The Highlight Reel is a blog series where I share passages that I’ve highlighted on my Kindle during my commute to and from work each day. The selections are mostly from self-help and work/marketing-related books.
I’m sharing them because I don’t believe we get enough good advice about how to relax, stop worrying about the small things, and look at the bigger picture.
The Talent Code: Greatness isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How by Daniel Coyle
“Every human skill, whether it’s playing baseball or playing Bach, is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse—basically, a signal traveling through a circuit.”
“When we fire our circuits in the right way—when we practice swinging that bat or playing that note—our myelin responds by wrapping layers of insulation around that neural circuit, each new layer adding a bit more skill and speed. The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates, and the faster and more accurate our movements and thoughts become.”
“Myelin is important for several reasons. It’s universal: everyone can grow it, most swiftly during childhood but also throughout life. It’s indiscriminate: its growth enables all manner of skills, mental and physical. It’s indiscriminate: its growth enables all manner of skills, mental and physical. It’s imperceptible: we can’t see it or feel it, and we can sense its increase only by its magical seeming effects.
Most of all, however, myelin is important because it provides us with a vivid new model for understanding skill: Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows in response to certain signals.”
“Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways—operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes—makes you smarter. Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you’re forced to slow down, make error, and correct them—as you would if you were talking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go—end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it.”
“Struggle is not optional—it’s neurologically required: in order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit suboptimal; you must make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes; you must slowly teach your circuit. You must also keep firing that circuit—i.e., practicing—in order to keep myelin functioning properly. After all, myelin is living tissue.”
Brian Burns 