When it comes to errors, most of us share a passionate and simple opinion: we don’t like them very much. We strive to avoid them, to conceal them, to avoid repeating them.  As a species, we are all essentially allergic to mistakes.

But there’s another way of thinking about error, and it begins with a story I heard recently about Marina Semyonova, a master teacher at the Bolshoi Ballet in the fifties.

The story goes like this: Every year, Semyonova would hold a tryout for the Bolshoi, which was (and still is) one of the world’s greatest ballet troupes. You can imagine the scene: dozens of brilliant young dancers milling about, years of experience holstered and ready, their dreams on the line.

At first, the tryout would proceed like any other: the dancers would try to show their abilities and vast repertoires. But then Semyonova would surprise them. She would stop the audition and teach them one new move  – something they’ve never tried.  They weren’t big complex moves – to the contrary, they were quite simple. It was as if the top-level audition suddenly was replaced by a beginners’ class.

The beginners’ class section took only a few minutes. But it was by far the most important moment of the audition, because by the time it was over Semyonova knew precisely which dancers to pick and which to pass over.  And as the record shows, she proved to be right far more often than not.

Semyonova wasn’t a neuroscientist, but she was onto something.  She wasn’t interested in measuring levels of skill – which changes over time and can be frustratingly unpredictable. She was zeroing in on a tiny slice of time that makes a massive difference in our learning ability  — that primal instant right after we make a mistake.

That instant – which this very cool brain-scan experiment shows to be about 0.25 seconds – is a fork in the road; the moment when things tip one way or the other. Either the mistake is judged as a verdict and thus blocked out — or it’s seen as a piece of information to be used.  And indeed, in the experiment referenced above, the students who used their mistakes (whose brains processed them deeply in that magical 0.25 seconds) ended up scoring higher than students who didn’t.

In other words, the old chestnut proves out to be true: it’s not the mistakes that are good or bad, but rather our reaction to them.  And this reaction – which we might deem our error-reflex — is in itself a kind of meta-skill, a measurable quality that is an accurate indicator of potential, and which can also be improved.

So the question becomes, how do we improve our own error-reflexes? How do we make more of our 0.25 second window? Here are a few ideas:

• Depersonalize our mistakes by picturing them as navigation points. Because that’s what they are, literally, inside your brain –neural circuits whose wrongness nudges you in the right direction.
• Break the reflex down into component parts. Every action is really three actions – the action, the recognition of the mistake, and the response. Each should be insulated from the others.
• Expect to feel a bit disoriented because it’s a tricky balancing act, emotionally speaking. One moment, you have to put all of yourself into a sincere move – the next moment you have to pull back and evaluate. It requires an emotional equilibrium that helps you lurch between hot commitment one second and cool analysis the next.

That all reminded me of a sight I’ve seen while watching the World Cup these past few weeks: a player making a mistake (missing a shot at a wide-open goal, for instance), and then smiling about it, as if it somehow didn’t profoundly affect his future or the happiness of millions in his home country.

These are gargantuan, life-changing, career-altering moments – and yet a surprising number of the erring players (even the Germans!) react with the same understanding, nearly bemused smile that we never see on the faces of similarly erring stockbrokers or lawyers or politicians.

I’d like to suggest that their smiles can be traced to the essence of the game, which is built on the essential difficulty of controlling a ball with parts of our body least suited for control.  It’s very, very tough to score goals, or even make five good passes in a row, never mind get past 10 enemy players and a goalkeeper. As a result, soccer players are good friends with error.  They live in a world of constant screw-ups. They understand mistakes deeply, and that’s precisely what makes them such marvelous and resilient talents.

PS: Speaking of error’s bright side, you should check out Being Wrong, by Kathryn Schulz.  She’s a brilliant and funny guide to how errors are gifts, and how screwing up is key to our happiness and success.

So here’s my problem: my innovation velocity varies too much. Way too much.

When it’s up, it’s way up – lots of fresh ideas arriving and connecting, leading to new projects, articles, even books. When it’s down, it’s pretty flat. If you were to draw a chart of my generation of good ideas over a given stretch of time, it would look like a map of Montana – large stretches of vast, windswept plains, leading to a few clusters of tall peaks where the majority of good ideas occur.

I’m interested in those peaks, in part because I think this pattern is pretty common.

