🚶 Ericsson “10,000 hours of deep practice”

💭”You will become clever through your mistakes” — German proverb

Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways; operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes, makes you smarter.
Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you’re forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them; as you would if you were taking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go; end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing.

💭”We tend to think of our memory as a tape recorder, but that’s wrong. It’s a living structure, a scaffold of nearly infinite size. The more we generate impulses, encountering and overcoming difficulties, the more scaffolding we build. The more scaffolding we build, the faster we learn.” — Robert Bjork, chair of psychology UCLA

Pilot Training Mock Flight
Edwin Link invented a mock plane machine to help train pilots with flight patterns, flight maneuvers, and flight instruments. His invention was monumental in allowing pilots all over the world be able to put in flight hours and gain practice.

Why is Brazil so good at soccer?
Brazil has a favorite pastime of playing futsal. It is a compacted game of soccer with smaller space, less people, and a smaller and heavier ball. The best Brazilian soccer players were extremely good futsal players. Futsal is the Sparta training that allows soccer players find playing soccer easy.

💭”I have always maintained that except fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work.” — Charles Darwin

Myelin as the fundamental building block theory is built on three simple facts:

💭”They send precise impulses along wires that give the signal to myelinate that wire. They end up, after all the training, with a super duper wire: lots of bandwidth, a high-speed broadband fiber optic cable internet connection. That’s what makes good athletes different from the rest of us.” — Bartzokis

Skill is a myelin insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows according to certain signals. ⇒The story of skill and talent is the story of myelin.

Q: Why is targeted mistake-focused practice so effective?
A: Because the best way to build a good circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again, over and over. ⇒Struggle is not an option: it’s a biological requirement.

Q: Why are passion and persistence key ingredients of talent?
A: Because wrapping myelin around a big circuit requires immense energy and time. If you don’t love it, you’ll never work hard enough to be great.

Q: What’s the best way to get to Coachella?
A: Go straight down Myelin Street.

Supporter cells sense the nerve firing and respond by wrapping more myelin on that fiber that fires. The more the nerve fires, the more myelin wraps around it. The more myelin wraps around it, the faster the signals travel, increasing velocities up to one hundred times over signals sent through an uninsulated fiber.

Myelin is infrastructure, but with a powerful twist: within the vast metropolis of the brain, myelin quietly transforms narrow alleys into broad, lightning-fast super highways.

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 myelin model shows that certain hotbeds of talent succeed not only because people there are trying harder but also because they are trying harder in the right way; practicing more deeply and earning more skill.

💭”Excellence is a habit” — Aristotle

Michelangelo.
From ages 6~10 he lived with a stonecutter and his family, learning how to handle a handle a hammer and chisel before he could read and write. After a brief, unhappy attempt at schooling, he apprenticed to the great Ghirlandaio. He worked on blockbuster commissions, sketching, copying, and preparing frescoes in one of Florence’s largest churches. He was then taught by master sculptor Bertoldo and tutored by other luminaries at the home of Lorenzo de’ Medici, where Michelangelo lived until he was 17. He was a promising but little-known artist until he produced the Pieta at age 24. People called the Pieta pure genius, but its creator begged to differ. 💭”If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.” — Michelangelo.

Q: Why do teenagers make bad decisions?
A: Because all the neurons are there but they are not fully insulated.

Q: Why is wisdom most often found in older people?
A: Because their circuits are fully insulated and instantly available to them; they can do very complicated processing on many levels, which is really what wisdom is.

Q: Why can’t monkeys, which have every neuron type and neurotransmitter we have use language the way we do?
A: Because we’ve got 20% more myelin. Sure you can teach a monkey to communicate at the level of a 3 year old, but beyond that, they are using the equivalent of copper wires.

Q: Why do breast-fed babies have higher IQs?
A: Because the fatty acids in breast milk are the building blocks of myelin. Eat fish. Consume omega-3 fatty acids as much as you can. The more myelin you have on board, the smarter you can be.

We are myelin beings.

💭”Try again. Fail again. Fail better” — Samuel Beckett

The difference between chess masters and ordinary players is a difference of organization, the difference between someone who understood a language and someone who didn’t. Or, to put it another way, the difference between experience.

