Daniel Coyle

As Dr. George Bartzokis, a UCLA neurologist and myelin researcher, put it: 'All skills, all language, all musical, all movements, are made of living circuits, and all circuits grow according to certain rules.'

To sum up: it’s time to rewrite the maxim that practice makes perfect. The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect.

Skill is insulation that wraps neural circuits and grows according to certain signals.

They each took part in the greatest work of art anyone can construct: the architecture of their own talent.

It turns out that self-discipline was twice as accurate as IQ in predicting the students’ grade-point average.

Carol Dweck, the psychologist who studies motivation, likes to say that all the world’s parenting advice can be distilled to two simple rules: pay attention to what your children are fascinated by, and praise them for their effort.

What ignited the process wasn’t any innate skill or gene. It was a small, ephemeral, yet powerful idea: a vision of their ideal future selves, a vision that oriented, energized, and accelerated progress, and that originated in the outside world.

Grit is that mix of passion, persistence, perseverance, and self-discipline that keeps us moving forward in spite of obstacles. It’s not flashy, and that’s precisely the point. In a world in which we’re frequently distracted by sparkly displays of skill, grit makes the difference in the long run.

Repetition has a bad reputation. We tend to think of it as dull and uninspiring. But this perception is titanically wrong. Repetition is the single most powerful lever we have to improve skills, because it uses the built-in mechanism for making the wires of our brains faster and more accurate.

Develop the habit of attending to your errors right away. Don’t wince, don’t close your eyes; look straight at them and see what really happened, and ask yourself what you can do next to improve. Take mistakes seriously, but never personally.

Every time you practice deeply—the wires of your brain get faster. Over time, signal speeds increase to 200 mph from 2 mph.

No matter what skill you want to learn, the pattern is always the same: See the whole thing. Break it down to its simplest elements. Put it back together. Repeat.

It’s no coincidence that most talent hotbeds put a premium on practicing when people are fresh, usually in the morning, if possible. When exhaustion creeps in, it’s time to quit.

Talent hotbeds are not built on identifying talent but on constructing it, day by day.

The new science can be summed up as follows: You want to develop your talent? Build a better brain through intensive practice.

Our sense of belonging constantly needs to be fueled by signals of connection.