarissa. Clarissa was a 15-year-old musician.

03:27She was part of the study  done by a psychologist named Gary McPherson. And McPherson tracked her study for months and  he identified one segment, one brief segment, 6-minute segment where she progressed more than  she did in a month of normal practice.

03:39And the question is, what did that look like? Well,  Clarissa's sitting down, she's wearing a hoodie, she's got her clarinet, and she's looking at  the music really intently, looking at it just ferociously intently, and then she plays a little  snatch of a song.

03:53It's called The Golden Wedding, and she plays the first couple bars. It's a jazzy  little tune. And then she makes a mistake and she stops. She feels that mistake, and then she  reads the notes again and she goes back and she hums it to herself.

04:09And then she goes back  and she plays a little bit further and she makes another mistake and she stops. If you picture what  the wires of her brain are doing in that moment, she's reaching. She's sensing that failure and  then reaching again.

04:19And that's called deep practice. It's when you get to the edge of  your ability to increase learning velocity. When you deliberately make mistakes in order to  build skill. That's what deep practice is. And when I visited these talent hotbeds, they were  all practicing like a bunch of Clarissas.

04:37They were all keenly focused on pushing themselves to  the edge of their ability, sensing that mistake, and then reaching again. And deep practice is all  about that moment of reach. That moment of reach where our learning velocity goes up.

04:55And really,  it's a moment of reinterpreting what mistakes are. You know, we walk around thinking mistake is a  verdict. Mistake is a sign. This isn't meant for me. But in fact, a mistake is information. It's  information over where you should reach next.

05:11And that combination of this intense  desire plus this intense reaching, it's like this engine, right? You've got this  high motivation fuel, reaching into this zone. And when we think about who the fastest learners  on in the world are, well, for my money, the fastest learners in the world are probably uh like  12-year-old kids on their skateboards.

05:26They learn really, really fast. They get good really, really  fast. Who are the slowest learners in the world? Well, maybe those same kids in their algebra  class. What's happening in those cases? What for look at them through a Clarissa lens.

05:41In the  skateboard, the skateboard is showing them the environment of that skateboard is showing  them where the mistakes are. They feel it. They feel that moment and they can correct  and adjust. They can make mistakes and fix. In the algebra classroom, they're sort of sitting  passively and knowledge is washing over them.

05:58The learning velocity of certain  environments, by tweaking the environment, you can massively impact the learning velocity. And that's the lesson of these talent hotbeds. They tweak the environment to create those reaches  to improve learning velocity.

06:08Like for example, at that same music school, Meadowmount School  of Music, they would take a sheet of music that they're learning, and this is a place where some  of the top musicians on the planet have trained. They would take their their sheet music and  cut it into strips, each line.

06:23Cut it up and mix them up in a bowl. Pull one out, play it,  and try to learn bit by bit, chunk by chunk. One of the places that I saw that was really  good at generating errors was Brazilian soccer. You know, there's a there's a mystery. Why does  Brazil produce so many brilliant soccer players?

06:43And the answer to that mystery is usually, well,  it's Brazil. It's warm and and they play on the beach and it's really inviting and they love  soccer. And that explanation makes a little bit of sense, but when you think about it more  deeply, there's a lot of places that are warm.

06:57There's a lot of places that love soccer. And  until the '50s, Brazil wasn't actually that good. They were beaten by Hungary in the World  Cup, which is not exactly a beach nation. So, what happened to make Brazil good? They  became addicted to this strange little game.

07:13It's called futebol de salão, soccer in the  room. And it resembles soccer if you fed soccer amphetamines and shoved it in a phone booth. Like,  it's intensely fast. The The space is about as big as a basketball court. The ball is small, smaller  center of gravity, five-a-side.

07:26It's passing lanes are very narrow. The game is very fast. There's  no space. You have to make decisions right now. It forces you into the sweet spot over and  over again. There's no room. The ball's small, difficult to control. So, the vision that creates,  the pressure that creates, it puts people into that zone of development, into that clearest spot.

