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

Full transcript

1. 0:00We live in this moment of peak individualism.  And so, whenever we see achievement,
2. 0:06we focus on that individual. We focus on what  makes them special. We focus on their habits,
3. 0:11their behaviors. We just see them. If you were  look at Hemingway and look at him through the lens
4. 0:16of individualism, you would say, "Well, what what  makes you great?" And it would be about his hard
5. 0:20work. It would be about his particular gift, his  talent. And that's a very sexy story to tell. It's
6. 0:26a very beautiful story to tell that he's sort of  a magical person. And that Steve Jobs is a magical
7. 0:30person. That Michael Jordan is a magical person.  [music] That Baryshnikov is a magical person.
8. 0:35We get kind of addicted looking at through this  individualistic lens. But when we do that, we're
9. 0:40blind to all the other forces that are actually,  truthfully, generating that talent. Generating
10. 0:46that performance. Generating that fulfillment.  I'm Daniel Coyle. I write about the science of
11. 0:51human potential. I'm the author of The Talent  Code, The Culture Code, and my new book Flourish.
12. 0:58Thank you for watching Big Think. If you'd like  to support our work, we encourage you to join our
13. 1:02members community. As a member, you'll receive our  quarterly print magazine, a beautifully designed
14. 1:07collection of the ideas and interviews that  matter most. Big Think is for curious people
15. 1:11who want to take deep dives into big ideas. To  support the media you want to see in the world,
16. 1:16go to bigthink.com/membership.  And now, back to the interview.
17. 1:23Where talent actually comes from.
18. 1:26When you actually scratch the surface of a great  performer, when you actually look into what made
19. 1:31a Hemingway or a Jordan or a Baryshnikov, what  you will invariably find is an elite environment.
20. 1:37A bunch of relationships, a bunch of connection.  Oh, who Mr. Hemingway? He's a great writer. Well,
21. 1:42who taught him to love words? What models  served him as he began to develop? What kind of
22. 1:47environment was he in? And when you begin to take  this environmental lens and put it on, it opens up
23. 1:53new opportunities for leadership. It's really in  the end about creating conditions where people can
24. 1:59grow together. There's a great saying in the Tao  Te Ching, where there's a good leader, people say,
25. 2:05"What a good leader that is." But where there's a  great leader, people say, "We did it ourselves."
26. 2:10That's not how we typically have thought about  leadership in the past. We often focus on control,
27. 2:14we often focus on results, we often focus  on sort of treating people as if they're
28. 2:18separate from others. But when we take this more  ecological approach, it opens up opportunity. It
29. 2:23opens up new ways to create more growth. So  I spent 5 years visiting talent hotbeds all
30. 2:29over the world, like places that produced  impossible numbers of talented performers.
31. 2:33A Russian tennis club that produced more top  25 players than the entire United States or a
32. 2:39Bulgarian chess club. And the places that  I visited had a sort of common features in
33. 2:46their environment that I saw over and over again.  The first thing is that they were kind of junky.
34. 2:51I started to call them chicken wire Harvards. You  know, you'd go to the music camp and there'd be
35. 2:55like cinder blocks holding up the stairs and  the camp hadn't been repaired in a long time.
36. 2:59They didn't put their attention on creating a  luxurious environment. They explicitly did not.
37. 3:06They actually kept it very spartan. An elite  development environment is not one where every
38. 3:11luxury is given to you. It's a place of work. It's  a place of craft. The second thing I noticed is
39. 3:17that they really had a different relationship  to mistakes. There's something called learning
40. 3:21velocity and the best story I know to get a handle  on that is a story about Clarissa. Clarissa was a
41. 3:2715-year-old musician. She was part of the study  done by a psychologist named Gary McPherson.
42. 3:33And McPherson tracked her study for months and  he identified one segment, one brief segment,
43. 3:396-minute segment where she progressed more than  she did in a month of normal practice. And the
44. 3:44question is, what did that look like? Well,  Clarissa's sitting down, she's wearing a hoodie,
45. 3:49she's got her clarinet, and she's looking at  the music really intently, looking at it just
46. 3:53ferociously intently, and then she plays a little  snatch of a song. It's called The Golden Wedding,
47. 3:59and she plays the first couple bars. It's a jazzy  little tune. And then she makes a mistake and she
48. 4:04stops. She feels that mistake, and then she  reads the notes again and she goes back and
49. 4:09she hums it to herself. And then she goes back  and she plays a little bit further and she makes
50. 4:13another mistake and she stops. If you picture what  the wires of her brain are doing in that moment,
51. 4:19she's reaching. She's sensing that failure and  then reaching again. And that's called deep
52. 4:26practice. It's when you get to the edge of  your ability to increase learning velocity.
