May 16, 2024 • 10 mins
Travis breaks down science of how to master any skill based on the research of Daniel Coyle and his book “The Talent Code”
In this episode, you'll learn about:
- Hotbeds of Talent Throughout the World
- How to Build Skill Like You Build Muscle
- Myelin and the Role it Plays in Skill Mastering
- The Benefits of Deep Practice and How to Do It
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Credits:
Guest: N/A
Host: Travis Ference
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Too many people attribute success to luck, or they complain that the best
have some kind of God given talent, which is a pretty defeatist
attitude to take towards something, especially if that thing is something you want
to have a career in, like music. So what if there was a formula
for creating skill that was backed in science? Wouldn't knowing that
we all have an equal opportunity to be great inspire you to get to
(00:22):
work and do it?
Welcome back, y'all. I'm Travis Farrantz, a Grammy nominated recording engineer and mixer. And I
started this show to help people like you achieve their dreams of a career
(00:45):
in music. So I've been in this industry for about 20 years, and I've gotten
the chance to see a lot of people grow to become insanely talented
and successful. And unfortunately, I've seen a lot of people burn out
and fade away as well. And the common thread of those that became great
was always focused practice and hard work. It was never that. They just
happened to get lucky. And if you've never been in the studio with a band
(01:07):
full of a list session musicians or hit songwriters, you'd
probably think that it must be inspiring, right? And it
is. But at the same time, it can leave you thinking, holy, I
will never be that good. Which is a limiting belief that we've
all had pop up in the back of our mind at least once. Don't lie.
You've thought it. And so I used to think that way as well, before I
(01:29):
read a book called the Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, which
really breaks down the science of skill mastery and basically throws the
excuse of luck or God given talent right out the door. So, in this
episode, we're going to talk through Daniel's book and cover what deep practice really
is, the importance of what Daniel calls ignition for your career,
and the role of mentors, coaches, and peers. But
(01:51):
before we get into that, we have got to talk about the
science. Every human skill is acted out by
chains of nerve fibers carrying electrical impulses from
point a to point b. A neural insulator called
myelin wraps these fibers and allows those impulses to travel
faster, also prevents them from leaking out. The more we
(02:13):
fire a particular fiber translation practice that
skill, the more myelin our body wraps around it,
essentially building a bigger freeway for those impulses to travel on.
Now, the thicker the myelin layers get, the more that associated
skill develops and improves. There are four main points to note about
myelin. One, it's the firing of the nerves that builds
(02:34):
it, the act of constantly watching tips, videos, or watching someone play
guitar is not going to develop your skill. Myelin build is a
response to the repetition of that nerve firing. Two,
myelin is universal to all manners of skill, mental
and physical. Three, myelination happens in one
direction. Once a skill is well developed and the nerve is wrapped, it does
(02:57):
not unwrap, except through age or disease. This is why your friend
that golfed in high school can still beat you, even though he only plays once
a year and four, age matters. So, for children, myelin
arrives in a series of waves. Hence why you'll notice big jumps in development as
your kids grow up. These waves continue all the way into your
thirties. This is why some of the greatest talents we know usually started
(03:19):
at a younger age. Now, this isn't to say that you can't build
myelin later in life. We never lose the ability to develop it. It
just develops at a much slower pace. Now, the reason I wanted to
share the science side of this with you is that we can now draw a
very simple comparison to muscle growth, something that we all
understand. If you want to build a muscle, you target it with a
(03:41):
specific workout, and skills are the exact same. If
you want to grow your skill, you just have to target it with the right
form of practice. Deep practice. So what is deep
practice? Are you deep practicing when you sit down at the piano for 3 hours
and play whatever comes to mind? Unfortunately, no.
