The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

Best for: People looking for a quick read and a couple of helpful tips.In a nutshell: Mr. Coyle provides 52 tips to help you get better at something. Anything.Line that sticks with me: “But in the talent hotbeds I visited, practice was the big game, the center of their world, the main focus of their daily lives.” (p 39)Why I chose it: As part of that whole summer reading BINGO thing our public library is doing, one square is ‘recommended by an independent bookseller.’ Also, I like to learn things.Review: Hmm. There are 52 tips, which I suppose is meant to correlate to weeks in the year, but the book isn’t laid out like that. Instead, each tip ranges from a paragraph to a few pages, grouped by getting started, getting better, and keeping it up. Some of the tips were helpful and familiar. The one I mention above, about practice, reminds me of the book by Commander Hayden (astronaut). Since they might never go to space, they have to treat preparation as the real thing. That’s what matters.Other tips run contrary to ones I’ve learned before, especially about writing. One is to “never mistake activity for accomplishment.” Which, yikes. Like, the fact that I write every single day — haven’t missed a day since March (that includes when I had food poisoning), when I started that — is a fucking accomplishment. That activity is making me a better writer.The tips are meant to be universal but, as mentioned above, I don’t think they are always applicable. And while the title is certainly true — this is a little book — I think it could have been a series of blog posts, or perhaps included in some sort of habit app. Not sure it warranted this fancy binding and shiny cover.

Years ago, there was always available Coyle's Book of Games; however, this book is more of a self-improvement publication. Teaching Company lecturer, neuroscientist, Sam Wang, in outlining the function of the various sections of the brain, provides a more transparent explanation of focused talent..

I put this book down over and over again, not because I didn't want to go on, but because I wanted to immediately implement something from a chapter into my daily routine, or because I wanted to share one of the tips with a friend.

I will definitely be focusing on these tips as I work towards specific goals, and I am anxious to see if the result is improved progress.

Short and to the point. Useful tips for anyone wanting to develop a talent in themselves or others. Coaches, teachers, etc in particular.

Nice little book with tips from Coyle's experience and research. Seems very good to look at before trying to teach kids, but also in general. I made notes of most of the tips: 1. Stare at those you want to become. 2. Spend 15 min engraving the skill want to learn. Listen, watch, etc. project oneself. Redo classics. 3. Steal without apology. 4. Keep a notebook. Reflect. 5. Don't be afraid to be stupid, especially when trying new things. 6. Choose spartan over luxurious. Focus on task. 7. Figure out if hard (exact, consistent) or soft (agile, adapting) skill. 11. Don't fall for prodigy myth. 13. Practice central, not drudgery. 14. Reaches and reps, not time. 15. Break down into chunks. 16. One perfect chunk each day. Achievable goals. 17. Embrace struggle. 18. 5 min/day rather than 1h/week. 19. Create small, addictive game, e.g. by giving points. 20. Practice alone. 21. Think in images. 22. Immediate attention after mistake. 23. Visualize the new connections made in the brain and the wires getting faster. 24. Compress the skill to small area or with other restrictions. 25. Slow it down. 26. Close your eyes. Awareness, balance, etc. 27. Mime it. 29. Mark it when perfect. 30. Take a nap. Strengthens the brains new connections. 31. Exaggerate the move to be learned. 32. Make positive reaches. Focus on reaching goal rather than not failing. 33. Challenge yourself also with small tasks, like write summary after having read something. 34. Sandwich technique: Correct-incorrect-correct. 35. Three times-ten min break. 36. Daily small tests, games. Measurable, fun, repeatable. 37. REPS. Reaching and repeating, engaging, purposeful, strong speedy feedback. 38. Stop before exhausted. Fatigue not good. 39. Practice immediately after performance. Helps target weak points. 40. Mental movie before sleep. Ideal performance. 41. End on positive note. 42. To be better teachers: Use first few seconds to connect on emotional level, establish trust. Vivid and short in stead of long speeches. No mushy language, be precise and concrete. Scorecard for learning, metric that tracks skills. Ex: number of accurate passes in stead of scores. Maximize reachfulness, lots of training for all. Reach: just outside current comfort zone. Aim to create independent learners that can reach for themselves. Part 3. Sustaining progress, etc. 43. Embrace repetition, creates circuitry needed. Tool, not a chore. Can be better with a little good than much not as good. 44. Blue-collar mindset - steady work. 45. Not too many games, skills better developed through practice. 46. Build good habits in stead of trying to break bad. 47. Teach to learn. Also for kids. 48. Min 8 weeks for new skill. 49. When get stuck/plateau, make a shift. Force slower, faster, backwards, etc-to get out of autopilot. 50. Cultivate grit. Makes the difference in the long run. Can take grit test online to learn more. 51. Keep big goals secret. 52. Talent grows slowly, think like a gardener, work like a carpenter.