Take the Beatles, for instance. In a 12-month period from mid-1968 to mid-1969, they recorded three groundbreaking albums (The White Album, Let It Be, Abbey Road) plus enough material for a later triple album (Anthology 3 ), plus five singles, plus a film (Let It Be), plus the film and soundtrack to Yellow Submarine, plus five solo albums recorded or released, plus writing a number of songs that turned up in later albums. Or there’s Einstein in 1905, cranking out the three world-changing scientific papers in one year, a triple burst of world-changing insight.

I know those are quasi-insane comparisons – my scribbles are an awful long way from the theory of relativity or the genius of “Hey Jude.” But I’d like to suggest that this pattern applies to all of us more than we might suspect. We all have innovation  hot zones where the majority of our good ideas happen, and their existence raises an important question. What is causing these zones? How do we create more of them?

I think we get a good insight into this question from a surprising place: Ira Glass, the host of This American Life and one of the most prolific, savvy radio producers on the planet.   A while back Glass did a series of revelatory interviews about the creative process.

If you’re in the innovation business, you should check out the whole thing, but in essence it boils down to two simple steps:

1. 1. In order to get quality ideas, you have to do the long, hard, wildly inefficient work of generating a lot of non-quality ideas.

1. 1. You should ruthlessly eliminate the possibilities that don’t work.

Here’s Glass on Step One:

“To do any kind of creative work well, you have to run at stuff knowing that it’s usually going to fail. You have to take that into account and you have to make peace with it. We spend a lot of money and time on stuff that goes nowhere…. And you can’t tell if it’s going to be good until you’re really late in the process. So the only thing you can do is have faith that if you do enough stuff, something will turn out great and really surprise you.”

And here’s Glass on Step Two:

“It’s time to be vicious. It’s time to kill, and enjoy the killing, so something better can live. Not enough is said about the importance of abandoning crap. All video production is trying to be crap. It’s like the laws of entropy.”

I like these steps because I think most of us do some version of this instinctively, but as Glass so eloquently points out, we don’t do them nearly aggressively enough. We generate ideas, but not intensively, and not by the dozens. We test and eliminate bad ideas, but we don’t get excited and eager about playing Terminator. And maybe we should.

If we were to diagram this process, it would look like this: a massive generation, followed by a pruning. A hundred starts, followed by 99 endings and one surviving miracle. It would be a kind of churning machine — a creative engine – that generates/prunes endlessly, and which every once in a while produces something beautiful.

The interesting thing is the innovation machine Glass describes is a precise replica of another fairly effective system: evolution. I’m not the first to point it out, but the resemblance between evolution and innovation is uncanny, as both consist of a constant churning of new life, followed by a ruthless selection where the fittest forms survive.

And here’s the other parallel: every once in a while, evolution hits one of those hot zones, producing a great burst of successful innovation. Some good examples: the rise of the dinosaurs, the explosion of life in the Cambrian period, or the changes that started around 35,000 years ago with Cro-Magnon man. These explosions of innovation are evolution’s equivalent of the 1968-69 Beatles — a lot of great ideas happening in a relatively short time.

All of which leads us to a potentially interesting point – like the Beatles, evolution isn’t “trying” any harder during those successful periods than they are during the unsuccessful periods. It’s churning away just as it always is – but then, for some mysterious reason, something hits, something changes, something connects, and suddenly there’s a magnificent run of successful innovations.

Just as with evolution, the productive explosions of the Beatles and Einstein proved to be the exception in the long run. Einstein spent much of his later career pursuing unified field theory, which turned out to be a dead end. As for McCartney and Lennon et. al., they went on to produce some really good work, but would never again approach that kind of concentrated, fertile idea explosion of 1968-69.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s this: maybe our innovation velocity is not about us as much as we think. Maybe our job is to build a good creative engine – generate and prune like crazy – so that we’re ready when the world aligns for us, when the factors come together.

So what can we do in the meantime?

When I think of my innovative zones, I find they tend to happen when I’ve put myself in a position where I have to deliver – the proverbial deadline pressure. Pressure produces clarity; it compresses time and alters your vision; it increases the velocity of the idea-generation and the ruthlessness of the idea-killing. Churn rate increases; ideas and strategies are born and die quickly, like generations of fruit flies – accelerating the series of adaptations that lead to the best work.

