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THE BIG IDEAS The Little Book of Talent

Sweet Spots
52 Tips for Improving Your Skills
Comfort zones and survival zones. BY DANIEL COYLE · BANTAM © 2012 · 160 PAGES

The Most Important Skill

Learning how to practice.

Take a Nap!
It’s awesome. “What follows is a collection of simple, practical tips for improving skills, taken
directly from the hotbeds I visited and the scientists who research them. The
Positive Reframing
Don’t make negative frames! advice is field-tested, scientifically sound, and, most important, concise. Because
Mental Movies when it comes down to it, we’re all navigating busy, complex lives. Parent or
Pre-sleep styles. teacher, kid or coach, artist or entrepreneur, we all want to make the most of our
Blue Collar Mind Sets time and energy. When it comes to developing our talents, we could use an owner’s
And LEGO lunch pails. manual, something to say Do this, not that. We could use a master coach that tucks
Think Like a Gardener in our pocket. We could use a little book. …
Act like a carpenter.
Whatever talent you set out to build, from golfing to learning a new language
to playing guitar to managing a startup, be assured of one thing: You are born
with the machinery to transform beginner’s clumsiness into fast, fluent action.
That machinery is not controlled by genes, it’s controlled by you. Each day, each
practice session, is a step toward a different future. This is a hopeful idea, and the
most hopeful thing about it is that it is a fact.”

~ Daniel Coyle from The Little Book of Talent

Daniel Coyle wrote the phenomenal book The Talent Code (see Notes) in which he describes how
talent is constructed.

“We are what we repeatedly
do. Excellence, then, is not
an act, but a habit.”
~ Aristotle
That book is all about myelin—which acts as a sort of insulator for electrical impulses and is a
key driver to performing at a high level.
As Dan says in the appendix to this book, “In fact, studies show that myelin grows in proportion
to the hours spent in practice. It’s a simple system, and can be thought of this way: Every time
you perform a rep, your brain adds another layer of myelin to those particular wires. The
more you practice, the more layers of myelin you earn, the more quickly and accurately the
signal travels, and the more skill you acquire.”

After Dan and I traded emails to set up an interview, I realized I had yet to read this little book
so I found it in the stacks and set it on the desk for the next morning. I woke up at 4am the
next morning (a Sunday—yes, I was in bed at 8pm on a Saturday night, my idea of a party!)
and devoured the book in one sitting before the family got up. In fact, I’m typing this at 6:37am
eagerly anticipating our almost-three-year-old son Emerson yelling, “Dadddddeeeeeeee!” to let
me know he’s up. :)

This book is an uber-practical companion guide to The Talent Code. As per the sub-title: “52
Tips for Improving Your Skills”—organized by the three phases of skill development: Igniting +
Improving Skills + Sustaining Progress. If you’re looking to improve your skills and/or if you’re
a coach/teacher/the kind of human looking to help others develop their skills, I think you’ll love
this book as much as I did. (Get a copy here.)

I’m excited to share a handful of my favorite Big Ideas so let’s jump straight in!

1 PhilosophersNotes | The Little Book of Talent

 COMFORT ZONE + SWEET SPOT + SURVIVAL ZONE
“The new science can be “There is a place, right on the edge of your ability, where you learn best and fastest. It’s called the

summed up as follows: You

sweet spot. Here’s how to find it.

want to develop your talent? Comfort Zone

Build a better brain through
Sensations: Ease, effortlessness. You’re working, but not reaching or struggling.
intensive practice.”
Percentage of Successful Attempts: 80 percent and above
~ Daniel Coyle
Sweet Spot

Sensations: Frustration, difficulty, alertness to errors. You’re fully engaged in an intense

struggle—as if you’re stretching with all your might for a nearly unreachable goal, brushing it
with your fingertips, then reaching again.

Percentage of Successful Attempts: 50-80 percent.

Survival Zone

Sensations: Confusion, desperation. You’re overmatched: scrambling, thrashing, and guessing.

You guess right sometimes, but it’s mostly luck.

Percentage of Successful Attempts: Below 50 percent.”

So, we need to practice if we want to develop our myelin to develop our skill. But not just any
practice will do. We need to DELIBERATELY practice.

We need to find our Sweet Spot right in between our comfort zone and our survival zone—that
place where we’re just outside the edge of our ability that demands intense focus and leads to
plenty of mistakes that we struggle to optimize.

