Quotes from Daniel Coyle

Why is targeted, mistake-focused practice so effective? A: Because the best way to build a good circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again, over and over. Struggle is not an option: it's a biological requirement.

small thank-you caused people to behave far more generously to a completely different person. This is because thank-yous aren't only expressions of gratitude; they're crucial belonging cues that generate a contagious sense of safety, connection, and motivation.

One of the best measures of any group's culture is its learning velocity—how quickly it improves its performance of a new skill.

Capitalize on Threshold Moments: When we enter a new group, our brains decide quickly whether to connect. So successful cultures treat these threshold moments as more important than any other.

The effect of this first phase of learning seemed to be to get the learner involved, captivated, hooked, and to get the learner to need and want more information and expertise.

As Albert Einstein said, "One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one's greatest efforts.

deep practice is assisted by the attainment of a primal state, one where we are attentive, hungry, and focused, even desperate.

Skills of proficiency are about doing a task the same way, every single time.

We think of effortless performance as desirable, but it's really a terrible way to learn

Fill the group's windshield with clear, accessible models of excellence. • Provide high-repetition, high-feedback training. • Build vivid, memorable rules of thumb (if X, then Y). • Spotlight and honor the fundamentals of the skill.

Creative skills, on the other hand, are about empowering a group to do the hard work of building something that has never existed before.

Keenly attend to team composition and dynamics. • Define, reinforce, and relentlessly protect the team's creative autonomy. • Make it safe to fail and to give feedback. • Celebrate hugely when the group takes initiative.

A good example of this technique is found in the work of the Shyness Clinic, a program based in Los Altos, California

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.

Luxury is a motivational narcotic.

Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways—operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes—makes you smarter. Or

In the space of a few generations a city with a population slightly less than that of present-day Stillwater, Oklahoma, produced the greatest outpouring of artistic achievement the world has ever known.

It's also why we've recently seen an avalanche of new studies, books, and video games built on the myelin-centric principle that practice staves off cognitive decline.

Many hotbeds use an approach I call the engraving method. Basically, they watch the skill being performed, closely and with great intensity, over and over, until they build a high-definition mental blueprint.

In one study, adolescents preparing for the PSAT who used this method chose to complete 60 percent more practice questions than the control group. In another, dieters consumed significantly fewer calories, were more physically active, and lost more weight.

is for amateurs.

This is not to say that being born late into a big family automatically makes someone fast, any more than having a parent die early in life automatically makes one prime minister of England. But it does say that being fast, like any talent, involves a confluence of factors that go beyond genes and that are directly related to the intense, subconscious reaction to motivational signals that provide the energy to practice deeply and thus grow myelin.

Whenever Abrashoff received a suggestion he felt was immediately implementable, he announced the change over the ship's intercom, giving credit to the idea's originator. Over the next three years, on the strength of this and other measures (which are detailed in Abrashoff's book It's Your Ship), the Benfold rose to become one of the navy's highest-ranked ships.

What is one thing that I currently do that you'd like me to continue to do? What is one thing that I don't currently do frequently enough that you think I should do more often? • What can I do to make you more effective?