Skill consists of identifying important elements and grouping them into a meaningful framework. The name psychologists use for such organization is chunking.

Your skill at reading, at the essence, is the skill of packing and unpacking chunks, or in myelin terms, of firing patterns of circuits at lightning speed.

Physical acts are also built of chunks.

Rule One: Chunk it up
Deep practice

Practice in the same way a good movie director approaches a scene: one instant panning back to show the landscape, the next zooming in to examine a bug crawling on a leaf in slow motion.

Absorb the whole thing
🔑Spending time staring at or listening to the desired skill: the song, the move, the swing, as a coherent entity.
⇒It basically amounts to absorbing a picture of the skill until you can imagine yourself doing it.
“We’re prewired to imitate. When you put yourself in the same situation as an outstanding person and attack a task that they took on, it has a big effect on your skill.”

Federer; professional tennis player
In California I met an 8 year old tennis player named Carolyn Xie, one of the top ranked age group players in the country. Xie had a typical tennis prodigy’s game, except for one thing. Instead of the usual two-handed backhand for that age, she hit one-handed backhands exactly like Roger Federer. Not a little bit like Federer but exactly like Federer, with that signature head-down torero finish.
It turned out that everyone in the family was a huge fan of Federer; in fact, they had watched just about every televised match he’d ever played on tap.e Carolyn in particular watched them whenever she could.
In her short life she had seen Roger Federer hit a backhand tens of thousands of times. She had watched the backhand, and without knowing, simply absorbed the essence of it.
🔑⇒Watch a shit ton videos.

Ray LaMontagne; singer
Another example is Ray LaMontagne, shoe-factory worker who at the age of 22 had an epiphany that he should become a singer-songwriter. LaMontagne had little musical experience and less money, so he took a simple approach to learning: he bought dozens of used albums by Stephen Stills, Otis Redding, Al Green, Etta James, and Ray Charles, and holed up in his apartment. For two years. Every day he spent hours training himself by singing along to the records. 8 years after he started, LaMontagne’s first album sold nearly half a million copies.

Some of the most fruitful imitation I saw took place at Spartak Tennis Club in Moscow, a freezing junk-pile that has produced a volcano of talent. All in all, the club produced more top twenty ranked women than the US did.
Walking up, I could see shapes moving behind clouded plastic windows, but I didn’t hear that distinctive thwacking of tennis racquets and balls. When I walked in, the reason became evident: they were swinging all right. But they weren’t using balls.
At Spartak it’s called imitatsiya—rallying in slow motion with an imaginary ball. All Spartak’s players do it, from the five-year-olds to the pros.
Their coach, a twinkly, weathered seventy-seven-year-old woman named Larisa Preobrazhenskaya, roamed the court grasped arms and piloted small limbs slowly through the stroke. When they finally hit balls—one by one, in a line (there are no private lessons at Spartak), Preobrazhenskaya frequently stopped them in their tracks and had them go through the motion again slowly then once more. And again. And perhaps one more time. It looked like a ballet class: a choreography of slow, simple, precise motions with an emphasis on tekhnika—technique. Preobrazhenskaya enforced this approach with an iron decree: none of her students was permitted to play in a tournament for the first three years of their study.
💭”Technique is everything. If you begin playing without technique, it is a big mistake, Big, big mistake!” — Preobrazhenskaya

Break it into chunks
The place I visited that best displayed this process was the Meadowmount School of Music in upstate New York. The original camp comprised a few cabins and an old house that had no electricity, no running water, and no television or telephone service.
In seven weeks, most students will learn a year’s worth of material, an increase of about 500% in learning speed.
The teachers of Meadowmount 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.
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).

Slow it down
Going slow allows you to attend more closely to errors, creating a higher degree of precision with each firing and when it comes to growing myelin, precision is everything.
“It’s not how fast you can do it. It’s how slow you can do it correctly.”
Second, going slow helps the practicer to develop something even more important: a working perception of the skill’s internal blueprints: the shape and rhythm of the interlocking skill circuits.

“Experts practice differently and far more strategically. When they fail, they don’t blame it on luck or themselves. They have a strategy they can fix.”