Comfort Zone = Too easy.

Sweet Spot = Properly challenging.

Survival Zone = Too challenging.

Tal Ben-Shahar has a similar way of describing this in the context of setting goals. He tells us we
want to leave our comfort zones and head into our stretch zones but we don’t want to go so far
that we wind up in our panic zones.

I like that. I also like to imagine a rubber band.

Imagine stretching a rubber band (or, better yet, go get one and actually do this!) between the
pointer fingers of each of your hands. If you just let it sit there without stretching it at all, there’s
no tension. It’s just kinda limp. Not so good. That’s our comfort zone.

Now, stretch it nice and taught so there’s a dynamic tension you can feel. That’s good. That’s
your stretch zone.

Now, imagine (I don’t recommend actually doing this unless you’re prepared to have the band
break in your face!) stretching the rubber band so far that it SNAPS. That, is not so good. That’s
our snap zone. Or, as Dan describes it, our survival zone. Or, as Tal describes it, our panic zone.

We want to play just on the edge of our abilities as we practice cultivating our skills.

Focus on YOU: Where are you spending most of your time?

Languishing in your comfort zone? Stretching in your sweet spot? Or snapping in your panic/
survival zone?

And, most importantly: What’s one thing you could do to optimize that?

2 PhilosophersNotes | The Little Book of Talent


“Talent hotbeds are not
built on identifying talent
but on constructing it, day
by day.”
~ Daniel Coyle
“It’s no coincidence that
most talent hotbeds put a
premium on practicing when
people are fresh, usually
in the morning, if possible.
When exhaustion creeps in,
it’s time to quit.”
~ Daniel Coyle
PhilosophersNotes | The Little Book of Talent
THE MOST IMPORTANT SKILL OF ALL
“With deep practice, small daily practice ‘snacks’ are more effective than once-a-week practice
binges. The reason has to do with the way our brains grow—incrementally, a little each day, even
as we sleep. Daily practice, even for five minutes, nourishes this process, while more occasional
practice forces your brain to play catch-up. Or, as the music education pioneer Shinichi Suzuki
puts it, ‘Practice on the days that you eat.’ …
The other advantage of practicing daily is that it becomes a habit. The act of practicing—making
time to do it, doing it well—can be thought of as a skill in itself, perhaps the most important skill
of all. Give it time. According to research, establishing a new habit takes about thirty days.”
Two things here.
First: Daily practice snacks are MUCH better than weekly feasts. And this applies to
*everything*—whether it’s meditation, exercise or deliberately cultivating a particular skill.
Consistency over intensity is one of my favorite mantras.
In this case, consistent intensity—even if it’s just for 5 minutes per day!
That’s part 1. Part 2 is one of my favorite Ideas.
We need to recognize that getting good at practicing consistently is a SKILL IN AND OF ITSELF!
I agree with Dan that it is perhaps THE most important skill of all. As I reflected on it, I realized
that I’ve unconsciously made this my #1 skill to develop and it’s now officially the #1 skill I will
be developing *consciously.*
This is at the heart of creating masterpiece days. We need to structure our lives such that we can
be in the best position to CONSISTENTLY show up and do our best work.
We need to know when our energy is best and do the most challenging work in a pre-selected
time block at.that.time. (Dan tells us for most hotbeds, that’s in the morning when everyone is
fresh.)
We need to follow Jim Loehr’s advice and TRAIN RECOVERY with good night’s of sleep and
naps. (Dan tells us that napping is a universal practice of peak performers—more on that in a
moment.)
We need to practice getting good at practicing/optimizing.
It’s one of, if not THE most important skill.
How are you doing with that?
P.S. Remember to practice every day you eat. :)
TAKE A NAP!
“This is one of my favorite tips. Napping is common in talent hotbeds, and features both
anecdotal and scientific justification.
The anecdotal: Albert Einstein was good at physics, and he was really good at his daily post-
lunch twenty-minute snooze. Other famous nappers include Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon
Bonaparte, Winston Churchill, Thomas Edison, Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, and John
D. Rockefeller. Spend time with any professional athletic team, and you’ll find they’re also
professional nappers.
The science: Napping is good for the learning brain, because it helps strengthen the connections
formed during practice and prepare the brain for the next session.”
3

