Tag: Deep Practice

January 30, 2026 – The Talent Code: Part 1, Chapters 3-4

January 30, 2026 /

Alright, alright, alright as Matthew McConaughey would say. I am starting to get into this book a bit. Chapter Three examines hot beds of excellence and Chapter Four is about how to get the benefit of deep practice. This is both the facts and the myths about what we think we believe about life if we are paying attention.

Coyle starts off chapter Three with the Bronte sisters. Now, I am pretty well read including a lot of the classics but I had never read Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights or heard of the likes of any one of the three Bronte sisters. I recognize the titles and I am peripherally aware that they are considered amongst the best literature. I guess I always perceived them as a little too feminine for me. Even though I will admit I don’t know anything about the plot so I could be dead wrong.

That being said, Coyle asserts that they became great authors by starting out writing quasi-nonsense. Poor spelling, poor sentence structure, poor punctuation and stories that were almost plagiarized from popular magazines is where the development of greatness occurred. This is the attack on the gene theory that some people are simply born great and hence three sisters are the best authors of the mid 19th century.

It would seem like nurture has a much stronger connection to greatness then nature. Renaissance masters were connected to each other via apprentice to master and master to master within the Florentine guild structure. I suspect that this is why college athletes are frequently from the same high school. Professional athletes are often from the same colleges. The athletes are in proximity to deep practice.

Recently Indiana beat Miami for the college football championship. It was said that prior to two years ago, Indiana was the losingest Division I football team in history. I can bet you that at the beginning of last year the new coach did not go out and replace the entire team. No, he worked with what he had. This year’s success will certainly make it easier for Indiana to remain on top with better recruiting and retaining top talent, but what shifted was mindset.

Nobody thought that a 3-9 team in 2023-4 would become an 11-2 team in 2024-5. In fact, when it came to playoff selection, they were deemed a fluke, had a soft schedule and not really worthy. Yes, they did lose their one playoff game to Notre Dame who went on to play in the championship against Ohio State (Indiana’s other loss on the year). You might say that they probably earned a number three ranking for 2025 based on those results. This team stayed together and became a juggernaut. The way they dismantled Oregon in the semi-finals was embarrassing for all of my Ducks fans (I only accept family in that category). Not used to losing badly like my Beavers, most of them gave up by halftime.

I strongly suspect that Coach Cignetti has unlocked the ‘Talent Code’ at Indiana. I wish that I could say that about my team’s coaches. Enough of football though, Chapter Four are the three elements of deep practice. They are chunk it up, repeat it and feel it. I will explain.

To chunk it up, you have to look at the whole picture and figure out where logical breaks can occur. Then you set about mastering any one of the chunks, that is the repeat part. Once you master a chunk you move on and combine the chunks, that is the feel it. It is that kind of thing where when you are right handed and you try to do something with your left hand.

I have tried this with several things like batting, shooting and writing. The first time is comically awkward. Then after hundreds of repetitions, it starts to feel normal. Keep practicing after that and all of a sudden, it is not just natural but intuitive. I sometimes try experiments like that when I am struggling because of bad habits. My logic is that if I relearn it on my other side I can start fresh and hopefully get away from the limitations I have on my primary hand.

While reading this book it has started to occur to me that there is a reason why I was a mediocre to poor high school athlete, musician andcollege student. I always thought that my super power was never give up. Sure, I would outlast the people that would give up and if I stayed long enough I would be the longest tenured and probably the best in comparison. But in those areas, I never did deep practice following the three rules.

But when I look at my success in other areas like leadership, I kind of do that intuitively. I am always more successful when I am allowed to to see the whole picture and I pretty much flail when I only have a myopic understanding. It leads me to speculate on the order or importance of certain aspects.

It is the reason that I always write with so much context. I want the reader to understand the why this thing is so important. Sometimes I even look at my podcast notes and wonder if I have put enough emphasis on the topic over the context. The punchline can sometimes be so subtle that it gets lost in the story. I should work on that but I see why this works for me. It is my talent code process.