Rule Two: Repeat it
🔑There is 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.

Q: What’s the simplest way to diminish the skills of a superstar talent?
A: Don’t let them practice for a month. Causing the skill to evaporate only requires that you stop a skilled person from systematically firing his circuit for a mere thirty days.

Myelin is a living tissue. Like everything else in the body, it’s in a constant cycle of breakdown and repair. That’s why daily practice matters, particularly as we get older.

Repetition is invaluable and irreplaceable. With conventional practice, more is always better: hitting two hundred forehands is presumed to be twice as good as hitting one hundred forehands a day. ⇔Deep practice, however, doesn’t obey the same math.

Most world class experts: pianists, chess players, novelists, and athletes practice between 3~5 hours a day, no matter what skill they pursue.

People at most of the hotbeds I visited practiced less than 3 hours a day. The younger Spartak kids(6~8) practiced a mere 3~5 hours each week, while older teens ratcheted up to 15 hours a week. On the whole, the duration and frequency of practice in hotbeds seemed reasonably sane.

Rule Three: Learn to feel it
Get a balance point where you can sense the errors when they come. To avoid the mistakes, first you have to feel them immediately.
“If you hear a string out of tune it should bother you. It should bother you a lot. That’s what you need to feel. What you’re really practicing is concentration. It’s a feeling.”

I asked people for words that described the sensations of their most productive practice

That productive, uncomfortable terrain located just beyond our current abilities, where our reach exceeds our grasp.
Deep practice is not simply about struggling; it’s about seeking out a particular struggle, which involves a cycle of distinct actions.

Of all the images that communicate the sensation of deep practice, my favorite is that of the staggering babies. A few years ago a group of American and Norwegian researchers did a study to see what made babies improve at walking. They discovered that the key factor wasn’t height or weight or age or brain development or any other innate trait but rather the amount of time they spent firing their circuits, trying to walk.
🔑⇒Baby steps are the royal road to skill.

Ignition
In 1997 Gary McPherson set out to investigate a mystery that has puzzled parents and music teachers since time immemorial: “why certain children progress quickly at music lessons and others don’t?” He undertook a long-term study that sought to analyze the musical development of 157 randomly selected children.
McPherson took a uniquely comprehensive approach, following the children from a few weeks before they picked out their instrument through to high school graduation, tracking their progress through a detailed battery of interviews, biometric tests, and videotaped practice sessions.
After the first nine months of lessons the kids were a typical mixed bag: a few had zoomed off like rockets; a few had barely budged; most were somewhere in the middle.
Then McPherson tested a new factor, he asked, “How long do you think you’ll play your new instrument?”
The children were asked to identify how long they planned to play: through this year, through primary school, through high school, all my life.
McPherson then measured how much each child practiced per week and he plotted the results against their performance on a skill test.
The differences were staggering. With the same amount of practice, the long-term-commitment group outperformed the short-term-commitment group by 400 percent. The long-term-commitment group, with a mere twenty minutes of weekly practice, progressed faster than the “short-termers” who practiced for an hour and a half. When long-term commitment combined with high levels of practice, skills skyrocketed.
“We instinctively think of each new student as a blank slate, but the ideas they bring to that first lesson are probably far more important than anything a teacher can do, or any amount of practice,” McPherson said. “It’s all about their perception of self. At some point very early on they had a crystallizing experience that brings the idea to the fore, that says, I am a musician. That idea is like a snowball rolling downhill.”
🔑⇒PN: You must identify as the skill you are trying to master: I am a day trader. I am a developer. I am an entrepreneur. I am a businessman.

What ignited the progress wasn’t any innate skill or gene. It was a small, ephemeral, yet powerful idea: a vision of their ideal future selves, a vision that oriented, energized, and accelerated progress, and that originated in the outside world. I want to be like them.

Future belonging
is a primal cue: a simple, direct signal that activates our built-in motivational triggers, funneling our energy and attention toward a goal.

💭”We’re the most social creatures on the planet,” says Dr. Geoff Cohen of the University of Colorado. “Everything depends on collective effort and cooperation. When we get a cue that we ought to connect our identity with a group, it’s like a hair trigger, like turning on a light switch. The ability to achieve is already there, but the energy put into that ability goes through the roof.”