That's how I practiced guitar. I'd play for hours every day, but I was
(04:03):
just playing what was fun to me at the time. And when I walked into
my first guitar class at music school, I quickly learned that I was lucky to
have even. Even gotten in. The growth of myelin is dependent on
practicing in what Daniel calls the sweet spot where you're
stretching the limits of your abilities, but not so far that it seems
impossible. You have to be operating at the edge of where you will make
(04:24):
mistakes, so that you're forced to recognize those mistakes, slow them
down, and then correct them. If you're not pushing your abilities,
then you are not adding wraps to your myelin. So while researching his
book, Daniel traveled the world visiting and studying talent hotbeds to try to
understand how specific places and periods of time
generated so much high level talent. Through those travels, he
(04:46):
came up with three rules for deep practice. Rule one is
chunk it up. First, you must take in the skill as a whole, absorb
it, and imagine yourself doing it. Daniel saw this escalated to the next
level at a small single court tennis training club in Russia that
somehow produced more top 20 ranking women than the
entire United States. Did from 2005 to 2007.
(05:09):
Here, he saw players perform a ballet like choreography
of slow motion tennis, but without ever hitting a ball, they just
imagined that they were playing the game. The next step of chunking is to
break things down into smaller segments and then master those segments
along with this is the act of slowing things down to really notice the nuance
and recognize your mistakes. These were demonstrated to the extreme
(05:32):
at Meadow Mount School of Music in upstate New York, which boasts
graduates such as Yo Yo Ma and Joshua Bell. One of the
practices at this school is for students to cut their sheet music up into
horizontal strips and pull them out at random, with the goal of
mastering the individual components of a piece. They also have a
philosophy of practicing sections at such slow tempos
(05:53):
that the piece is unrecognizable. And that brings us
to the second rule of deep practice, which is
repetition. Now, this seems fairly obvious, but there is a
key requirement to this repetition, that you must
remain at the edge of your ability. 2 hours of practice is
only twice as productive as one if you're in that sweet
(06:15):
spot. Shockingly, Daniel found that the amount of time spent practicing at some
of these talent hotbeds was remarkably low. That russian tennis club, for
example, practiced only 15 hours a week. Finally, the
third rule of deep practice, learn to feel it. This is a bit
harder to grasp onto, probably because as humans, we hate to be wrong.
So it's really easy for us to ignore our mistakes. But the goal here is
(06:37):
to feel and recognize that you have made a mistake, then stop and correct.
Don't just practice through it without acknowledging it. Now, Daniel asked people at the
various talent hotbeds he visited for words to describe their best practice sessions.
And I think that this is actually the best way to understand this concept of
learn to feel it. And they gave him words like attention,
connect, build, mistake, repeat,
(07:00):
alert, and edge. Nowhere in the list were words like
flow, natural, or effortless. So, with all that in
mind, I think it's pretty obvious how deep practice would accelerate your skill development.
But it also seems pretty obvious that it's not going to be very much fun
to do. That's where Daniel's term ignition comes in.
Ignition is the motivation you need to commit to doing the hard
(07:22):
work necessary to become world class. Many times, this motivation
passion is triggered by someone achieving the seemingly impossible, thus
making it now within the realm of possibility for everybody else.