I take a couple lessons from this:

• • 1. Generate more, in short bursts. Break a day into sections: a conscious searching for new stuff, experimenting, a kind of safe zone where things a tried without judgement. Think of this as the mutation phase – lots of random DNA colliding, creating new combinations.

• • 2. Use deadlines. This accelerates the test, so that the fittest ideas can survive.

• • 3. Use other people, but more for step one (the generation part) than step two (the ruthless killing part). When it comes to selecting what will live and what will die, it’s better to rely on our own sensibilities.

Also: it never hurts to listen to a lot of Beatles music.

I heard a couple good stories the other day about the value of daydreaming, playing, fiddling, futzing, noodling, tinkering – that age-old, hugely underrated activity known as goofing around.

Story #1 takes place in the seventies, at an international ski race in Austria. The world’s best racers are all training on a course that possesses a slightly unique feature: after the finish line, skiers must traverse a long, flat section that leads back to the chairlift.

Now most competitors do exactly what you would expect: they complete their practice run, and then make a beeline for the chairlift – they point their skis and zoom over the flats, in order to get there as quickly as possible.

All except one skier. This guy does the complete opposite of a beeline. He crosses the finish line, and then skies ever so slowly across the flats, carving curlicue turns in the snow. He plays with the snow and the edges of his skis, to see what happens. He goofs around. His name? Ingemar Stenmark, a.k.a. the the greatest slalom skier who ever lived, winner of more ski races than anyone in history.

Story #2 takes place in the late 1940s, in a cafeteria at Cornell. A young physics professor notices a student tossing a dinner plate into the air. The plate is wobbling, and the red insignia of Cornell is going around, and, just for fun, the professor decides to try to figure out the motion of the rotating plate by writing some equations — “piddling around,” he calls it.   The professor’s name was Richard Feynman; those piddling equations later led to his 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics.

There are loads of other stories about the power of goofing around – in fact, here’s a whole book on them.  And it’s clear that goofing around is on the rise — it’s official corporate policy at Google, which grants its employees “20-Percent Time” for them to pursue projects of their own choosing and initiative. Many of Google’s best innovations — Google News, Gmail, among others — trace their roots to 20-Percent Time. Other organizations are following suit.

We all know at some level that goofing around is a smart thing to do. But I think there’s an deeper connection to explore here that has to do with the specific kind of goofing that leads to innovation. To put it simply: it’s not about the goofer – it’s about the precise quality of of goofing.

We get some good insights into this from new research about daydreaming. As this WSJ story points out, daydreaming is not just idle time:

“People assumed that when your mind wandered it was empty,” says cognitive neuroscientist Kalina Christoff at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. As measured by brain activity, however, “mind wandering is a much more active state than we ever imagined, much more active than during reasoning with a complex problem.”

What’s more, daydreaming activity is not all equal. As the ever-insightful Jonah Lehrer points out in this story, daydreaming has been linked to all kinds of creative breakthroughs – if it’s done right.

“The point is that it’s not enough to just daydream,” [Dr. Jonathan] Schooler [a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara] says. “Letting your mind drift off is the easy part. The hard part is maintaining enough awareness so that even when you start to daydream you can interrupt yourself and notice a creative insight.”

I think that’s an interesting zone – the directed daydream, where part of the mind is held in reserve, watching intently for a good result – much like Feynman and Stenmark. We can visualize these goofing-around moments as places where our wiring gets a chance to stretch into new areas; where we are activating the edges of our neural circuitry, creating new, surprising, and potentially useful connections.

So what does good goofing have in common? Three qualities, it seems:

• It’s inherently fun, and playful, because it’s rooted in a genuine enjoyment of the process.
• It explores the edges of our abilities,  not the center. It finds new connections between unexpected sources, rather than going over old territory.
• It  doesn’t always lead to something important. In fact, it usually doesn’t.

I think this final point is a worthy one. We never hear about the wobbly-plate daydreams that do not produce Nobel Prizes – but that doesn’t mean they are any less important in the long run. As with so many other things in life, we can’t control the outcome, but we can slightly tilt the odds, provided we make it a habit.

As the great ski coach and author Warren Witherell of Burke Mountain Academy likes to say, real talent is not about execution. It’s about exploration.

Beneath every big talent lies an ignition story – the famously potent moment when a young person falls helplessly in love with their future passion.

