When ChatGPT came out you couldn’t go 5 minutes without someone mentioning it or mentioning AI. Then you couldn’t go a day without a company releasing a new AI product. It was easy to see why. Asking questions to ChatGPT made it seem like there was a true artificial intelligence on the other side. All knowing and ready to provide you with the information you needed at a moment. But then a curious thing happened. Experts in fields started to see the pitfalls. For someone who didn’t know about space the answers ChatGPT gave on space were great but to experts the answers ranged from slightly wrong to outright lies. This happened in every field that people asked about. And that is how I feel about Talent Code.
When i started reading the book, I was hooked. Every example lined up with the hypothesis of the book and reinforced that it was the right view. But then i hit a chapter talking about a subject i knew. And it framed it to be so positive and only reinforcing the hypothesis even though I knew it wasn’t that I began to suspect the rest of what I read. But what does the Talent Code try to answer?
We have long thought Talent is innate. Something people are born with. This let’s the average person tell themself that it wouldn’t have mattered what they did, that olympic winner could never have been them. That there is something they are born with and either they never found it or they are doing it but it just isn’t the high level of someone else. Talent Code asserts that Talent is grown and can be done by anyone through the right conditions which aren’t as hard to achieve as people thing. Let’s break it down.
Daniel Coyle, author of Talent Code, has 3 core assertions in his book.
More myelin is how you hardwire skills into your body.
Use deep practice to increase the myelin around your neural pathways.
Chunk up what you’re practicing into its smallest units.
Myelin is where it all begins. It is a substance that wraps around nerves and helps neurons move. Thus if you have practiced swinging a bat the pathway for that will have more myelin around it making that skill better and easier for you to repeat. After that he says deep practice is what builds that myelin. Not just lots of practice but deep practice which is achieved through repetition and the combination of making and fixing mistakes. If you only do something easily and correct over and over your body gets complacent. But if you struggle and challenge yourself and make mistakes and learn how to fix them, it will yield exponentially better results. Lastly, the way to optimize that deep practice is breaking up your practice into the smallest chunks. If you want to be better at baseball you need to break it up into small chunks such as catching, throwing, swinging, etc and practice each individually to build up the whole.
I enjoyed this hypothesis and actually agree with it. It is how I have learned to study and gain new skills and is something i do naturally to control my ADHD when working on developing new skills or honing existing ones. Repetition of the same thing gets boring easily but challenging myself and failing and fixing what is wrong helps me stay in the zone. The book itself just faltered for me when i read through examples where I realized he was skewing things to only show the positive and support the hypothesis. This didn’t surprise me. Most business and leadership books are similar in this. They are also similar in that I felt that the book could have been a long article. I got the gist of it very quickly and then i felt each chapter was just repeating the same thing over and over.
Overall I would give the book a 6.5/10. I think it is a good lesson to learn and gives a good bedrock for how a learning culture can succeed. It is better to challenge, fail, learn, and repeat vs just doing the same easy things over and over. Also I love the shattering of the innate talent myth and the focus on anyone can be great, you just have to work hard and put yourself in the proper conditions to practice your skills.