53. 4:31When you deliberately make mistakes in order to  build skill. That's what deep practice is. And
54. 4:37when I visited these talent hotbeds, they were  all practicing like a bunch of Clarissas. They
55. 4:41were all keenly focused on pushing themselves to  the edge of their ability, sensing that mistake,
56. 4:48and then reaching again. And deep practice is all  about that moment of reach. That moment of reach
57. 4:55where our learning velocity goes up. And really,  it's a moment of reinterpreting what mistakes are.
58. 5:00You know, we walk around thinking mistake is a  verdict. Mistake is a sign. This isn't meant for
59. 5:04me. But in fact, a mistake is information. It's  information over where you should reach next.
60. 5:11And that combination of this intense  desire plus this intense reaching,
61. 5:15it's like this engine, right? You've got this  high motivation fuel, reaching into this zone.
62. 5:22And when we think about who the fastest learners  on in the world are, well, for my money, the
63. 5:26fastest learners in the world are probably uh like  12-year-old kids on their skateboards. They learn
64. 5:31really, really fast. They get good really, really  fast. Who are the slowest learners in the world?
65. 5:37Well, maybe those same kids in their algebra  class. What's happening in those cases? What
66. 5:41for look at them through a Clarissa lens. In the  skateboard, the skateboard is showing them the
67. 5:46environment of that skateboard is showing  them where the mistakes are. They feel it.
68. 5:50They feel that moment and they can correct  and adjust. They can make mistakes and fix.
69. 5:54In the algebra classroom, they're sort of sitting  passively and knowledge is washing over them.
70. 5:58The learning velocity of certain  environments, by tweaking the environment,
71. 6:03you can massively impact the learning velocity.  And that's the lesson of these talent hotbeds.
72. 6:08They tweak the environment to create those reaches  to improve learning velocity. Like for example,
73. 6:14at that same music school, Meadowmount School  of Music, they would take a sheet of music that
74. 6:19they're learning, and this is a place where some  of the top musicians on the planet have trained.
75. 6:23They would take their their sheet music and  cut it into strips, each line. Cut it up and
76. 6:27mix them up in a bowl. Pull one out, play it,  and try to learn bit by bit, chunk by chunk.
77. 6:34One of the places that I saw that was really  good at generating errors was Brazilian soccer.
78. 6:39You know, there's a there's a mystery. Why does  Brazil produce so many brilliant soccer players?
79. 6:43And the answer to that mystery is usually, well,  it's Brazil. It's warm and and they play on the
80. 6:47beach and it's really inviting and they love  soccer. And that explanation makes a little
81. 6:53bit of sense, but when you think about it more  deeply, there's a lot of places that are warm.
82. 6:57There's a lot of places that love soccer. And  until the '50s, Brazil wasn't actually that
83. 7:02good. They were beaten by Hungary in the World  Cup, which is not exactly a beach nation. So,
84. 7:08what happened to make Brazil good? They  became addicted to this strange little game.
85. 7:13It's called futebol de salão, soccer in the  room. And it resembles soccer if you fed soccer
86. 7:19amphetamines and shoved it in a phone booth. Like,  it's intensely fast. The The space is about as big
87. 7:26as a basketball court. The ball is small, smaller  center of gravity, five-a-side. It's passing lanes
88. 7:31are very narrow. The game is very fast. There's  no space. You have to make decisions right now.
89. 7:36It forces you into the sweet spot over and  over again. There's no room. The ball's small,
90. 7:42difficult to control. So, the vision that creates,  the pressure that creates, it puts people into
91. 7:49that zone of development, into that clearest spot.  Brazil is uniquely addicted to futebol do salão.
92. 7:56There were, until about 2009, I think there were  39 international championships and Brazil had won
93. 8:0138 of them. It's played all over the nation.  And when you look at the biographies of great
94. 8:05Brazilian players, they all spent a huge portion  of their youth doing this, playing this game.
95. 8:11That's what surprised me about those those talent  hotbeds, that they were not making each other
96. 8:19comfortable. They were tipping their environment  so that they could get into that clearest zone,
97. 8:23so they could make more mistakes, so they could  build more skill. And I call it the rule of 20%.
98. 8:29If you're making mistakes about 20% of the time,  you're probably in the sweet spot. If you're not
99. 8:34making any mistakes, you are not learning. If  you're making 80% percent mistakes, you're not
100. 8:40in the sweet spot. That's pretty sour to be there.  And the great irony of the sweet spot is that it
101. 8:44feels kind of bitter. It's really hard to hang out  making 80% success and 20% mistakes. It's hard.