For Albert Einstein, that moment happened when his father brought him a compass. As Walter Isaacson wrote in Einstein: His Life and Universe:

Einstein later recalled being so excited as he examined its mysterious powers that he trembled and grew cold…. [Einstein wrote] “I can still remember – or at least I believe I can remember—that this experience made a deep and lasting impression on me. Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.”

For music educator Shinichi Suzuki, the moment happened was when he was seventeen and he heard a phonograph recording of violinist Mischa Elman playing Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” Suzuki, who would go on to found the famed Suzuki Method, would write:

The sweetness of the sound of Elman’s violin utterly enthralled me. His velvety tone as he played the melody was like something in a dream. It made a tremendous impression on me….I brought a violin home … and, listening to Elman playing a Haydn minuet, I tried to imitate him. I had no score, and simply moved the bow, trying to play what I heard.

These moments pop up fairly often. In his memoir, the writer Stephen King tells of the mindblowing thrill of writing a story for his mother when he was seven. The neurologist Oliver Sacks tells about the transporting smells and explosions of childhood chemistry experiments in Uncle Tungsten. (My own moment came when I read Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff.)

As moving as they are, these moments aren’t the whole story, of course. They are doorways to years of work and passion — the slow construction of beautiful neural broadband. But they’re still important because these moments lead us to a question: What exactly happened there? Is there something special about certain kinds of inspiration? And more important, how do we make it happen?

I think we can find one clue by looking more closely at the moments themselves. So let’s break it down:

1. The moments are serendipitous. Nobody sets it up; there’s no mediator. It happens by chance, and thus contains an inherent sense of noticing and discovery.
2. They are joyful. Crazily, obsessively, privately joyful. As if a new, secret world is being opened.
3. The discovery is followed directly by action. As the Suzuki example shows, the point is not merely listening to the song, but in trying to play that song — to be the player. Like the others, he didn’t just admire – he acted.

Since these kinds of interactions are deeply individualized, they are understandably difficult for science to study. But we get one insight through the work of Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, psychologist and author of Flow. Czikszentmihalyi tracked two hundred artists from the time they were students until nearly two decades later. Over that time, some became serious painters; some didn’t. The deciding factor? Joy. The students who became serious painters were the ones who found the most joy in the sheer act of painting.

I think the emerging lesson is that these moments are a lot like falling in love — we can’t force it, but we can increase the odds slightly by doing a few basic things.

• Create lots of encounters; approach each with an open mind.
• Don’t think too much. This moment is not about being logical. It’s about rapture, immersion; about feeling, as Emily Dickinson wrote, “as if the top of my head were taken off.”
• Let it be secret. For parents, this means backing off and giving space. Can you imagine if Suzuki’s parents were eagerly hovering as he listened to “Ave Maria”? Or if Einstein’s dad enrolled him in a class on magnetism? Helicopters are serendipity killers.

Speaking of serendipity: a few years after learning to play violin, Suzuki traveled from Japan to Berlin in order to perfect his craft. He spoke no German, but somehow managed to fall into a musical crowd, and made a lifelong friendship with an frizzy-haired amateur violinist who also worked as a physicist: Albert Einstein.

I just came across a letter from 1998 that made my day. Here’s the backstory: Amir, a 14-year-old aspiring cartoonist, sends some of his drawings to John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren and Stimpy. Here’s Kricfalusi’s response (edited for space).

Dear Amir,

Thanks for your letter and all your cartoons to look at. Your comics are pretty good, especially your staging and continuity. You might have the makings of a good storyboard artist. I’m sending you a very good how to draw animation book by Preston Blair. Preston was one of Tex Avery’s animators. He animated ‘Red Hot Riding Hood’ and many other characters. His book shows you very important fundamentals of good cartoon drawing.

Construction. Learn how to construct your drawings out of 3-dimensional objects. Learn how to draw hands so they look solid. I want you to copy the drawings in his book. Start on the first page, draw slow. Look very closely. Measure the proportions. Draw the drawings step-by-step, just the way Preston does.

After you finish each drawing check it carefully against the drawing in the book. (if you do your drawings on tracing paper, you can lay the paper on top of the book to see where you made mistakes. On your drawing write the mistakes. Then do the drawing again, this time correcting the mistakes.

Here’s another important piece of information for you: Good drawing is more important than anything else in animation. More than ideas, style, stories. Everything starts with good drawing. Learn to draw construction, perspective.

Ok, now it’s up to you.