End Your Programming Routine: I am glad to find out that we are strictly bound by our genes to our destiny. Yes, I will never be an NBA player and I have come to terms with that but it doesn’t mean that I could be the best at 95% of other things in life. I think I would rather be the best steelhead fisherman than and NBA star anyway. Next week, we will cover all of Part Two.

January 23, 2026 – The Talent Code: Part 1, Chapters 1-2

January 23, 2026 /

Admittedly, I did not know anything about this book before I purchased it. It came from a co-worker recommendation a couple of years ago. If I remember this conversation correctly, I was telling him about my former position at another company. I believe that he said something like, you should read this book that I just read. I wrote the title down and then I just waited until I had some time to fit it into my reading.

Honestly, I was expecting the book to be about techniques to get the best out of people as a leader using teambuilding skills. At least, that is the conversation I was having with my co-worker. I didn’t even read the dust jacket and just jumped into reading the book. To my surprise, it has nothing to do with that. The book is all about how the individual masters skills.

Because I was expecting something different, I was puzzled when I read the introduction. What do high performance teams have to do with a middle schooler practicing the clarinet? It is no surprise there, nothing really. OK, I am going to change my paradigm now, we are going to get educated on how to learn skills well. This is up my alley.

This is going to sound a little spacy but Coyle’s assertion is that the way we master skills is by something called deep practice. That act of deep practice in turn causes a bio-chemical reaction for the body to build a compound called myelin. This is the material that wraps nerve fiber. The more the deep practice, the thicker the myelin gets. This then causes the message transmissions to become faster and more precise. That is mastery.

The phrase deep practice has a specific implication. Deep practice is the act of working until a mistake is made, stopping and analyzing the problem and starting again at that point. Coyle uses a word exercise to try and prove a point. If you struggle with something then you are more likely to recall it and in turn master it. The list of words that he provided with missing letters was more memorable then the list where everything was filled out.

Coyle’s also asserts that there is a phenomenon out there that seems to line up with the theory anyway. Why do so many major league baseball players come from the Dominican Republic? It is because the culture has mastered deep practice when it comes to baseball. They are not a super race of baseball phenoms and certainly pound for pound when you look at Olympic medal totals it not because of genetic athleticism and deep population pools.

He also maintains that poorer demographics are more likely to use deep practice because they don’t really have any other options. They are less likely to have analytics and coaching, not discounting those things but they are making mistakes and learning from them which is what then leads to greatness.

If that is then true, I am reminded of several misguided coaches that I have had over the years. They boldly assert that the phrase “practice makes perfect” is wrong. It should be “perfect practice makes perfect” when in reality the first statement is actually more true. Someone cannot get to perfect practice without practice. And it should also be noted that using this theory, repetition holds no value. If you are not trying to do it faster or better or some other variation then likely you are actually repeating the same mistakes in your ‘perfect’ repetition.

Another novelty to me is the 10,000 hours theory does not play a role but not as big as you would think. Remember that is that it takes 10,000 hours to master something. But, combine Deep practice with 10,000 hours and you will be a master. That make sense for me because when I think about certain things like reading, sometimes I have a difficult time remembering what I read. I am sure that I have probably read that many hours in my lifetime and yet that information is only temporarily available. It goes into my brain and then six months later I would have to read the book again to even know what that is about.

And yet, I think that I am a pretty good programmer. I struggled and struggled to get it. After months of debugging I sometimes found that the program did not work like it should. Things that technically were correct did not execute in ways that they were supposed to. I learned from that particularly to be a better programmer and test my work in smaller chunks to the point that I didn’t need to do that anymore because I had mastered the nuance.

End Your Programming Routine: Despite the fact that this is not the book I was thinking that it was going to be, I actually think that it might be better than that. Sometimes, things that matter are comfortable and familiar, but sometimes they are stretching us and making us better. While a business book is interesting, this may not be the right forum. Next week, we will cover chapters 3 and 4.