Research-based, practical, and concise. Can be read in under an hour.

This handbook contains 52 rules for developing or improving any skill. It focuses on best practices that the author observed at what he calls 'talent hotbeds'. These are schools, training camps, and academies that have produced a high number of world class athletes, musicians, performers and academic stars. The book is concise, each of the 52 rules is covered in a few pages, so it is a fast read. But when you look at putting it into practice, it's not so easy. Some of the rules are refreshing - such as the finding that practicing as little as 15 minutes a day can be more helpfule then longer but infrequent sessions. He also gives advice on how to pick the best coach for yourself and how to coach others. Its handy to have all of these rules in a compact package which could be kept in your purse or backpack and referred to frequently. I plan to pick a skill and work towards developing some proficiency using Coyle's tips. According to him it takes a minimum of eight weeks to start to change the brain. This is a short enough time that any reader should be able to apply some of the tips and begin to see real changes.

There seems to be no lack of self-help/improvement books lately; all promising to set you on the road to betterment and success. Yet, when you come right down to it, all of them contain the old saw of 'practice makes perfect'. This cliche is actually based on a physiological fact where every time a skill or thought process is repeated the brain cells/nerve pathways involved are strengthened due an increase in a substance called myelin. The more myelin a nerve cell is encased in the bigger/faster/stronger the nerve impulse becomes (and so also the skill being performed). So now the question becomes - how best to lay down this all important myelin.Enter Daniel Coyle and The Little Book of Talent. Based on a previous book of his - The Talent Code - The Little Book is a distillatiion of 52 tips that are best practices for laying down myelin and increasing talent/skill. Coyle collected these ideas by going to experts in learning - top teachers, coaches, and neuroscientists - and then breaking down their methods into easy to manage information bites. The book is divided into three sections: 1)getting started, 2)improving skills, and 3)sustaining progess and Coyle carefully builds through each section. While the book did not specifically recommend this, the fact that the tips are 52 in number suggests that this could be a year long program of weekly ideas/practices. The information is not complex but it does require sustained effort.This is an excellent book for any teacher, coach, or parent. I found the tips to be insightful and brilliant in their simplicity. But please don't mistake simple for easy - if you do these tips properly they are HARD WORK. The book reads well and the examples used highlight and motivate. There is a glossary in the beginning that explains key concepts before you get into the meat of the book and a suggestion list for further reading at the end. There are no citations or notations of where the tip came from or what research supports which idea but as this is more a 'pedal to the metal' type book this lack is not necessarily a hinderance. I liked and enjoyed the book; so much so that I have since purchased The Talent Code and intend on reading it also. Highly recommended.

This "little" book packs a big wallop for anyone who is intent on improving their skills and interests. Each of the 52 tips can be is easily 'digestible' and can be immediately put into practice to help the reader reach his goal. While many tips draw from athletic experience, they are applicable to skills and goals of all sorts. A very good resource to keep on the shelf and draw upon frequently.

This is indeed a little book. It contains 52 brief techniques for improving skills, based on Daniel Coyle's research into human excellence, and how we get there. What you will not find here is a lengthy treatise expounding Coyle's theory of greatness, with footnotes. That would be The Talent Code. This book is an extended commercial for Coyle's other book, which was apparently effective, because I was curious enough to buy a copy after reading The Little Book of Talent.The tips you find in this book seem pretty simple. I think that is a feature not a bug. Most excellent coaching seems really simple after the fact. The hard part is doing the right thing at the right time that will help the student push harder than they ever thought they could. With a new batch of tricks, that should help a coach find that right thing faster, and more often. The same idea could easy be expanded to one's self, along the lines of Getting Things Done or the 4-Hour Workweek. Try to find ways to boost yourself just a little bit everyday, and aim for a cumulative effect to achieve a bigger payoff.The tips are pretty interesting, and I find them intuitively accurate. They match up with my own experience. What I am less impressed with is Coyle's theoretical framework. The 10,000 hour rule serves nicely as a synecdoche of Coyle's theory: Rule of Ten Thousand Hours (n): The scientific finding that all world-class experts in every field have spent a minimum of ten thousand hours intensively practicing their craft. While this number is sometimes misinterpreted as a magical threshold, in reality it functions as a rule of thumb underlining a larger truth: Greatness is not born, but grown through deep practice, no matter who you are.Coyle has a lot of interesting research, but the one thing he can't conquer is the popular impression that some people are born more talented than others. That is because this popular belief is true. The semantic flaw in the popular belief is that we are not born with ready made skills; we have to learn them. Thus is entirely correct to say that all geniuses must perfect their skills through intensive practice. What is missing is the genius had a greater capacity for that talent than you when he started, and if you both went through an identical training regimen, the difference would rapidly become obvious.The other important thing Coyle has going for him is very few of us are so skilled in anything that we are bumping up against our capacity limits. You can almost always get better at whatever it is you are doing with more effective techniques. The talented people will just learn faster, and learn more than the rest of us. This grates against the American national character, however, so Coyle shouldn't have any trouble finding a willing audience.