Allright Bastard, let’s get to work. Draw! and slow now.

Your pal,

John K.

Good teaching is wrapped in mystery. We tend to think of the great teacher as possessing a higher level of knowledge, and so we sometimes expect their knowledge to arrive in cryptic, complicated forms. After all, they’re smarter than we are. We’re not supposed to understand.

Kricfalusi’s letter shows us the falseness of this thinking by delivering a virtual clinic on the powerful simplicity of master teaching. First he establishes a connection. Then he gives a series of straightforward signals — do X, do Y, do Z. Do them slowly. Mark your mistakes. Look very closely. And best of all, Kricfalusi doesn’t just tell – he shows, by drawing examples. (Check out the original document.) Then he re-establishes the connection.

I think this letter is a useful reminder about what good teaching really is: simple, clear signals delivered at the right time, with love.

Amir apparently listened. He’s now in his fourth year at the animation program at Sheridan College — here’s some of his work.

Leadership is fascinating because it’s rooted in mystery. What makes certain leaders great? What makes them tick? How do they know the right thing to do?

One way to approach the mystery it through the window of a small question: why did so many mailroom workers rise to become CEOs?

Here’s a partial list:

• Dick Grasso (NYSE)
• Barry Diller, Michael Ovitz, and David Geffen (William Morris)
• Mike Medavoy (Universal)
• J. Lawrence Hughes (William Morrow)
• Ned Tanen (MCA)
• Jeffrey Katzenberg (Paramount)
• George Bodenheimer (ESPN)
• John Borghetti (Quantas)
• Tom Whalley (Warner Bros.)
• Sidney Weinberg (Goldman Sachs)

Other mailroom workers-turned-leaders: Don Hewitt (60 Minutes), John Bachmann (Edward Jones), and Simon Cowell (EMI records). If you Google the phrase “started out in the mailroom” and “ceo,” you get 3,450 results.

This is a striking pattern, because it’s so unlikely. At most corporations, the mailroom is the bottom rung. Its duties are simple: you read and sort letters, photocopy, roam the building delivering the mail, fetch coffee. To become CEO, the mailroom group had to do a very difficult thing: they had to outcompete hundreds of employees who were 1) more qualified, 2) better-resourced, and 3) more highly regarded – since after all, they weren’t relegated to the mailroom. And yet despite those immense odds, these underdogs pulled it off. How?

I think part of the answer can be found by looking at the equally demanding world of the NFL – specifically the surprising career paths of current head coaches. Because it turns out that an unusually high percentage  (nine at last count, including the Tony Sprarano of the Dolphins, Brad Childress of the Vikings, and Mike McCarthy of the Packers) share an interesting quirk on their resume: they sll started out on the bottom rung of the pro-coaching ladder, working as quality-control coaches.

Quality-control is not a sought-after job. It’s frequently the lowest-paid member of the staff. Q-C coaches spend their days sitting in a room watching game tape, compiling data, analyzing film, producing 50-page scouting reports for coaches to use, and, yes, occasionally fetching coffee for the “real coaches.”

“We worked quadruple everybody else, but we got to feel like a coach,” said Todd Haley, now the coach in Kansas City, who worked in quality control with the Jets. “We had responsibility. It’s the greatest job in football as far as learning.”

We usually think of leadership as being an innate talent, stemming from such intangibles as “charisma, “vision” and “character.” But the success of these underdogs from the mailroom and Q-C  coaching flips this idea on its head. The leadership talents of these CEOS and NFL head coaches is not being born; it’s being grown. They are positioning themselves smack-dab in the middle of the information flow, and they are working that flow like a training session to change their brains.

To understand how this works, let’s look at a typical day in the life of a mailroom worker and compare it to that of a higher-up.

The higher-up is insulated in their job, cocooned by the responsibilities of the day. Their advancement depends on performing a narrow job well and being recognized for doing so, usually by his or her immediate boss.

The mailroom underdog, on the other hand, roves around like a spy, able to peer into the organization’s inner workings (not least by reading mail and hearing gossip). They are the proverbial fly on the wall inside the offices of the powerful. They can learn the anatomy of disasters and successes. They can navigate a maze of personalities; witness communication skills. They can learn the crucial dividing line between what matters and what doesn’t. Their advancement doesn’t depend on performing a narrowly defined task for a narrow audience; rather, it depends on their impressing someone – anyone, really – of their general-purpose savvy and chutzpah.

