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