Developing Your Talent is Never an Accident

If you take a running jump from the roof of a skyscraper, “persistence” won’t help you fly.

It doesn’t matter how “badly” you want it, or how much effort you’re willing to put in — the physics just doesn’t work.

Likewise, if you’re practicing in the wrong way, or an inefficient way — even for 10,000 hours — you’re never going to develop any talent.

In his excellent book, The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle cracks the…well, the “talent code” (obviously), and shows how each of us can fully develop our own latent potentialities and make the most out of the natural talent that we’ve been given.

We all start where we are, with a specific amount of talent — large or small — and what we do with that talent is generally up to us.

However, there are better and worse ways to go about developing your talent, and Daniel Coyle lays out some of the best in this book.

When this book first came out, one of the newer discoveries in the field was that of the neural substance myelin, a kind of sheathing that wraps around the nerve pathways involved in performing actions and movements.