In short, the underdog isn’t really an underdog — they’re the overdog. For a person of the right mindset – like former Paramount/Fox CEO Barry Diller – this spot is the perfect neural-training camp.

“My great strategy was to take what was seen as the worst job in the building — photocopying I’d collect things to copy, along with as much of the file room as I could carry, and hole myself up reading through the history of the entertainment business as seen through every deal, every development, every contract I read their entire file room.”

That’s not to say personal characteristics don’t count, because they do. Diller, like all of these successful underdogs, is hugely ambitious, persistent, and hardworking to the extreme. But here’s the point: so are a lot of other people. These underdog groups succeed in disproportionate numbers because they channel that energy through a grid of intensive training to make their brains fast, accurate, and organization-smart.

An increasing number of companies seem to understand this. GE’s Crotonville Leadership Development Center is a now-legendary pioneer in this area. Hindustan Unilever, a hugely successful Indian company, is widely regarded as a talent hotbed –largely because its senior managers spend 30 to 40 percent of their time mentoring young leaders.

So what’s the takeaway from all this? It depends who you are.

For organizations:

• Construct a virtual mailroom,  a training program that allows young employees to learn – through real-world experience, not lectures – how leadership really works.
• Consider leadership-mentoring programs.

For individuals:

• Judge early jobs by their position in the information flow, not by prestige or salary.
• Create your own training regimen. Whether it’s photocopying contracts or making predictions and seeing how they turn out, it doesn’t matter so long as its yours.

Vision is the greatest of talents, because it looks so much like magic. We see it in sports, when a basketball player surprises an entire arena by delivering a last-second pass to a waiting teammate. Or in business when a smart investor spots a tiny, vital pattern and leverages it to a massive advantage. Vision dwarfs other talents like accuracy, persistence, and strength because it operates on a higher plane. It changes the game by creating new opportunities where none existed.

When we see someone demonstrate great vision, we usually chalk it up to some innate quality. You have it or you don’t. Wayne Gretzky and Warren Buffett have it — they look at the world and they find a gap to exploit. (And I, who am equally unspectacular at hockey and investing, apparently don’t.)

But is that true? Are we stuck with the vision we’ve got? Or is it possible to improve?

One intriguing answer comes from new branch of sports science called perceptual training. These are scientists who spend their days putting special goggles on athletes with world-class anticipation and comparing them to normal folks, in order to see what’s different.

Their findings are fascinating, and consists of two simple facts:  it’s not about reflexes (it turns out pros and amateurs have roughly the same reaction times). Rather,  it’s about reading cues. The best athletes are skilled at decoding a set of signals that allow them to anticipate what’s going to happen. As this story in Wired puts it, regarding tennis:

What separated the pros from everyone else was the ability to pull directional information out of the early stages of a swing and therefore to predict a split second earlier where to head…. This means that an expert, who doesn’t have to wait until contact, has twice as long to move, plant his feet, and swing.

What’s more, the research shows this skill is learnable. Tennis players who spent a single day learning to read cues improved their success rate by 5 percent — quite a significant number for a few hours’ work. And like any newly built neural circuit, it soon gets stashed in the unconscious. As researcher Dr. Damien Farrow puts it, “they don’t even know that they’re doing it.”

This idea — that vision is learnable — makes a lot of sense. When you look closely at the biographies of people with great vision, you see a similar pattern. When Wayne Gretzky watched hockey on television as a kid, he used paper and pencil to make a record of where the puck went  in the course of a game — a perceptual map. When he was older, he practiced alone with a set of rubber cones, imagining the game and making passes to invisible teammates. He built his perceptual circuitry, bit by bit (just as Warren Buffett did by reading thousands of annual reports). This is why many good coaches, including John Calipari of Kentucky, have added perceptual training (like this program) into their programs.

I was thinking about Gretzky and Buffett the other night as I was reading The Big Short, the compelling new book by Michael Lewis. It’s the story of a handful of investors who, unlike everyone else in the world, actually anticipated the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. At a time when 99.99 percent of investors zigged, they zagged. They had vision, they made the right move, and they made billions of dollars as a result.