An example from Daniel studies is when 20 year old South Korean Sa ri Pak
won the 1998 LPGA championship. She was the first South
Korean to achieve that level of success in golf and became a national
(07:44):
icon. Ten years later, the LPGA would be dominated by South
Koreans, with 45 players winning over one third of the
events. Another example of being motivated by others. I've been reading Arnold
Schwarzenegger's book recently, and he talks about how he was shocked
during one of his first international competitions when he saw the
form on some of the american bodybuilders calves,
(08:06):
a muscle that he himself wasn't really focusing on. He then used
that as his motivation to go back and do the work necessary to return
and, I believe, win the competition the following year. Daniel
also mentions that ignition comes from actually being in a hotbed
itself. Imagine being a young artist in Florence during the
Renaissance, or if you want a more current music industry example, maybe
(08:28):
an up and coming engineer working at Sound City in its heyday. It's hard not
to wanna be better every day when you're surrounded by people operating at
the top of their game. So the takeaway here is that in order to commit
to doing the hard work that you'll need to do, you'll likely need some
motivation. And that might be from being inspired by someone else's
achievement, frustrated with your own failures, or being
(08:50):
energized by your peer community. And speaking of peers, that brings us to
the final section, the role of coaches, mentors
and your peers. Now, this is an area I have a lot of opinions on,
so I'm going to stray from the talent code, but definitely still in the spirit
of Dan's writing. So few people, if any, have the ability to
become the greatest version of themselves on their own. Sports is
(09:12):
definitely the most public representation of this. Right? Great athletes
obviously have great coaches, but they also have great trainers and likely great
nutritionists working with them as well. In the business space, executive coaches have
been around for years now. High performing CEO's that want to push themselves even
further, they bring in a coach. And in music, there are so
many coach roles, everything from instructors to producers. There are so
(09:34):
many situations in the music making process where one person is helping
another perform at their best. You're probably a coach
to someone you're working with right now. So to go beyond the traditional
coach or mentor roles, I actually think that your peer group
is as important to your development as any one coach might be.
It's that ignition example of being motivated by a hotbed.
(09:57):
There's a saying that you are the average of your five closest friends. If
you are surrounding yourself with people that are all as driven to achieve their goals
as you are, then you're all going to motivate each other to do the work.
That's why networking plays such a big role in this industry.
Everybody's looking for people to collaborate with who all want to make
each other better. So I cannot emphasize enough the importance of
(10:19):
immersing yourself in a peer group of like minded music
professionals. And lastly, in today's digital world, I don't think you necessarily
have to know your coaches or mentors. There are so many smart
people putting amazing information out into the world that you can just have
for free. If you live in a place where working with hit record producers is
just not an option, that doesn't mean you can't still learn from
(10:41):
those people's podcast, interviews, articles, videos, et cetera. It's
also not stopping you from hitting them up on social media or an email
either. I hope this was helpful to you or that you found it interesting. I
think I'm definitely going to read the talent code again. Scanning through it to make
this video reminded me how many interesting stories are in there. It's it's a good
read. And if you're into science backed career improvement, then you might want to check
out this video I did on the Super Mario effect.
Too many people attribute success to luck, or they complain that the best
have some kind of God given talent, which is a pretty defeatist
attitude to take towards something, especially if that thing is something you want
to have a career in, like music. So what if there was a formula
for creating skill that was backed in science? Wouldn't knowing that
we all have an equal opportunity to be great inspire you to get to
(00:22):
work and do it?
Welcome back, y'all. I'm Travis Farrantz, a Grammy nominated recording engineer and mixer. And I
started this show to help people like you achieve their dreams of a career
(00:45):
in music. So I've been in this industry for about 20 years, and I've gotten
the chance to see a lot of people grow to become insanely talented
and successful. And unfortunately, I've seen a lot of people burn out
and fade away as well. And the common thread of those that became great
was always focused practice and hard work. It was never that. They just
happened to get lucky. And if you've never been in the studio with a band
(01:07):
full of a list session musicians or hit songwriters, you'd
probably think that it must be inspiring, right? And it
is. But at the same time, it can leave you thinking, holy, I
will never be that good. Which is a limiting belief that we've
all had pop up in the back of our mind at least once. Don't lie.
You've thought it. And so I used to think that way as well, before I
(01:29):
read a book called the Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, which
really breaks down the science of skill mastery and basically throws the
excuse of luck or God given talent right out the door. So, in this
episode, we're going to talk through Daniel's book and cover what deep practice really
is, the importance of what Daniel calls ignition for your career,
and the role of mentors, coaches, and peers. But
(01:51):
before we get into that, we have got to talk about the
science. Every human skill is acted out by
chains of nerve fibers carrying electrical impulses from
point a to point b. A neural insulator called
myelin wraps these fibers and allows those impulses to travel
faster, also prevents them from leaking out. The more we
(02:13):
fire a particular fiber translation practice that
skill, the more myelin our body wraps around it,
essentially building a bigger freeway for those impulses to travel on.