The training grounds of all the talent hotbeds tended to be junky, unattractive places.
“If we’re in a nice, easy, pleasant environment, we naturally shut off effort. Why work? But if people get the signal that it’s rough, they get motivated now.”

If the conceptual model for deep practice is a circuit being slowly wrapped with insulation, then the model for ignition is a hair trigger connected to a high-voltage power plant.
Accordingly, ignition is determined by simple if/then propositions, with the then part always the same-better get busy. See someone you want to become? Better get busy. Want to catch up with a desirable group? Better get busy.

One of the better demonstrations of the power of primal cues, however, came about by accident. In the 1970s, a clinical psychologist from Long Island named Martin Eisenstadt tracked the parental histories of every person who was eminent enough to have earned a half-page-long entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica—a roster of 573 subjects, spanning Homer to John F. Kennedy, a rich mix of writers, scientists, political leaders, composers, soldiers, philosophers, and explorers. Eisenstadt wasn’t interested in motivation per se; in fact, he was testing a theory he’d developed relating genius and psychosis to the loss of a parent or parents at an early age. But he wound up constructing an elegant demonstration of the relationship between motivation and primal cues.
Political leaders who lost a parent at an early age include Julius Caesar (father, 15), Napoleon (father, 15), fifteen British prime ministers, Washington (father, 11), Jefferson (father, 14), Lincoln (mother, 9), Lenin (father, 15), Hitler (father, 13), Gandhi (father, 15), Stalin (father, 11), and (we reflexively paste in) Bill Clinton (father, infant). Scientists and artists on the list include Copernicus (father, 10), Newton (father, before birth), Dar win (mother, 8), Dante (mother, 6), Michelangelo (mother, 6), Bach (mother and father, 9), Handel (father, 11), Dostoyevsky (mother, 15), Keats (father, 8; mother, 14), Byron (father, 3), Emerson (father, 8), Melville (father, 12), Wordsworth (mother, 7; father, 13), Nietzsche (father, 4), Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë (mother at 5, 3, and 1, respectively), Woolf (mother, 13), and Twain (father, 11). On average, the eminent group lost their first parent at an average age of 13.9, compared with 19.6 for a control group. All in all, it’s a list deep and broad enough to justify the question posed by a 1978 French study: “do orphans rule the world?”
When we look at parental loss as a signal hitting a motivational trigger, the connection becomes clearer. Losing a parent is a primal cue: you are not safe.
“Such adverse events nurture the development of a personality robust enough to overcome the many obstacles and frustrations standing in the path of achievement.”
Losing a parent at a young age was not what gave them talent; rather, it was a primal cue-you are not safe-that, by tripping the ancient self-preserving evolutionary switch, provided energy for their efforts, so that they built their various talents over the course of years, step by step, wrap by wrap.

Talent hotbeds possess more than a single primal cue. They contain complex collections of signals—people, images, and ideas—that keep ignition going for the weeks, months, and years that skill-growing requires.
Talent hotbeds are to primal cues what Las Vegas is to neon signs, flashing with the kind of signals that keep motivation burning.
Consider the sights that a young Michelangelo would have encountered in a single afternoon in Florence. In a half-hour’s stroll he could have visited the workshops of a dozen great artists. These were not quiet studios: to the contrary, they were beehives overseen by a master and a hustling team of journeymen and apprentices, competing for commissions, filling orders, making plans, testing new techniques.
All of them were concentrated within a few blocks; all of them were simply part of the landscape of everyday life; and all flashed signals that added up to one energizing message: better get busy.
Or consider the scene at the Mermaid Tavern in London during Shakespeare’s day. There, across the river from the Globe Theatre, the major writers of the day—Marlowe, Jonson, Donne, Raleigh—gathered to talk shop and match wits.
Or consider the Academy and Lyceum of Athens, where Plato, Aristotle, and the rest taught, argued, and learned.
Or consider the thronging environs of São Paolo, where, walking around one afternoon, I attempted to keep track of the number of signals about soccer I spotted: a TV highlight, a billboard, an overheard conversation, four futsal pickup games, five kids juggling balls down the street.