What gave these guys the vision?  Two answers. First, their backgrounds had provided Gretzky-style training. These were not normal childhoods: one investor’s idea of youthful fun was combing the Talmud for errors; another was an obsessive loner who far preferred numbers to people. Second, they had the ability to read large meaning into small cues. When they encountered a tiny but vital data point — like the Mexican strawberry picker who had obtained a loan to buy a $750,000 home — they knew what it meant for the larger picture. And they acted.

Obviously there are differences between making a brilliant hockey pass and earning billions in the stock market. But I think there are some similarities, too. Specifically, three lessons:

• • Define the perceptual component of a skill, and train it separately. One reason so few people have good vision is that they lump it in with all other skills. By breaking it out and working on it by itself, you enable yourself to train that decision-making circuit exactly as you would any skill.

• • Make long gazes, not short glances. In their research on rugby players, experimenters found that better players tended to look longer at potential targets. Interestingly, Lewis’s investors did the same thing. Instead of trying to take in every tiny piece of data, they stared deeply at a few and found out what they really meant.

• • Keep track of results. This seems titanically obvious, but it’s the kind of obvious thing that most people don’t actually do. Developing vision is about trying to predict the future. If you don’t record the data — how each of your predictions turned out — you won’t have the feedback it takes to improve.

At my recent trip to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, I spent a lot of time talking to coaches about a small but profound question: can we identify talent?

In other words, can we assess a bunch of young performers when they’re 14 or so, measure certain qualities, and figure out who will likely succeed and who will likely fail?

To our conventional way of thinking, the answer seems obvious. Of course we can. It’s what coaches do – spotting the magic spark, the X-Factor.

But here’s the surprising answer the Olympic coaches kept giving me: No, we can’t.

In fact, the vast majority of the coaches said they were reliably surprised by who made it and who didn’t in the long run — at how inaccurate their first, second, and third impressions often turned out to be. I should point out that these are not average coaches. They are world-class experts, with decades of savvy and experience, employing every diagnostic tool known to sports science, observing these athletes on a daily basis. And the closer they look, the more mysterious talent seems to be. And as the casino-like hits and misses of the NFL and MLB drafts faithfully confirm each year, the Olympic coaches are far from alone. So the question grows: when it comes to spotting talent, what do we look for?  What qualities matter most?

I think part of the mystery can be illuminated by a small but revealing data point: A handwritten 1979  letter from a 14-year-old guitarist named Saul Hudson to his girlfriend who just broke up with him.

The letter’s not all that interesting, really, except for one fact: Saul Hudson would grow up to be Slash, the lead guitarist of Guns N’ Roses. And the letter captures some key qualities — the vital intangibles — that helped grow this kid into one of the better rock guitarists of all time.

Back to the letter: Young Saul is writing to Michele, who has just broke up with him via letter. The key passages are in bold.

Tuesday
Oct. 2. 79
Dear Michele,

Your letter scared me, upon first glance, I hadn’t any idea what it was about, but when you told me, it struck in a strange way, I hadn’t any idea that I talked about my guitar so often, I’m going to have to change that, no matter who I talk to.

It’s a drag that it screwed up our relationship, you should have told me sooner, but I don’t think that’s the only reason, you just don’t like me that much, and I can see why, because I’m a hard person to get along with at times.

But any I’m glad we got that straight, thank you for not lying to me. To get off the subject, you look really nice today, you get prettier & prettier every day. My weekend was pretty good. Steve came by and we went to a couple parties, and we went to the Starwood, I spent pretty much of my weekend on cloud 9 if you know what I mean.

I had never been in the Starwood before, like, we hung around outside, but I’ve never been inside. It’s not such a hot place, I mean the Bands are alright, the girls are pretty (I still think you cuter than any of the girls there) the drugs are cool but it’s not a place I would want to waste my life at. The most exciting part of the night was, a guy mouthed off to this black guy, and the black got a hundred friends and chased him around all Hollywood. It’s a pretty crazy place. I’m going there next week to see Quiet Riot, because I hear there pretty good. One of these days I’ll play there.

