Daniel Coyle is the author, and he’s even better.
Gladwell is a great writer, and he is good at seeing things in a different perspective. But his greatest talent is in telling stories. Gladwells’ books are fun and easy to read.
Coyle is better at putting it all together. Coyle has taken ideas I remember reading in Tipping Point and Outliers and David and Goliath – and he puts it all together with the neurological study of myelin.
Yes, Myelin. The thing that get’s destroyed by the disease MS (Multiple Sclerosis). It’s the little layers of fat that wrap around every nerve in your body to make the signals travel faster.
Coyle explains how myelin is the basis of all talent, all great ability. There are no “natural born talents” or “geniuses.” It’s all about practice. There are people born in the right place at the right time, with access to the right people and the right materials - but that happens to lots of people. It's about the practice.
You need something to get a kid excited, otherwise they'll never practice hard enough or long enough. Then you need them to practice on the edge of failure, all the time. Always moving forward, always correcting, and always trying again.
He shows that all the best coaches, whether they know it or not, are helping develop myelin on the right nerves, in the right order.
Soccer coaches need to let the players try all sorts of different moves to be able to change tasks and maneuver new ways at any second. They need a web of myelinated nerves doing a thousand things at once.
A violinist needs precisely the correct movement every single time. The notes must be perfect. The violinist doesn’t need a web, but a direct myelin nerve for each note. Exact precision.
They all need to practice, correctly, for 10,000 hours to build up the myelin needed to become a star.
Coyle has visited the talent hotbeds of the world. From a shabby Russian tennis club that has produced more top twenty women than the entire United States, to a small poor British family that turned out three world class writers. From the small island of the Dominican Republic and all it’s baseball stars to Brazil and it’s soccer geniuses, to Korea and it’s female golfers. He has studied the great coaches, the great players – and he has found the secret.
It is not money, or equipment, or genes, or “natural ability.” It’s about Myelin. How do you grow myelin?
Practice.
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