💭”To play ball, you need three things. Heart. Mind. Balls. If you have two, you can play but you will never be great. To be great, all three.” — Curiel

💭”Left to our own devices, we go along in a pretty stable mindset. But when we get a clear cue, a message that sends a spark, then boing, we respond.” — Dr. Carol Dweck

High motivation is not the kind of language that ignites people. What works is precisely the opposite: not reaching up but reaching down, speaking to the ground-level effort, affirming the struggle. Dweck’s research shows that phrases like “Wow, you really tried hard,” or “Good job, dude,” motivate far better than what she calls empty praise.
⇒From the myelin point of view, this conclusion makes sense. Praising effort works because it reflects biological reality. The truth is, skill circuits are not easy to build; deep practice requires serious effort and passionate work.
⇒The truth is, when you are starting out, you do not “play” tennis; you struggle and fight and pay attention and slowly get better. The truth is, we learn in staggering-baby steps. Effort-based language works because it speaks directly to the core of the learning experience, and when it comes to ignition, there’s nothing more powerful.

💭”It’s not about recognizing talent, whatever the hell that is. I’ve never tried to go out and find someone who’s talented. First you work on fundamentals, and pretty soon you find out where things are going.” — Robert Lansdorp, tennis coach of former world number-one players

So far in this book we’ve talked about skill as a cellular process that grows through deep practice. We’ve seen how ignition supplies the unconscious energy for that growth. Now it’s time to meet the rare people who have the uncanny knack for combining those forces to grow talent in others.

Master coaches are quiet, even reserved. They possessed the same sort of gaze: steady, deep, unblinking. They listened far more than they talked. They seemed allergic to giving pep talks or inspiring speeches; they spent most of their time offering small, targeted, highly specific adjustments. They had an extraordinary sensitive to the person they were teaching, customizing each message to each student’s personality.

Master coaches aren’t like heads of state. They aren’t like captains who steer us across the unmarked sea, or preachers on a pulpit, ringing out the good news. Their personality, their core skill circuit is to be more like farmers: careful, deliberate cultivators of myelin.
They’re down-to-earth and disciplined. They possess vast, deep frameworks of knowledge, which they apply to the steady, incremental work of growing skill circuits, which they ultimately don’t control.

John Wooden; basketball coach
In 1970 two educational psychologists named Ron Gallimore and Roland Tharp were given a dream opportunity: to set up, from scratch, an experimental reading program at a laboratory school in a poor neighborhood in Honolulu: the Kamehameha Early Education Project, KEEP.
They weren’t very successful. For the first two years, reading achievement at KEEP remained low.
One afternoon while shooting baskets in Gallimore’s backyard, Gallimore had an idea: they would perform a detailed, up-close case study of the greatest teacher they could find and use the results to help them at KEEP.
Both men instantly thought of the same teacher, who happened to be right on UCLA’s campus: Mr. John Wooden, head basketball coach.
He had led UCLA to nine national championships in the previous ten years. His team had recently concluded an 88 game undefeated stretch that had lasted for nearly three years, one of the many historic feats that would later lead ESPN to name Wooden the greatest coach of all time in any sport.
A few weeks later Gallimore and Tharp settled eagerly into court side seats to watch Wooden coach the season’s first practice.
Wooden didn’t give speeches. He didn’t do chalk talks. He didn’t dole out punishment laps or praise. In all, he didn’t sound or act like any coach they’d ever encountered. “Teaching utterances or comments were short, punctuated, and numerous. There were no lectures, no extended harangues and he rarely spoke longer than 20 seconds.”
Gallimore and Tharp kept attending practices. As weeks and months went by, an ember of insight began to glow.
Gallimore and Tharp recorded and coded 2,326 discrete acts of teaching. Of them, a mere 6.9 percent were compliments. Only 6.6 percent were expressions of displeasure. But 75 percent were pure information: what to do, how to do it, when to intensify an activity.
One of Wooden’s most frequent forms of teaching was a three-part instruction where he modeled the right way to do something, showed the incorrect way, and then remodeled the right way, a sequence that appeared in Gallimore and Tharp’s notes as M+, M−, M+; it happened so often they named it a “Wooden.”
“demonstrations rarely take longer than three seconds, but are of such clarity that they leave an image in memory much like a textbook sketch.”
“mental and emotional conditioning,” which basically amounted to everyone running harder than they did in games, all the time. Former player Bill Walton once said, “Practices at UCLA were nonstop, electric, supercharged, intense, demanding.” While Wooden’s practices looked natural and unplanned, in fact they were anything but. The coach would spend two hours each morning with his assistants planning that day’s practice, then write out the minute-by-minute schedule. He kept cards from year to year, so he could compare and adjust. No detail was too small be be considered.
Wooden may not have known about myelin, but like all master coaches, he had a deep understanding of how it worked.
He taught in chunks, using what he called the “whole-part method”—he would teach players an entire move, then break it down to work on its elemental actions.
He formulated laws of learning (which might be retitled laws of myelin): explanation, demonstration, imitation, correction, and repetition.
“Don’t look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.”
“The importance of repetition until automaticity cannot be overstated.”
“Repetition is the key to learning.”