I was unimpressed by this book. While it is interesting that these author visited these "talent hotbeds" and observed young talent being trained. I got the impression from the book that he then went about writing this book just based on his observations. There is a lot of scientific research on skill development, motor learning, and sport psychology. At times the author documents some scientific studies for his tips. Such as tip #30 Take a Nap he mentions research at the University of California Berkley that supports his tip. However, many other tips such as Tip #14, take off your watch come with no evidence to back it up. I would have liked this book to be supported more by some of the research that is going on.

Easy quick read book to motivate you when needed. This book has great simple tips you can us immediately to build your confidence or courage to take on a challenge at work or school. If you have not read the authors larger book, this one is a good sampler for the more in depth book. As an instructor of leadership skills in the Boy Scouts this book will be very helpful to the boys and adults.

Perhaps it is not fair to Coyle to bring up Malcolm Gladwell in the first sentence of a review of this book. After all, The Little Book of Talent doesn't aspire to summarize and assimilate a wide range of social science research. His aims are more modest: provide the reader with the useful nuggets, just the conclusions from observations about how to get the most out of one's attempts to develop a skill. For the reader seeking such suggestions, surely there is something here. For a comprehensive account of the cultivation of human potential, one will look elsewhere.

This compact guide about how to pursue self improvement gets a "highly recommend" from me. I like the Coyle draws from a range of proven cases then synthesizes it all down neatly into a set of 52 quite readable tips. I'm ready to pursue career, parenting and even my tennis game this week with a new outlook and new ideas to improve.

This book is a short, concise, but practical look at concrete ways one can pick up or improve on a skill. It isn't terribly long, but it doesn't need to be. In all honesty, while reading it I was reminded of those "top 10" blog posts that have a way of turning into viral internet memes. I appreciated the brevity - when learning a skill I don't want to be bogged down with 300 pages of long, drawn out advice that serves only to give the author an avenue to express his or her own life philosophy. Coyle gives us a nice alternative - a self-help book that delivers what it claims, and does so without boring me to death.

This book has oodles of good advice, nicely stated, short, sweet, and to the point. It uses real world examples (both anecdotal and research verified) There seems to be a bit of repetition to this book, but each chapter is different.Unfortunately, this book focuses more on hard skills, those skills that are easily measured, such as tennis swings rather than soft skills, such as focusing. The advice in this book is good. I foresee this book being on a bestseller list once its released in August. Highly recommended because it gives clear instructions on how to become a better at your talents.

The book is broken into 3 logical stage: Getting Started, Improving Skills and Sustaining Progress. It's short at a little over 100 pages and the size of a novel, but it's packed with great tips that you can go use as soon as you read them. I haven't had time to implement a lot of them yet, so I can't speak to its efficacy yet, but they make a lot of sense. And given the success of the talent hotbeds he studied, I'm optimistic. If you're a coach, parent, or have a role in the skills development process of kids, this book will help.

As often happens with good motivation/self-help books, everything such book says you probably intuitively know. Still, the concentration of wisdom and very useful advice in such small format provides for a very powerful tool. I am going to make sure my children will read it next - it is very useful for younger generations. The book is really inspiring.

Great little book. Short and to the point. Only takes about an hour to read but worth the time. The tips are pretty useful as i am already putting a couple of them in to good use.

This book is a mildly enjoyable read. Most of the contents are common sense. It would be more appropriate for a teen or older child rather than an adult. It would make a nice graduation gift.

This is an afterthought of The Talent Code by Coyle. A very quick read, but very interesting and informative. Recommend to everyone, especically educators, as it emphasizes that talent is developed through effort and not just inate.

I won a copy through Goodreads' Firstreads giveaway program!!!

I am always skeptical of self-help books, but “The Little Book of Talent” is more of a pocket reference guide. There are undoubtedly a couple tips in here that everyone already knows…but moreover many you never thought to try.
Coyle offers quotes from famous successes and examples for how these tips relate to everyday talents. I especially enjoyed his focus of nurturing ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ skills. Although this is not a new concept, the author explains in a logical way how to really fine-tune seemingly daunting skill sets.
I plan to share this book with friends because the viewpoint is fresh and the collective experiences ring true. Happy reading!