Now, the thicker the myelin layers get, the more that associated
skill develops and improves. There are four main points to note about
myelin. One, it's the firing of the nerves that builds
(02:34):
it, the act of constantly watching tips, videos, or watching someone play
guitar is not going to develop your skill. Myelin build is a
response to the repetition of that nerve firing. Two,
myelin is universal to all manners of skill, mental
and physical. Three, myelination happens in one
direction. Once a skill is well developed and the nerve is wrapped, it does
(02:57):
not unwrap, except through age or disease. This is why your friend
that golfed in high school can still beat you, even though he only plays once
a year and four, age matters. So, for children, myelin
arrives in a series of waves. Hence why you'll notice big jumps in development as
your kids grow up. These waves continue all the way into your
thirties. This is why some of the greatest talents we know usually started
(03:19):
at a younger age. Now, this isn't to say that you can't build
myelin later in life. We never lose the ability to develop it. It
just develops at a much slower pace. Now, the reason I wanted to
share the science side of this with you is that we can now draw a
very simple comparison to muscle growth, something that we all
understand. If you want to build a muscle, you target it with a
(03:41):
specific workout, and skills are the exact same. If
you want to grow your skill, you just have to target it with the right
form of practice. Deep practice. So what is deep
practice? Are you deep practicing when you sit down at the piano for 3 hours
and play whatever comes to mind? Unfortunately, no.
That's how I practiced guitar. I'd play for hours every day, but I was
(04:03):
just playing what was fun to me at the time. And when I walked into
my first guitar class at music school, I quickly learned that I was lucky to
have even. Even gotten in. The growth of myelin is dependent on
practicing in what Daniel calls the sweet spot where you're
stretching the limits of your abilities, but not so far that it seems
impossible. You have to be operating at the edge of where you will make
(04:24):
mistakes, so that you're forced to recognize those mistakes, slow them
down, and then correct them. If you're not pushing your abilities,
then you are not adding wraps to your myelin. So while researching his
book, Daniel traveled the world visiting and studying talent hotbeds to try to
understand how specific places and periods of time
generated so much high level talent. Through those travels, he
(04:46):
came up with three rules for deep practice. Rule one is
chunk it up. First, you must take in the skill as a whole, absorb
it, and imagine yourself doing it. Daniel saw this escalated to the next
level at a small single court tennis training club in Russia that
somehow produced more top 20 ranking women than the
entire United States. Did from 2005 to 2007.
(05:09):
Here, he saw players perform a ballet like choreography
of slow motion tennis, but without ever hitting a ball, they just
imagined that they were playing the game. The next step of chunking is to
break things down into smaller segments and then master those segments
along with this is the act of slowing things down to really notice the nuance
and recognize your mistakes. These were demonstrated to the extreme
(05:32):
at Meadow Mount School of Music in upstate New York, which boasts
graduates such as Yo Yo Ma and Joshua Bell. One of the
practices at this school is for students to cut their sheet music up into
horizontal strips and pull them out at random, with the goal of
mastering the individual components of a piece. They also have a
philosophy of practicing sections at such slow tempos
(05:53):
that the piece is unrecognizable. And that brings us
to the second rule of deep practice, which is
repetition. Now, this seems fairly obvious, but there is a
key requirement to this repetition, that you must
remain at the edge of your ability. 2 hours of practice is
only twice as productive as one if you're in that sweet
(06:15):
spot. Shockingly, Daniel found that the amount of time spent practicing at some
of these talent hotbeds was remarkably low. That russian tennis club, for
example, practiced only 15 hours a week. Finally, the
third rule of deep practice, learn to feel it. This is a bit
harder to grasp onto, probably because as humans, we hate to be wrong.
So it's really easy for us to ignore our mistakes. But the goal here is
(06:37):
to feel and recognize that you have made a mistake, then stop and correct.