If you want to start a child in a new skill, you should search out the best-trained, most John Wooden-like teach possible. Right? Not necessarily.
In the early 1980s a University of Chicago team of researchers led by Dr. Benjamin Bloom undertook a study of 120 world-class pianists, swimmers, tennis champions, mathematicians, neurologists, and sculptors.
They discovered a surprising fact: many world-class talents, particularly in piano, swimming, and tennis, start out with seemingly average teachers.
But these people are not average teachers. They merely disguised as average because their crucial skill does not show up on conventional measures of teaching ability. They succeed because they are tapping into the second element of talent code: ignition.
They are creating and sustaining motivation; they are teaching love.
“The effect of this first phase of learning seemed to get the learner involved, captivated, hooked, and to get the learner to need and want more information and expertise.”
“Perhaps the major quality of these teachers was that they made the initial learning very pleasant and rewarding. Much of the introduction to the field was as playful activity and the learning at the beginning of this stage was much like a game. These teachers gave much positive reinforcement and only rarely were critical of the child. However, they did set standards and expected the child to make progress, although this was largely done with approval and praise.”

💭”Great teachers focus on what the student is saying or doing and are able, by being so focused and by their deep knowledge of the subject matter, to see and recognize the inarticulate stumbling, fumbling effort of the student who’s reaching toward mastery, and then connect to them with a targeted message.” — Ron Gallimore

A coach’s true skill consists not in some universally applicable wisdom that he can communicate to all, but rather in the supple ability to locate the sweet spot on the edge of each individual student’s ability, and to send the right signals to help the student reach toward the right goal, over and over. As with any complex skill, it’s really a combination of several different qualities.

💭”A great teacher has the capacity to always take it deeper, to see the learning the student is capable of and to go there. It keeps going deeper and deeper because the teacher can think about the material in so many different ways, and because there’s an endless number of connections they can make.” — Gallimore

People are not born with this depth of knowledge. It’s something they grow, over time, through the same combination of ignition and deep practice as any other skill.
One does not become a master coach by accident. Many of the coaches I met shared a similar biographical arc: they had once been promising talents in their respective fields but failed and tried to figure out why.

💭”What I do for myself as a teacher is no different from what I ask my students to do. I know what I’m doing because I put a lot of work into it. I’m no different from them. If you spend years and years trying hard to do something, you’d better get better at it. How dumb would I have to be if I didn’t?” — Linda Septien, teacher of Jessica Simpson, Beyoncé Knowles, Ryan Cabrera, Demi Lovato, etc
2. Perceptiveness
When Gallimore and Tharp studied John Wooden in 1974, they were surprised to find that he distributed praise and criticism unevenly. Which is to say, certain players got a lot of praise; others got a lot of criticism. What’s more, he was open about this. During the team’s preseason meeting each year, Wooden would say, “I am not going to treat you players all the same. Giving you the same treatment doesn’t make sense, because you’re all different. The good Lord, in his infinite wisdom, did not make us all the same. Goodness gracious, if he had, this would be a boring world, don’t you think? You are different from each other in height, weight, background, intelligence, talent, and many other ways. For that reason, each one of you deserves individual treatment that is best for you. I will decide what that treatment will be.