“No matter what skill you
want to learn, the pattern
is always the same: See the
whole thing. Break it down
to its simplest elements.
Put it back together.
Repeat.”
~ Daniel Coyle
“Every time you practice
deeply—the wires of your
brain get faster. Over time,
signal speeds increase to
200 mph from 2 mph.”
~ Daniel Coyle
4 PhilosophersNotes | The Little Book of Talent
Sara Mednick is one of the world’s leading researchers on the scientific benefits of napping. She
wrote a whole book on it called Take a Nap! Change Your Life (see Notes) where she tells us:
“Let’s look at the rest of the animal kingdom. Do any other species try to get all their sleep
in one long stretch? No. They’re all multiphasic, meaning that they have many phases of
sleep. Homo sapiens (our modern industrialized variety, anyway) stand alone in attempting
to satisfy the need for sleep in one phase. And even that distinction is a relatively recent
development. For most of our history, a rest during the day was considered as necessary
a component of human existence as sleeping at night. As A. Roger Ekirch, one of the few
historians to study sleep, put it, ‘Napping is a tool as old as time itself.’”
Plus: “Scientists no longer argue about whether napping is natural or unnatural, helpful or
unhelpful. These are givens.”
Plus: “Our results back up what historians, anthropologists, artists and numerous brilliant
leaders and thinkers have been telling their contemporaries throughout the ages. In a perfect
world, all humans, including you, would nap.”
And... In his great book The Power of Rest (see Notes) Matthew Edlund tells us: “Research at
Harvard has shown that short periods of daytime sleep—even as short as a six-minute nap—
can improve memory.”
(Six minutes!!)
Naps. They do a body good.
(Note to self: Remember to take naps more often! :)
POSITIVE FRAMING
“There’s a moment before every rep when you are faced with a choice: You can either focus your
attention on the target (what you want to do) or you can focus on the possible mistake (what you
want to avoid). This tip is simple: Always focus on the positive move, not the negative one.
For example, a golfer lining up a putt should tell herself, ‘Center the stroke,’ not ‘Don’t pull this
putt to the left.’ A violinist faced with a difficult passage should tell himself, ‘Nail that A-flat,’ not
‘Oh boy, I hope I don’t miss that A-flat.’ Psychologists call this ‘positive framing,’ and provide
plentiful theories of how framing affects our subconscious mind. The point is, it always works
better to reach for what you want to accomplish, not away from what you want to avoid.”
Positive framing vs. negative framing.
It’s important to state what you want to happen in POSITIVE terms.
Are you doing that?
Remember: Quit framing things negatively!
Ahem. Um.
I mean: Frame things positively! :)
P.S. This reminds me of what psychologists call “approach” vs. “avoidance” behavior.
The healthiest among us choose approach goals—framing their desires in the positive things they
want to move toward rather than the negative things they want to avoid.
As per Dan Siegel (see Notes on Mindsight): “People with mindfulness training have a shift in
their brains toward an “approach state” that allows them to move toward rather than away
from challenging situations. This is the brain signature of resilience.”
To the approach!

