Quotes from Daniel Coyle

ignore the bad habit and put your energy toward building a new habit that will override the old one.

Belonging cues are behaviors that create safe connection in groups. They include, among others, proximity, eye contact, energy, mimicry, turn taking, attention, body language, vocal pitch, consistency of emphasis, and whether everyone talks to everyone else in the group.

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.

The revolution is built on three simple facts. (1) Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons—a circuit of nerve fibers. (2) Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy. (3) The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become.

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.

Struggle is not optional—it's neurologically required: in order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit suboptimally; you must make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes; you must slowly teach your circuit. You must also keep firing that circuit—i.e., practicing—in order to keep myelin functioning properly. After all, myelin is living tissue.

We are all paid to solve problems. Make sure to pick fun people to solve problems with.

Inspiration is for amateurs.

As Pablo Picasso (no slouch at theft himself) put it, "Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.

A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary. —Thomas Carruthers

Even the most creative skills—especially the most creative skills—require long periods of clumsiness.

Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows in response to certain signals.

Studies show that even a brief connection with a role model can vastly increase unconscious motivation.

While successful culture can look and feel like magic, the truth is that it's not. Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It's not something you are. It's something you do.

You can't prevent mistakes, but you can solve problems graciously.

You know the phrase 'Don't shoot the messenger'?" Edmondson says. "In fact, it's not enough to not shoot them. You have to hug the messenger and let them know how much you need that feedback. That way you can be sure that they feel safe enough to tell you the truth next time.

to get good, it's helpful to be willing, or even enthusiastic, about being bad. Baby steps are the royal road to skill.

To sum up: it's time to rewrite the maxim that practice makes perfect. The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect.

Super-slow practice works like a magnifying glass: It lets us sense our errors more clearly, and thus fix them.

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.

Thinking about your ancestors makes you smarter. A research team led by Peter Fischer found that spending a few minutes contemplating your family tree (as opposed to contemplating a friend, or a shopping list, or nothing at all) significantly boosted performance on tests of cognitive intelligence. Their hypothesis is that thinking about our connections to the group increases our feelings of autonomy and control.

Building purpose in a creative group is not about generating a brilliant moment of breakthrough but rather about building systems that can churn through lots of ideas in order to help unearth the right choices. This is why Catmull has learned to focus less on the ideas than on people—specifically, on providing teams with tools and support to locate paths, make hard choices, and navigate the arduous process together.

I have always maintained that excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work. —Charles Darwin

The solution is to ignore the bad habit and put your energy toward building a new habit that will override the old one.