Summary: The Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle
Summary: The Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle

Summary: The Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle

  1. Start with who you want to become.
    1. Find heroes and use their stories, photos and videos to guide and motivate you.
  2. Spend 15 minutes a day engraving the skill on your brain.
    1. Watch perfect versions intensely and repeatedly until you can feel the execution.
  3. Steal without apology.
    1. Identify critical moves, specific details and concrete facts the incorporate.
  4. Buy a notebook.
    1. Make time daily to introspect on your performance and plan your goals.
  5. Be willing to be stupid.
    1. Take at least one risk per week, use failure as feedback for improvement.
  6. Choose spartan over luxury.
    1. Eliminate distraction by working in a simple and frugal environment.
  7. Before you start, figure out it’s a hard or soft skill.
    1. Hard skills need consistency and precise execution (often involves a coach).
    1. Soft skills are reactive, adaptable and creative.
  8. To build hard skills, work like a careful carpenter.
    1. Build strong foundations by perfecting each subskill slowly and precisely before moving on.
  9. To build soft skills, play like a skateboarder.
    1. Combine exploration of many new challenges that force you to stretch and experiment with clear feedback and introspection.
  10. Honor the hard skills.
    1. For combinations of hard and soft skills, priorities training the hard skills – even when you’re an expert – they’re the foundation of your talent.
  11. Don’t fall for prodigy myth.
    1. Success s a combination of luck, hard work, sort and natural talent – in that order.
  12. Pick a high-quality teacher or coach.
    1. Find someone attentive, fundamentals-oriented, action-oriented, precise, unflinchingly honest and experienced. All things equal, pick someone older.
  13. Find the sweet spot between comfort and survival.
    1. Craft practice that hits the spot between comfort and survival (50-80% success rate).
  14. Take off your watch when practicing.
    1. Measure practice in high-quality reps, not time.
  15. Break every move into chunks.
    1. Break skills into their smallest chunks; master them; then link them to new ones.
  16. Each day, try to achieve one perfect chunk.
    1. Set a daily SAP (smallest achievable perfection).
  17. Embrace struggle.
    1. Embrace emotional frustration and discomfort. Your best-self lies on the other side of it.
  18. Choose 5 minutes a day over an hour a week.
    1. Make practice habitual, efficient and effective by doing less, with more focus, every day.
  19. Don’t do Drills. Instead play small addictive games.
    1. If it can be counted, it can be turned into a game. Score and track progress.
  20. Practice alone.
    1. Tune your personal sweet spot and hone your discipline when nobody’s watching.
  21. Think in images.
    1. Say and practice victualing actions and feelings vividly.
  22. Pay attention immediately after you make a mistake.
    1. Attend deeply to errors asap – take them seriously but not personally.
  23. Visualize the wires of your brain forming new connections.
    1. Depersonalize mistakes by framing them as chances for new better connections.
  24. Visualize the wires of your brains getting faster.
    1. Give reps meaning by visualizing the develop your neural country-roads.
  25. Shrink in the space (Barca way).
    1. Constrain practice space to force precision (Barcelona practice).
  26. Slow it down (even slower than you think).
    1. Works like shrinking, particularly for hard skills, for precision.
  27. Close your eyes.
    1. Embrace blindness to sweep away distraction, nudge yourself to the edge of your ability and train your other senses.
  28. Mime it.
    1. Eliminate cues and force yourself to reach by eliminating equipment and training just the purest form of the movement.
  29. When you get it right, mark the spot.
    1. Consciously and immediately rewind and internalize the build-up and feeling of your perfect rep.
  30. Take a nap.
    1. A 20-minute nap in the mid of the day boosts creativity and strengthens memory.
  31. To learn a new move, exaggerate it.
    1. Push the upper and lower extremes of any activity to help identify and hone on its sweet spot.
  32. Make positive reaches.
    1. Always focus on reaching positive outcome you want, don’t think about mistakes you want to avoid (if you focus on the post, you will run into it).
  33. To learn from a book, close the book.
    1. Use active recall – learn by challenging yourself to recall and summarize what you learnt.
  34. Use the sandwich technique.
    1. Sandwich an incorrect move between two correct ones to highlight and learn from the mistake.
  35. Use 3 x 10 technique (practice 3 times with 10 mins breaks).
    1. Practice things 3 times with 10 minutes break in between sets to learn them most effectively.
  36. Invent daily tests.
    1. Find ways to turn practice into quick, fun games with measurable outcomes that isolate accuracy and reliability.
  37. Use REPS gauge to choose the best practice method.
    1. Reaching and repeating – Are you pushed repeatedly into your sweet spot?
    1. Engagement – Are you interested and emotionally immersed?
    1. Purposefulness – Does it target the specific thing you want to improve?
    1. Strong speedy feedback – Does it clearly tell you how you did, how to improve?
  38. Stop before you’re exhausted.
    1. Unless improving endurance, quit before fatigue affects performance.
  39. Practice immediately after performance.
    1. Your mistakes will be fresh in your mind and most easily fixable.
  40. Just before sleep, watch a mental movie.
    1. Pre-visualizing performance improves it.
  41. End on a positive note.
    1. Finish every session with uplifting reward.
  42. 6 ways to be a better teacher or coach.
    1. Connect emotionally.
    1. KISS feedback.
    1. Use score cards for progressive improvement.
    1. Keep everyone active and learning.
    1. Foster independent learning.
  43. Embrace repetition.
    1. It’s not a chore. It’s your most powerful tool.
  44. Have a blue-collar mindset
    1. Get up each morning and go to work honing your craft if you feel like it or not.
  45. For every 1 hour of competition, spend 5 hours practicing.
    1. 1:10 is even better.
  46. Don’t waste time breaking bad habits, build new ones that override.
    1. Build new ones that override detrimental ones.
  47. To learn it more deeply, teach it.
  48. Give new skills at least 8 weeks.
    1. Learning takes time – give your brain time it needs to grow.
  49. When you hit a plateau, make a shift.
    1. Slow it down, speed it up, cut back on reps, up your game. Make changes to break through plateaus.
  50. Cultivate your grit.
  51. Keep your big goals secret.
    1. Telling your goals might fool your brain into thinking it’s already accomplished.
  52. Think like a gardener, work like a carpenter.
    1. Talent grows slowly, steadily. Train strategically and trust in the process.