“Develop the habit of
attending to your errors
right away. Don’t wince,
don’t close your eyes; look
straight at them and see
what really happened, and
ask yourself what you can
do next to improve. Take
mistakes seriously, but
never personally.”
~ Daniel Coyle
“Repetition has a bad
reputation. We tend to think
of it as dull and uninspiring.
But this perception is
titanically wrong. Repetition
is the single most powerful
lever we have to improve
skills, because it uses
the built-in mechanism
for making the wires of
our brains faster and more
accurate.”
~ Daniel Coyle
PhilosophersNotes | The Little Book of Talent
PRE-SLEEP MENTAL MOVIES
“This is a useful habit I’ve heard about from dozens of top performers, ranging from surgeons
to athletes to comedians. Just before falling asleep, they play a movie of their idealized
performance in their heads. A wide body of research supports this idea, linking visualization to
improved performance, motivation, mental toughness, and confidence. Treat it as a way to rev
the engine of your unconscious mind, so it spends more time churning toward your goals.”
Want to prime your subconscious mind before you sleep?
A TON of peak performance coaches recommend watching an idealized performance in your
head. A mental movie of pure awesome.
NOTE: As I’ve said many times, remember that we’re visualizing our ideal PERFORMANCE (aka
what we’re going to do) *not* our ideal OUTCOMES (aka the benefits of doing something really
well for a long time).
Comedians imagine a great performance, perfect timing, audience laughing, etc. NOT the big
check per se.
Athletes imagine the perfect moves, scoring with grace, etc. NOT the endorsement check.
I like to imagine a masterpiece day—getting up with energy and enthusiasm, moving thru my
morning rituals with a smile then knocking out my AM1 time block (either reading or creating
a Note), spending time with the fam then rolling thru my AM2 time block (which is my most
challenging and important; these days MWF I do the MP3 + PNTV + Micro Classes for a Note
while Tue/Thu I do interviews).
My ideal PERFORMANCE.
How about you? What’s your ideal performance look like?
P.S. When we do imagine our product goals, let’s remember to open up a can of WOOP on ‘em!
(Check out the Micro Class on that.)
As per our Note on Gabriele Oettingen’s brilliant book Rethinking Positive Thinking, we imagine
our Wish + Outcome + Obstacle + Plan: “On a blank sheet of paper, name the wish in three to
six words. Identify the best outcome (also in three to six words) and write it down. Now let
your thoughts lead your pen, taking as much paper as you need. Then name your obstacle
and write it down. Imagine the obstacle, again letting your thoughts wander and lead your
writing. To create a plan, first write down one specific action you can take to overcome the
obstacle. Write down the time and place where you believe the obstacle will arise. Then write
down the if-then plan: ‘If obstacle x occurs (when and where), then I will perform behavior y.’
Repeat it once to yourself out loud.”
BLUE COLLAR MINDSETS AND LEGO LUNCH PAILS
“From a distance, top performers seem to live charmed, cushy lives. When you look closer,
however, you’ll find that they spend vast portions of their life intensively practicing their craft.
Their mind set is not entitled or arrogant; it’s 100-percent blue collar: They get up in the
morning and go to work every day, whether they feel like it or not.
As the artist Chuck Close says, ‘Inspiration is for amateurs.’”
The blue collar mind set.
I. LOVE. THAT.
So much so that I stole Emerson’s little LEGO construction guy’s red lunch pail. It now sits on
the window sill in my office. Right in front of my face. I’m looking at it now as I type.
5

“Grit is that mix of passion,
persistence, perseverance,
and self-discipline that
keeps us moving forward in
spite of obstacles. It’s not
flashy, and that’s precisely
the point. In a world in
which we’re frequently
distracted by sparkly
displays of skill, grit makes
the difference in the long
run.”
~ Daniel Coyle
If you liked this Note,
you’ll probably like…
The Talent Code
Talent Is Overrated
Mastery (by Greene)
Turning Pro
Do the Work
6 PhilosophersNotes | The Little Book of Talent
That lunchpail is *identical* to the lunch pail that Steve Pressfield put on the cover of his classic
book Turning Pro (see Notes).
It’s the *perfect* representation of showing up and doing the work. Day in and day out. Whether
we feel like it or not. Blue-collar style. Remember: Inspiration is for amateurs.
THINK LIKE A GARDENER, WORK LIKE A CARPENTER
“We all want to improve our skills quickly—today, if not sooner. But the truth is, talent grows
slowly. You would not criticize a seedling because it was not yet a tall oak tree; nor would you get
upset because your skill circuitry is in the growth stage. Instead, build it with daily deep practice.
To do this, it helps to ‘think like a gardener and work like a carpenter.’ I heard this saying at
Spartak. Think patiently, without judgment. Work steadily, strategically, knowing that each
piece connects to a larger whole.”
Love that.
As much as we’d like results right.this.moment (ideally YESTERDAY!), that’s not how it works.
We need to think like a gardener. With patience. Without judgment. Looking at results over
horticultural time, not clock time.
And we need to act like a carpenter. Precisely. Steadily. Strategically. Seeing how each piece
connects to the larger whole.
That’s a winning formula for giving ourselves the space to cultivate our talent (/myelin) so we
can optimize, flourish, and actualize!
Brian Johnson,
Chief Philosopher
About the Author of “The Little Book of Talent”
DANIEL COYLE
Daniel Coyle is the author of The Talent Code, as well as the New York Times
bestseller Lance Armstrong’s War. He lives with his wife and four children in
Homer, Alaska, and Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Connect: thetalentcode.com
About the Author of This Note
BRIAN JOHNSON
Brian Johnson loves helping people optimize their lives as he studies, embodies
and teaches the fundamentals of optimal living—integrating ancient wisdom
+ modern science + common sense + virtue + mastery + fun. Learn more and
optimize your life at brianjohnson.me.