07:49Brazil is uniquely addicted to futebol do salão. There were, until about 2009, I think there were  39 international championships and Brazil had won 38 of them. It's played all over the nation. And when you look at the biographies of great Brazilian players, they all spent a huge portion  of their youth doing this, playing this game.

08:11That's what surprised me about those those talent  hotbeds, that they were not making each other comfortable. They were tipping their environment  so that they could get into that clearest zone, so they could make more mistakes, so they could  build more skill.

08:23And I call it the rule of 20%. If you're making mistakes about 20% of the time,  you're probably in the sweet spot. If you're not making any mistakes, you are not learning. If  you're making 80% percent mistakes, you're not in the sweet spot.

08:40That's pretty sour to be there. And the great irony of the sweet spot is that it feels kind of bitter. It's really hard to hang out  making 80% success and 20% mistakes. It's hard. So, it takes that extra bit of focus. It takes  that, what they would call, deliberate practice.

08:57There was this embrace of struggle, where the  struggle was validated, the struggle was expected, the struggle was noble. I saw it really vividly  at Spartak. Spartak is a tennis club outside of Moscow. It has produced more top 25 women players  than the entire United States in the 1990s and the early 2000.

09:16And when you get to Spartak, you  start to wonder why, because it's it's like in the middle of this huge park, and it's like an  old Quonset hut. It looks like something ancient from World War II. And when I walked there, I felt  like I had gone to the wrong place, because it was sort of looked kind of deserted.

09:33There was a  tiny door. I remember opening the door, but I didn't hear tennis balls. I kind of expected to  hear tennis balls, but I didn't hear tennis ball. And the reason I didn't hear is that they were  all swinging without the ball. They were all in a line, almost like dancers swinging slowly.

09:47And  the teacher, whose name was Larissa Preobrajenska, she was 79 and it was this was her routine. She  would not let them begin to compete until they had perfected the stroke. She was incredulous. How can  you start to compete unless you build the stroke?

10:05And so what she was doing with that slow motion  practice, almost like dancers moving through the stroke, fixing their wrist, fixing their elbow,  having them repeat it and repeat it until it was absolutely built and grooved, then they could go  to compete.

10:15It really for me captured that sense of of focus and and focus on building that happens  in these places. They're not sort of rolling out the balls and saying, "Go hit balls and see  who's who has magical talent." They're saying, "Wait a minute, we have to start from the ground.

10:33We have to start from the most basic transfer of power from the most basic movement of your  body. And let's focus on that and struggle through that until we've got it." And they  build it piece by piece by piece by piece. I mean, the rule of 10,000 hours has been both  elevated and trashed in in recent years.

10:48And in some ways I think we've landed on this sort of  medium area where it's not a hard and fast rule. You can't just go do 10,000 hours of something  and be world class. And yes, it's depends on which skill you're trying to do. If you're doing  high jump, um genetics play a bigger role on that.

11:09If you're doing the 100-meter sprint, genetics  play a bigger role on that. But for most skills, it's a pretty good rule of thumb to say you need  to deep practice, you need to deep practice a lot, and you need to build that circuitry. That's  sort of a non-negotiable.

11:19You need to build that circuitry and that takes that takes time. So there's not a sort of a a a shortcut or a hack to get to this. Spending time building  those fundamentals, building those circuits, making those mistakes, reaching past where  you currently are on the edge of your ability, and doing that over and over again.

11:43That's what  what actually skill to skill is built of. It's kind of a depressing message in some way to say,  "Oh, yeah, there's not a there's not a shortcut." But on the other hand, what I see in the talent  hotbeds is that it's an immensely liberating message.

11:59It's an immensely joyful message, and it  makes each repetition actually matter because each time you're going to a slightly further place. You  made the mistake, you learned from the mistake, you grew. And so, that growth is what repetition  actually is.

12:12There was also this sense that um you could steal ideas. There wasn't a sense that  everything was individual, like that you had to figure out your way to do it. It was a sense you  could borrow and beg and steal ideas from other people. An elite environment where a person has  the opportunity to learn from others, to stare, to stare and learn.

