Over my life there have been a few books that I’ve read and that have completely changed my view on huge swathes of my life. I’m going to highlight a few of the over the coming months.

The first one is The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle.

Talent is not born, it’s grown.

Show me anyone who can be described as talented and I’ll show you someone who has put in hours and hours of work into getting where they are. This book highlights the power of purposeful and deep practice and shows the talent myth for what it is. You are not born good at maths. You are not born good at golf. You are born with a brain with a phenomenal capacity for learning and skill acquisition. The more that skill is practiced with perfect form the more the neural pathways are insulated with myelin. The myelin allows the message to pass down these pathways quicker and easier allowing a skill to be performed easier and easier.

This may all be difficult to swallow, it was for me too. I grew up in a world where “talented” people were just born that way and there was nothing you can do to counter that. This is a dangerous mindset to have kids growing up in. This book shows the true power of deep practice, expert coaching and self motivation. Right now you are ten thousand hours of purposeful practice away from mastering a skill. In this book Daniel Coyle travels to talent hotspots to see why one small tennis club in Moscow can produce as many top twenty tennis players as the entire United States? Why does one music camp in New York produce so many world class musicians? Why do so many top baseball players come from tiny Caribbean islands?

This book is fascinating and has really liberated my mind with respect to talent. I know that I’m not bound down by what my family is good at. Swimming, cycling, running and endurance were never things I would have been associated with at school but I’ve practiced and practiced. I’ve analysed my technique and motivation. And I have improved unrecognisably.

Here’s a short video from Daniel Coyle about the book:

Buy The Talent Code on Amazon here.

Further Reading:

Bounce by Matthew Syed describes busts more and more myths about talent. My favourite one is the Hungarian family that produced three female Chess Grandmasters!

You can buy Bounce on Amazon here.

You can be whatever you want to be, you just have to be willing to practice relentlessly.