Authors: Daniel Coyle,
Whether it’s for you, your kid or your employee, Daniel Coyle’s The Little Book of Talent shows you how skills can be improved. The 52 scientifically-proven, “tried and tested” injunctions in this book apply to parents, students, performers, entrepreneurs, employees, leaders and anyone who wants to be better than they are today.
Video Review of The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills by Daniel Coyle,
Quotes & Tips from The Little Book of Talent
Learn via teaching: To learn it more deeply, teach it. This works because when you communicate a skill to someone, you come to understand it more deeply yourself.
Learning via mistakes: Even the most creative skills—especially the most creative skills—require long periods of clumsiness. … Feeling stupid is no fun. But being willing to be stupid—in other words, being willing to risk the emotional pain of making mistakes—is absolutely essential, because reaching, failing, and reaching again is the way your brain grows and forms new connections.
Value of practice: As the martial artist and actor Bruce Lee said, “I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick ten thousand times.”
Value of Role Models: Studies show that even a brief connection with a role model can vastly increase unconscious motivation. For example, being told that you share a birthday with a mathematician can improve the amount of effort you’re willing to put into difficult math tasks by 62 percent.
One step at a time: After all, you aren’t built to be transformed in a single day. You are built to improve little by little, connection by connection, rep by rep. As Wooden also said, “Don’t look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.
Give it time: Give a new skill a minimum of eight weeks. If you have early success, do your best to ignore the praise and keep pushing yourself to the edges of your ability, where improvement happens. If you don’t have early success, don’t quit. Instead, treat your early efforts as experiments, not as verdicts. Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint.
Changing Habits: The solution is to ignore the bad habit and put your energy toward building a new habit that will override the old one.
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