Ding ding ding we’ve got a winner. If coaching or teaching (parenting too) is in your future (or present), this book is for you. Likewise, if you’d like to understand the process of getting really good at something, this book will describe how you can do it from an underlying level. I’m giving this one a solid 5 out of 5 stars for being quite good, but with some caveats.
The Talent Code takes you through “talent hotbeds” and tries to extract what made them into hotbeds. It also cites a lot of good research on the subject from academics like K. Anders Ericsson and Carol Dweck. I was previously familiar with both of them having read Mindset by Dweck and an academic paper on Deliberate Practice by Ericsson, so a lot of the information in the Talent Code was review for me, but it did take them to the next step.
The Talent code likes to call it deep practice, but for all intents and purposes, it’s the same as deliberate practice. The most interesting thing for me is the identification of myelin as the microscopic cause that allows practice to work. Your nerves actually get wrapped by an insulation called myelin. The more it wraps, the better the impulse travels and your system works better. And of course, your body wraps more myelin as you use those nerves. Put simply, do something more and you’ll do it better which is simple enough advice. The book certainly goes into more depth on this area, but most of it should be pretty straightforward and I won’t repeat it all here.
The second segment of the book is about ignition and I found it to be quite useful as a concept. Ignition is about grabbing someone’s attention and really turning them into deep practice machines. Most people understand that deep practice works, but few will actually dedicate the time and mental strain to do deep practice because they are not ignited. Sadly, a lack of ignition has been one of my great weaknesses in life and while the book describes a lot of ways that ignition can happen, it takes it more from a coach or teacher’s perspective. It doesn’t do a great job of showing you how to ignite yourself.
I think this lack could be the great weakness in the book. Perhaps I need a little too much hand holding, but I didn’t really see an action plan develop for myself from this book. I could potentially create an action plan as a coach for a team or as a leader of an organization, but not for myself. Maybe it’s impossible to ignite yourself. If I tried, I’d feel like I was just manipulating myself and it wouldn’t work because I’d know what I was doing and the manipulation wouldn’t work. Perhaps that’s the problem, you really need to get lucky and have someone or something in your environment ignite you.
The last section of the book is about Master Coaches, but really the key to being a master coach is to ignite your players and then help them through Deliberate Practice. Often, it will be separate coaches that ignite versus really dive into deep practice and mastery with the earliest beginner coaches needing to ignite while the ones later on can focus more on deep practice.
One part I found funny in the book was the final chapter about how the Raiders and JaMarcus Russell both went to the same relatively unknown master coach for help. It was meant to be about how some master coaches are relatively unknown, but can have profound impact. To me, it sounded a lot more like Russell had a very smart agent who put Russell in front of that coach to become the number 1 overall pick. It didn’t sound quite so much like the master coach was a great judge of future performance since Russell has since been considered one of the all-time biggest draft busts. Oops. Then again, the Raiders didn’t follow the advice they got from their master coach about how to handle Russell.
Overall, I liked the book. If you plan to become a coach, teacher, or even a parent, it’s a good read (or 6 hour audiobook listen). It may save you a lot of headaches and put your kids on the right path to success. The only problem is that it doesn’t have a plan for self ignition, but that may be impossible without some serious amnesia.