Football coach Tom Martinez has a vivid metaphor for this process. “The way I look at it, everybody’s life is a bowl of whipped cream and shit, and my job is to even things out. If a kid’s got a lot of shit in his life, I’m going to stir in some whipped cream. If a kid’s life is pure whipped cream, then I’m going to stir in some shit.”
3. The GPS Reflex
💭”You gotta give them a lot of information. You gotta shock ’em, then shock ’em some more.” — Robert Lansdorp, tennis coach

Most master coaches delivered their information to their students in a series of short, vivid, high-definition bursts.
The directions weren’t dictatorial in tone but were delivered in a way that sounded clinical and urgent, as if they were being emitted by a particularly compelling GPS unit navigating through a maze of city streets: turn left, turn right, go straight, arrival complete.

As soon as the student could accomplish the feat(play that chord, hit that volley) the coach would quickly layer in an added difficulty. Good. Okay, now do it faster. Now do it with the harmony. Small successes were not stopping points but stepping-stones.

💭”One of the big things I’ve learned over the years is to push. The second they get to a new spot, even if they’re still groping a little bit, I push them to the next level.” — Septien
4. Theatrical Honesty
Drama and character are the tools master coaches uses to reach the student with the truth about their performance.
Moral honesty is at the core of the job description; character in the deeper sense of the word.
💭”Truly great teachers connect with students because of who they are as moral standards. There’s an empathy, a selflessness, because you’re not trying to tell the student something they know, but are finding, in their effort, a place to make a real connection.” — Ron Gallimore

Skills like soccer, writing, and comedy are flexible-circuit skills, meaning that they require us to grow vast ivy-vine circuits that we can flick through to navigate an ever-changing set of obstacles.
⇔Playing violin, golf, gymnastics, and figure skating, on the other hand, are consistent-circuit skills, depending utterly on a solid foundation of technique that enables us to reliably re-create the fundamentals of an ideal performance.
(🔥💎This is why self-taught violinists, skaters, and gymnasts rarely reach world-class level and why self-taught novelists, comedians, and soccer players do all the time.)

💭”A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary.” — Thomas Carruthers

The stack of research on cognition and aging keeps growing, each new study chiming in with the same refrain: use it or lose it.

💭“The myelin literally starts to split apart with age,” Bartzokis said. “This is why every old person you’ve ever met in your life moves more slowly than they did when they were younger. Their muscles haven’t changed, but the speed of the impulses they can send to them has changed, because the myelin gets old.”
⇒The good news is that while natural waves of myelination end in our thirties, our overall volume of myelin increases until our fifties, and we always retain the ability to add more myelin through deep practice. “You must remember the myelin is alive, always being generated and degenerating, like a war,” Bartzokis says. “When we are younger, we build myelin easily. As we age the overall balance shifts toward degeneration, but we can keep adding myelin. Even when the myelin is breaking up, we can still build it, right to the end of our lives.”
⇒This is why level of education is one of the most reliable predictors for Alzheimer’s.

One study showed that elderly people who pursued more leisure activities had a 38% lower risk for developing dementia. As one neurologist pointed out, the mantra “use it or lose it” needs an update. It should be use it and get more of it.

All the world’s parenting advice can be distilled to two simple rules: pay attention to what your children are fascinated by, and praise them for their effort. To which I would add, tell them how the myelin mechanism works.

When I started working on this project, I came across an electron microscope photo of myelin. It’s not a great image in the usual sense of the word: it’s grainy and blurred. But I like looking at it, because you can see each individual wrap, like the layers in a cliff face or the growth rings of a tree. Each wrap of myelin is a unique tracing of some past event. Perhaps that wrap was caused by a coach’s pointer; perhaps that one by a parent’s encouraging glance; perhaps that one by hearing a song they loved. In the whorls of myelin resides a person’s secret history, the flow of interactions and influences that make up a life, the Christmas lights that, for some reason, light up.