102. 8:51So, it takes that extra bit of focus. It takes  that, what they would call, deliberate practice.
103. 8:57There was this embrace of struggle, where the  struggle was validated, the struggle was expected,
104. 9:02the struggle was noble. I saw it really vividly  at Spartak. Spartak is a tennis club outside of
105. 9:09Moscow. It has produced more top 25 women players  than the entire United States in the 1990s and the
106. 9:16early 2000. And when you get to Spartak, you  start to wonder why, because it's it's like
107. 9:22in the middle of this huge park, and it's like an  old Quonset hut. It looks like something ancient
108. 9:29from World War II. And when I walked there, I felt  like I had gone to the wrong place, because it was
109. 9:33sort of looked kind of deserted. There was a  tiny door. I remember opening the door, but
110. 9:38I didn't hear tennis balls. I kind of expected to  hear tennis balls, but I didn't hear tennis ball.
111. 9:42And the reason I didn't hear is that they were  all swinging without the ball. They were all in
112. 9:47a line, almost like dancers swinging slowly. And  the teacher, whose name was Larissa Preobrajenska,
113. 9:53she was 79 and it was this was her routine. She  would not let them begin to compete until they had
114. 9:59perfected the stroke. She was incredulous. How can  you start to compete unless you build the stroke?
115. 10:05And so what she was doing with that slow motion  practice, almost like dancers moving through the
116. 10:10stroke, fixing their wrist, fixing their elbow,  having them repeat it and repeat it until it was
117. 10:15absolutely built and grooved, then they could go  to compete. It really for me captured that sense
118. 10:21of of focus and and focus on building that happens  in these places. They're not sort of rolling out
119. 10:29the balls and saying, "Go hit balls and see  who's who has magical talent." They're saying,
120. 10:33"Wait a minute, we have to start from the ground.  We have to start from the most basic transfer of
121. 10:37power from the most basic movement of your  body. And let's focus on that and struggle
122. 10:43through that until we've got it." And they  build it piece by piece by piece by piece.
123. 10:48I mean, the rule of 10,000 hours has been both  elevated and trashed in in recent years. And
124. 10:55in some ways I think we've landed on this sort of  medium area where it's not a hard and fast rule.
125. 11:00You can't just go do 10,000 hours of something  and be world class. And yes, it's depends on
126. 11:05which skill you're trying to do. If you're doing  high jump, um genetics play a bigger role on that.
127. 11:09If you're doing the 100-meter sprint, genetics  play a bigger role on that. But for most skills,
128. 11:14it's a pretty good rule of thumb to say you need  to deep practice, you need to deep practice a lot,
129. 11:19and you need to build that circuitry. That's  sort of a non-negotiable. You need to build
130. 11:25that circuitry and that takes that takes time.  So there's not a sort of a a a shortcut or a
131. 11:32hack to get to this. Spending time building  those fundamentals, building those circuits,
132. 11:37making those mistakes, reaching past where  you currently are on the edge of your ability,
133. 11:43and doing that over and over again. That's what  what actually skill to skill is built of. It's
134. 11:49kind of a depressing message in some way to say,  "Oh, yeah, there's not a there's not a shortcut."
135. 11:54But on the other hand, what I see in the talent  hotbeds is that it's an immensely liberating
136. 11:59message. It's an immensely joyful message, and it  makes each repetition actually matter because each
137. 12:06time you're going to a slightly further place. You  made the mistake, you learned from the mistake,
138. 12:12you grew. And so, that growth is what repetition  actually is. There was also this sense that um
139. 12:20you could steal ideas. There wasn't a sense that  everything was individual, like that you had to
140. 12:24figure out your way to do it. It was a sense you  could borrow and beg and steal ideas from other
141. 12:29people. An elite environment where a person has  the opportunity to learn from others, to stare,
142. 12:36to stare and learn. That's really the first moment  of deep practice when we look at a skill and say,
143. 12:42"I want to do that." And kind of fall in love  with it. Fall in love with that baseball swing,
144. 12:46fall in love with that poem, fall in love with  that music, fall in love with that dance move.
145. 12:51To really take it inside yourself. And  that's that same pattern that I saw. A
146. 12:56social environment where you can stare and learn.  A place where you're not focused on yourself,
147. 13:02but you're using other people's ideas. And a place  where struggle is not just not just accepted,
148. 13:08but validated and made noble. You know, one  of the greatest mysteries in the world is
149. 13:13why did the Renaissance happen? Why did the  Renaissance happen in Italy at that time?