From the epigraph:We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. --AristotleAlong the lines of Michael Pollan’s distillation of his excellent The Omnivore’s Dilemma into In Defense of Food and even further into Food Rules, so Daniel Coyle boils down his The Talent Code into this, The Little Book of Talent.The Omnivore’s Dilemma is one of my all-time favorite books and I’ll just leave it at “I hated” the distillations. So whereas I likely would enjoy the depth of Coyle’s The Talent Code, I’m definitely not the audience for his quick-reference guide of “52 Tips for Improving Your Skills.”That said, I’m going to cut it some slack.It’s based on the current theory that innate talent is a mere starting point toward success -- and maybe a lesser one, compared with practice and motivation. Much of the theory will be familiar to readers who’ve encountered any of the books in Coyle’s Further Reading list (for example, Outliers, Being Wrong, The Power of Habit, Mindset, Bounce). But the focus is not theory here (or source attribution/documentation), it’s takeaways -- tips toward success in sports, business and the arts that range from a paragraph to a few pages and are organized into sections on Getting Started, Improving Skills, and Sustaining Progress.Among my favorites are “Stare at who you want to become” (intensely observe the people you want to model, the talent you want to develop), and “Pay attention immediately after you make a mistake” (don’t look away from mistakes, learn from them), for example via “Use the sandwich technique” (learn from mistakes by making the correct move, then the incorrect move, then the correct move again). Like these last two, some tips seem like they could have been combined, but perhaps Coyle separated them along the line of his tip, “Break every move down into chunks.”In the end, periodically referring to a little book of tips (whether to improve our diets or talents) might be just the kind of habit Aristotle suggests.

The Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle is scheduled to be published in August of this year and packs a big punch of information for such a concise book. 52 common sense tips are shared to improve your skill in athletics, work, or relationships. The “sweet spot” of success and “deep and shallow practice” are discussed throughout the examples Coyle utilizes to further his explanation on mastering certain skills in life.Positivity (tip #41) and using the best practice method (Tip #37 which is the “R.E.P.S.” philosophy) are succinctly given to the reader in useful nuggets for later referral. This title would make an excellent gift for the new grad or a handy reference for anyone needing that extra “boost” for confidence or skill building in life.

I think that I have found my new best book of 2012 - The Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle. After reading the first two Steig Larsson behemoths this little book was a nice change. Please note that the title says 'little'. I only say this because so many people who reviewed it on Amazon seemed to have missed the whole point of this. It is small for a reason, and clearly states in the title that it is a 'little book'. If you want a bigger book with more substance you may want to check out his other book The Talent Code.I have read many amazing books this year (100+ books so far) - Dauphine du Maurier, Radclyff Hall, Steig Larsson, David Weber, Umberto Eco, Ricky Martin, Susan Cain - to name just a few of the fabulous authors. But only 3 books so far have made me want to buy copies so I can hand them out to people and say – read this! Daniel Coyle’s The Little Book of Talent is the one that tops the list. (The other two are: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain and Me by Ricky Martin.)Is there anyone that doesn’t have at least one thing that they would like to improve? This book contains 52 tips for improving your skills, whatever they may be. And it is not just geared towards people learning a new skill, it is also helpful for people teaching and coaching others. Oh and if you have trouble getting you kid to take naps you can show them tip #30 – Take a nap. Napping is good for the learning brain. Napping helps make the connections that we learned in practice stronger and gets the brain ready to learn more. Or how about #46 - don’t try to break bad habits, make new ones. I think that is a key point that most people don’t get when they want to ‘break’ a habit. They work at getting rid of the habit but don’t try to replace it with something else.I would be very surprised if there was anyone that couldn’t find anything useful from this book. Yes, most are common sense. The point here is that you have something that you can hold in your hand that says - do this to get better. It focuses on making you mindful of what you need to do to achieve your goal, and explains why it works.DS(Bruce's evil twin :-))

Daniel Coyle’s previous book The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How, apparently needed a junior companion. He compiled notes taken while researching Talent Code into the 52 tips for improving your skills that make up this book. Some tips are new and interesting, such as: “Choose Spartan over luxurious,” “Five ways to pick a high-quality teacher or coach,” “Pay attention immediately after you make a mistake,” “Practice begins when you get it right,” and my favorite: “Take a nap.” Others are old and ordinary, such as: “Buy a notebook”, and “Embrace Struggle.” The recurring theme is that “Small actions, repeated over time, transform us.” This is the basis for what he calls deep practice.The book is a pleasant and very short read. The value in this book would be in applying it to increasing your skill in some meaningful area.