12:36That's really the first moment  of deep practice when we look at a skill and say, "I want to do that." And kind of fall in love  with it. Fall in love with that baseball swing, fall in love with that poem, fall in love with  that music, fall in love with that dance move.

12:51To really take it inside yourself. And  that's that same pattern that I saw. A social environment where you can stare and learn. A place where you're not focused on yourself, but you're using other people's ideas. And a place  where struggle is not just not just accepted, but validated and made noble.

13:08You know, one  of the greatest mysteries in the world is why did the Renaissance happen? Why did the  Renaissance happen in Italy at that time? And there's all kinds of reasons historians  give. Oh, it happened you know, because Florence was emptied out by the plague and because the The  existed.

13:22But when all those all those reasons also happened in other places, why was it there? And  what you find out when you dig into that is that Florence was where craft guilds evolved. A guild  was a workshop where young people were brought in and taught the craft of mixing paint and carving  stone and making frescoes and preparing pigments.

13:46And they would get hundreds of reps, thousands  of reps, thousands of hours spent learning about the fundamentals of their craft. Each one of those  reps putting them into that zone of deep practice. That's the kind of environment that's an elite  development environment.

13:58It's not one where they got put in a kind of a country club environment  and given lessons from painters. It's ones where they were working every day with other people  on real projects, you know, learning as they went. First as a young apprentice learning how  to prepare the surface, then mixing the paints, learning how the medium worked, watching  great masters at work.

14:16They're staring, they're struggling, and they're stealing. And that  to me is an elite environment. And so as we look at our schools, as we look at our families, as  we look at our work environments, the challenge to us is how do we create that environment where  it is safe to stare, struggle, and steal together uh for in a at a craft of getting better.

14:39And  create that kind of guild environment where we can dig in and and grow ourselves. I think the most  mind-blowing thing that I see people astonished by is the compounding effect. If you improve 1% a day  at piano, at public speaking, at dance, at at at whatever you're trying to improve at.

15:001% a day for  a year, by the end of that year you're 37 times better than when you started. Compounding,  exponential growth is mind-blowing. And so that's why I think we've all had experiences in  our lives where we've had people around us who've just took taken off like rocket ships.

15:17Kids in our  neighborhood who have grown up to be incredible musicians maybe, or people we used to go to  high school with who are very unimpressive who are now incredibly impressive in terms of their  skill and their talent level. And that speaks really to all that potential that's that's that's  right there waiting for you when you take off that individual focus when you start looking at it  through a more holistic kind of ecological lens.

15:42When you stop treating talent as a magical gift  and start treating it as something you can grow. The question this leads us to is how do you get  that's a big project like growing that much skill spending that much time it's not an easy thing to  spend all that time at the edge of your ability.

15:58What makes someone do that? And the answer is  ignition. We tend to think of motivation is this internal trait and yes it feels that way  but in fact it's about this relationship this interaction that we have with the culture around  us. Motivation doesn't happen from the inside out it always happens from the outside in.

16:13When we see  someone that we want to become when we see some a vision of our future self that is what unlocks  motivation. Somebody who is sort of like a person on the horizon toward which we want to travel. And there's all kinds of fascinating experiments that that that they've done to do this.

16:31One of my  favorites is this birthday experiment. They have a class read a biography of a mathematician and  it gives some information about the mathematician. It talks about where they were born talks about  how they developed and at the end of it as part of the bio they give the mathematician's birthday.

16:46But here's the twist for half of the students the birthday of the mathematician matched their actual  birthday. The experimenters made it match. And then they gave everybody in that experiment a math  test. Like okay you read about this mathematician how hard will you work on the math test?

17:01And the  people's whose birthday matched worked three times as hard on the math test. There was an unsolvable  problem on the math test and they spent three three times as much time working on that  problem. Which is kind of crazy cuz all it was was just this little moment like you and  the math teacher are connected.

17:16This little guitar string inside them got plucked. Like, oh,  that math teacher is connected to me in some way. And that social connection unlocked energy. And  that's how we're built. When we see something that we really connect with in our windshield,  that we feel that guitar string get plucked, it unlocks energy.