150. 13:17And there's all kinds of reasons historians  give. Oh, it happened you know, because Florence
151. 13:22was emptied out by the plague and because the The  existed. But when all those all those reasons also
152. 13:28happened in other places, why was it there? And  what you find out when you dig into that is that
153. 13:33Florence was where craft guilds evolved. A guild  was a workshop where young people were brought in
154. 13:39and taught the craft of mixing paint and carving  stone and making frescoes and preparing pigments.
155. 13:46And they would get hundreds of reps, thousands  of reps, thousands of hours spent learning about
156. 13:52the fundamentals of their craft. Each one of those  reps putting them into that zone of deep practice.
157. 13:58That's the kind of environment that's an elite  development environment. It's not one where they
158. 14:02got put in a kind of a country club environment  and given lessons from painters. It's ones where
159. 14:06they were working every day with other people  on real projects, you know, learning as they
160. 14:11went. First as a young apprentice learning how  to prepare the surface, then mixing the paints,
161. 14:16learning how the medium worked, watching  great masters at work. They're staring,
162. 14:21they're struggling, and they're stealing. And that  to me is an elite environment. And so as we look
163. 14:27at our schools, as we look at our families, as  we look at our work environments, the challenge
164. 14:32to us is how do we create that environment where  it is safe to stare, struggle, and steal together
165. 14:39uh for in a at a craft of getting better. And  create that kind of guild environment where we can
166. 14:46dig in and and grow ourselves. I think the most  mind-blowing thing that I see people astonished by
167. 14:52is the compounding effect. If you improve 1% a day  at piano, at public speaking, at dance, at at at
168. 15:00whatever you're trying to improve at. 1% a day for  a year, by the end of that year you're 37 times
169. 15:05better than when you started. Compounding,  exponential growth is mind-blowing. And so
170. 15:10that's why I think we've all had experiences in  our lives where we've had people around us who've
171. 15:17just took taken off like rocket ships. Kids in our  neighborhood who have grown up to be incredible
172. 15:21musicians maybe, or people we used to go to  high school with who are very unimpressive who
173. 15:26are now incredibly impressive in terms of their  skill and their talent level. And that speaks
174. 15:31really to all that potential that's that's that's  right there waiting for you when you take off that
175. 15:36individual focus when you start looking at it  through a more holistic kind of ecological lens.
176. 15:42When you stop treating talent as a magical gift  and start treating it as something you can grow.
177. 15:48The question this leads us to is how do you get  that's a big project like growing that much skill
178. 15:53spending that much time it's not an easy thing to  spend all that time at the edge of your ability.
179. 15:58What makes someone do that? And the answer is  ignition. We tend to think of motivation is
180. 16:03this internal trait and yes it feels that way  but in fact it's about this relationship this
181. 16:08interaction that we have with the culture around  us. Motivation doesn't happen from the inside out
182. 16:13it always happens from the outside in. When we see  someone that we want to become when we see some
183. 16:20a vision of our future self that is what unlocks  motivation. Somebody who is sort of like a person
184. 16:25on the horizon toward which we want to travel.  And there's all kinds of fascinating experiments
185. 16:31that that that they've done to do this. One of my  favorites is this birthday experiment. They have
186. 16:36a class read a biography of a mathematician and  it gives some information about the mathematician.
187. 16:42It talks about where they were born talks about  how they developed and at the end of it as part
188. 16:46of the bio they give the mathematician's birthday.  But here's the twist for half of the students the
189. 16:51birthday of the mathematician matched their actual  birthday. The experimenters made it match. And
190. 16:55then they gave everybody in that experiment a math  test. Like okay you read about this mathematician
191. 17:01how hard will you work on the math test? And the  people's whose birthday matched worked three times
192. 17:06as hard on the math test. There was an unsolvable  problem on the math test and they spent three
193. 17:12three times as much time working on that  problem. Which is kind of crazy cuz all it
194. 17:16was was just this little moment like you and  the math teacher are connected. This little
195. 17:20guitar string inside them got plucked. Like, oh,  that math teacher is connected to me in some way.