Don't just practice through it without acknowledging it. Now, Daniel asked people at the
various talent hotbeds he visited for words to describe their best practice sessions.
And I think that this is actually the best way to understand this concept of
learn to feel it. And they gave him words like attention,
connect, build, mistake, repeat,
(07:00):
alert, and edge. Nowhere in the list were words like
flow, natural, or effortless. So, with all that in
mind, I think it's pretty obvious how deep practice would accelerate your skill development.
But it also seems pretty obvious that it's not going to be very much fun
to do. That's where Daniel's term ignition comes in.
Ignition is the motivation you need to commit to doing the hard
(07:22):
work necessary to become world class. Many times, this motivation
passion is triggered by someone achieving the seemingly impossible, thus
making it now within the realm of possibility for everybody else.
An example from Daniel studies is when 20 year old South Korean Sa ri Pak
won the 1998 LPGA championship. She was the first South
Korean to achieve that level of success in golf and became a national
(07:44):
icon. Ten years later, the LPGA would be dominated by South
Koreans, with 45 players winning over one third of the
events. Another example of being motivated by others. I've been reading Arnold
Schwarzenegger's book recently, and he talks about how he was shocked
during one of his first international competitions when he saw the
form on some of the american bodybuilders calves,
(08:06):
a muscle that he himself wasn't really focusing on. He then used
that as his motivation to go back and do the work necessary to return
and, I believe, win the competition the following year. Daniel
also mentions that ignition comes from actually being in a hotbed
itself. Imagine being a young artist in Florence during the
Renaissance, or if you want a more current music industry example, maybe
(08:28):
an up and coming engineer working at Sound City in its heyday. It's hard not
to wanna be better every day when you're surrounded by people operating at
the top of their game. So the takeaway here is that in order to commit
to doing the hard work that you'll need to do, you'll likely need some
motivation. And that might be from being inspired by someone else's
achievement, frustrated with your own failures, or being
(08:50):
energized by your peer community. And speaking of peers, that brings us to
the final section, the role of coaches, mentors
and your peers. Now, this is an area I have a lot of opinions on,
so I'm going to stray from the talent code, but definitely still in the spirit
of Dan's writing. So few people, if any, have the ability to
become the greatest version of themselves on their own. Sports is
(09:12):
definitely the most public representation of this. Right? Great athletes
obviously have great coaches, but they also have great trainers and likely great
nutritionists working with them as well. In the business space, executive coaches have
been around for years now. High performing CEO's that want to push themselves even
further, they bring in a coach. And in music, there are so
many coach roles, everything from instructors to producers. There are so
(09:34):
many situations in the music making process where one person is helping
another perform at their best. You're probably a coach
to someone you're working with right now. So to go beyond the traditional
coach or mentor roles, I actually think that your peer group
is as important to your development as any one coach might be.
It's that ignition example of being motivated by a hotbed.
(09:57):
There's a saying that you are the average of your five closest friends. If
you are surrounding yourself with people that are all as driven to achieve their goals
as you are, then you're all going to motivate each other to do the work.
That's why networking plays such a big role in this industry.
Everybody's looking for people to collaborate with who all want to make
each other better. So I cannot emphasize enough the importance of
(10:19):
immersing yourself in a peer group of like minded music
professionals. And lastly, in today's digital world, I don't think you necessarily
have to know your coaches or mentors. There are so many smart
people putting amazing information out into the world that you can just have
for free. If you live in a place where working with hit record producers is
just not an option, that doesn't mean you can't still learn from
(10:41):
those people's podcast, interviews, articles, videos, et cetera. It's
also not stopping you from hitting them up on social media or an email
either. I hope this was helpful to you or that you found it interesting. I
think I'm definitely going to read the talent code again. Scanning through it to make
this video reminded me how many interesting stories are in there. It's it's a good
read. And if you're into science backed career improvement, then you might want to check
out this video I did on the Super Mario effect.
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