17:38And that's that moment of  ignition. You know, we typically think of talent hotbeds as being kind of magical places. But in  fact, with many of them, you can go back in time and see the moment when they got lit, when they  got ignited. If you're a Russian tennis player, it was when Anna Kournikova went to the finals  at Wimbledon.

17:55A girl from Spartak, from that same club, showed up. She went all the way to the  finals at Wimbledon. Next thing you know, there's more champions coming out of Spartak five years  later. If you're a baseball player on the island of Curacao, it's the moment Andruw Jones hit three  home runs in a World Series in 1996.

18:09From that moment on, that that island began it it's like  that ultimate guitar string. They're all saying, if they can do it, why can't I? And that moment,  which is, by the way, completely irrational, illogical, defies everything that we would  know about individual development and talent, and yet, because talent is actually this  process through which we are using energy, funneling energy into this deep practice  to grow skills, to grow circuitry, um that's why that's powerful.

18:47It's like a  lightning bolt that absolutely lights up a place where people can say, if they can do it,  why can't I? Because motivation is this kind of remarkable kind of lightning bolt moment  a lot of times, you can't force it to happen, but you you can increase the likelihood of it  happening with a certain set of tools.

19:04One place I saw that did this really well was Pixar. You  know, we all know Pixar is good at making movies. If you're a new employee at Pixar on your first  day, you come to an auditorium and you sit there and Ed Catmull tells you a couple things.

19:19He makes  a very short speech. The speech goes like this. Whatever you did before, you're a movie maker  now. We need you to help us make our films better. That's the end of the speech. It's a very  short speech. And then they have these things where they'll bring everybody together and watch  versions, rough versions of the Pixar films.

19:37The whole company, baristas come together, engineers,  IT folks, and they watch them and they they ask for suggestions. Do you notice anything could  be better? And I met an IT guy who had suggested a badge on the character in Up. They had some like  funny message in his in his scout badges.

19:54There was a boy scout in the movie Up. And the IT guy  had raised his hand and made a suggestion and they had put it in the movie. It's about creating a  moment where you're inviting someone in, inviting someone in to play a role of active contribution  to that to that goal, to that task, to that larger thing.

20:16I saw it in Curacao on the baseball field. You know, that's a place that has produced uh uh uncountable number of major leaguers after  they produced just the one. I coached Little League so I was curious, how do they organize  their practice?

20:27I organize my practice so it's just a coach and 12 players. On the field  in Curacao, there's about a hundred players. And they're divided up into groups and  they have the older kids teaching them. Now, what a moment is that? Rather than looking  at some old guy, they're being taught by older versions of themselves.

20:45Kids who had been  to the Little League World Series. Kids were on their way to maybe play in the major  leagues. Think about that guitar string moment, that moment of being invited in to that struggle,  to that contribution, to that growth process.

21:00They're really good at structuring environments  to create that kind of that kind of invitation that Ed Catmull is offering and that those older  players in Curacao are offering. It's saying, "Here's a future vision of yourself. Here's something you can play a part in.

21:14Do you want to do that?" And and inviting people  in. We tend to, through that individualistic lens, look at Pixar and Ed Catmull as being kind of  magical. Well, that's just their little magic dust or whatever. But, it's a playbook. I mean,  it is an absolute playbook that you can, with the right level of deep knowledge and sincerity and  learning and growth, apply that in other places.

21:35And they certainly did in Walt Disney when Walt  Disney acquired them. Walt Disney was struggling. They hadn't produced a good movie in a long time,  their animated division. And Ed Catmull started visiting there once a week, and he moved the desks  around so people had to come walk by him, and he created these brain trust meetings where they  would get together, just like with the earlier example where people are pointing out flaws  together and pointing out things they could do better.

21:57And next thing you know, um Disney has  turned around their animated division entirely. Four times a year, we print a magazine  worth putting your phone down for. Big Think's premium print magazine is built  with custom artwork and expert insight from the world's biggest thinkers.

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