196. 17:26And that social connection unlocked energy. And  that's how we're built. When we see something
197. 17:33that we really connect with in our windshield,  that we feel that guitar string get plucked,
198. 17:38it unlocks energy. And that's that moment of  ignition. You know, we typically think of talent
199. 17:43hotbeds as being kind of magical places. But in  fact, with many of them, you can go back in time
200. 17:49and see the moment when they got lit, when they  got ignited. If you're a Russian tennis player,
201. 17:55it was when Anna Kournikova went to the finals  at Wimbledon. A girl from Spartak, from that
202. 17:59same club, showed up. She went all the way to the  finals at Wimbledon. Next thing you know, there's
203. 18:05more champions coming out of Spartak five years  later. If you're a baseball player on the island
204. 18:09of Curacao, it's the moment Andruw Jones hit three  home runs in a World Series in 1996. From that
205. 18:16moment on, that that island began it it's like  that ultimate guitar string. They're all saying,
206. 18:23if they can do it, why can't I? And that moment,  which is, by the way, completely irrational,
207. 18:29illogical, defies everything that we would  know about individual development and talent,
208. 18:35and yet, because talent is actually this  process through which we are using energy,
209. 18:41funneling energy into this deep practice  to grow skills, to grow circuitry,
210. 18:47um that's why that's powerful. It's like a  lightning bolt that absolutely lights up a place
211. 18:53where people can say, if they can do it,  why can't I? Because motivation is this
212. 18:58kind of remarkable kind of lightning bolt moment  a lot of times, you can't force it to happen,
213. 19:04but you you can increase the likelihood of it  happening with a certain set of tools. One place
214. 19:10I saw that did this really well was Pixar. You  know, we all know Pixar is good at making movies.
215. 19:14If you're a new employee at Pixar on your first  day, you come to an auditorium and you sit there
216. 19:19and Ed Catmull tells you a couple things. He makes  a very short speech. The speech goes like this.
217. 19:23Whatever you did before, you're a movie maker  now. We need you to help us make our films better.
218. 19:32That's the end of the speech. It's a very  short speech. And then they have these things
219. 19:37where they'll bring everybody together and watch  versions, rough versions of the Pixar films. The
220. 19:43whole company, baristas come together, engineers,  IT folks, and they watch them and they they ask
221. 19:48for suggestions. Do you notice anything could  be better? And I met an IT guy who had suggested
222. 19:54a badge on the character in Up. They had some like  funny message in his in his scout badges. There
223. 19:59was a boy scout in the movie Up. And the IT guy  had raised his hand and made a suggestion and they
224. 20:04had put it in the movie. It's about creating a  moment where you're inviting someone in, inviting
225. 20:09someone in to play a role of active contribution  to that to that goal, to that task, to that larger
226. 20:16thing. I saw it in Curacao on the baseball field.  You know, that's a place that has produced uh
227. 20:23uh uncountable number of major leaguers after  they produced just the one. I coached Little
228. 20:27League so I was curious, how do they organize  their practice? I organize my practice so it's
229. 20:31just a coach and 12 players. On the field  in Curacao, there's about a hundred players.
230. 20:36And they're divided up into groups and  they have the older kids teaching them.
231. 20:40Now, what a moment is that? Rather than looking  at some old guy, they're being taught by older
232. 20:45versions of themselves. Kids who had been  to the Little League World Series. Kids
233. 20:49were on their way to maybe play in the major  leagues. Think about that guitar string moment,
234. 20:53that moment of being invited in to that struggle,  to that contribution, to that growth process.
235. 21:00They're really good at structuring environments  to create that kind of that kind of invitation
236. 21:05that Ed Catmull is offering and that those older  players in Curacao are offering. It's saying,
237. 21:10"Here's a future vision of yourself.  Here's something you can play a part in.
238. 21:14Do you want to do that?" And and inviting people  in. We tend to, through that individualistic lens,
239. 21:19look at Pixar and Ed Catmull as being kind of  magical. Well, that's just their little magic
240. 21:24dust or whatever. But, it's a playbook. I mean,  it is an absolute playbook that you can, with the
241. 21:29right level of deep knowledge and sincerity and  learning and growth, apply that in other places.
242. 21:35And they certainly did in Walt Disney when Walt  Disney acquired them. Walt Disney was struggling.
243. 21:39They hadn't produced a good movie in a long time,  their animated division. And Ed Catmull started
244. 21:44visiting there once a week, and he moved the desks  around so people had to come walk by him, and he
245. 21:49created these brain trust meetings where they  would get together, just like with the earlier
246. 21:53example where people are pointing out flaws  together and pointing out things they could
247. 21:57do better. And next thing you know, um Disney has  turned around their animated division entirely.
248. 22:08Four times a year, we print a magazine  worth putting your phone down for.
249. 22:12Big Think's premium print magazine is built  with custom artwork and expert insight from
250. 22:17the world's biggest thinkers. No AI slop, no  rage bait, just big ideas for curious people.
251. 22:22Support the media you want to see in the  world. Go to bigthink.com/membership to join.