Love you

Saul

[Saul draws picture of a marijuana leaf — and adds the following postscript]

This leaf was perfect untill I put the f*****g lines in it

I think this letter is fascinating because it gives us a peek into the invisible dimension of talent development: the mindset. Saul gives us a look into his core motivations, which contain three important ingredients:

• #1: Obsession. Young Saul has just lost his girlfriend (whom he clearly likes a lot) because he talks too much about his guitar.
• #2: A vivid vision of future self. In talking about the Starwood club, Saul declares that he’ll play there. It’s not some hazy dream – it’s more matter-of-fact, a statement of fact.
• #3:  A keen eye for making small improvements. His scrawled commentary about the leaf is small but telling. Saul wanted it to be better, and he’s emotional about it. It’s the same attitude he shows earlier in the letter when he writes, “I’m going to have to change that.” It’s not a big leap to imagine that same sort of self-talk on the songs he’s learning. Play it again, again, and again, until it’s perfect.

These qualities — which make up Saul’s mindset and his identity — are more important than any measured skill level, because they operate on a higher plane. These qualities fueled and channeled the thousands of hours of intensive practice that built Saul’s circuitry. At the moment he wrote this letter, there were probably dozens of 14-year-old guitarists in Los Angeles who could play far better than Saul (who had only started guitar two years before). In a conventional tryout, he might have been completely overlooked.

All of this is a roundabout way of making a simple point: we fail at talent identification because we’re looking in the wrong place. We instinctively look at  performance (which is visual, measurable) instead of mindset and identity, which are what really matter, because they create the energy that fuels the engine of skill acquisition. They are the nuclear power-plant for the 10,000 hours of deep practice. They are the the ghosts in the machine.

I’ve found that good teachers and coaches often dig around for mindsets, sort of like doctors looking for subtle symptoms of a disease. They inquire about long-term goals, they watch for telltale signs, they try to penetrate the glossy surface to find out the answer to that tiny but titanically important questions: why are you here, really? How much do you care? What are you prepared to give?

For example: one highly successful college basketball coach, who shall remain nameless, uses a simple litmus test in his recruiting: if the recruit makes an excuse for anything – for instance, their performance in a certain game, or their grades in math – the coach crosses them off his list, no matter what physical skills they may possess. Why? Because they have the wrong mindset.

Which makes me wonder: how else can we measure mindset? Is there a way to replace “Talent Identification” with “Mindset/Identity Identification”? And more important, how do we create cultures that help ignite these kinds of mindsets?

PS — For more good reading on this topic, check out Carol Dweck’s book — called Mindsets, naturally.

Several readers recently forwarded me this video. Not only because it’s deadly cute (man oh man, is it ever), but also because it provides valuable insights into increasing our learning velocity. There’s more learning per second going on here than almost anything I’ve ever come across.

On the surface, Li’l Edward tumbles around like a dervish, creating a perfect chaos. Beneath that chaos, however, there’s a pattern worth noting — a clinic on how our brains learn best and fastest. Since after all, evolution has built to learn by playing.

Three things Edward does that might be worth copying:

• • 1) Create lots of pure action. This kid is firing his circuitry. He’s not interested in observing or communicating — he’s all about doing, firing an action and experiencing the response. It’s pure action-feedback loops, with brief pauses for orientation. Watching it reminds me of being in Brazil, watching a futbol de salao game — which is essentially the same thing, lots of neural action in a tiny space.

• • 2) Zoom in and out. Edward has a pattern — he checks out a toy, then he rolls on his back to check it out in a deeper way (he even tries to do it to the big tricycle). It’s probing; he’s zooming in and out, from the small details to the big ones. This reminds me of watching good musicians practice, as they hone home in on a few notes, then step back to see where those fit in the big picture.

• • 3) Get totally absorbed. There are lots of names for good practice mindsets — “Flow,” “Relaxed Focus” — but I’m going to go with a new one: “The Baby.” This kid is open to new things, investigatory, and resilient. His emotional thermostat is not too hot, not too cold.  He shows us that all good practice is a kind of exploration. In short, Edward is learning because he’s not caught up in himself, but utterly caught up in his world.

(Well, at least until the end of the video, when he gets stuck under a chair.)

So the question becomes: how do we create more moments like this in our own lives? What kinds of “skill playpens” can we build?

I spent last week at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, giving a few talks. It was big fun on a lot of levels. For one, the Olympic team is in good hands–as proven by the medal-haul of Vancouver. For another, the coaches are a friendly, hard-working, and deeply knowledgeable bunch. (The cafeteria food’s not too bad, either.)

The big surprise of my visit was this: most Olympic coaches want to coach their athletes less. A lot less. They want fewer structured drills, and more invented games–particularly for younger athletes. Fewer circumscribed workouts, and more intensive play. Less work, more fun.

To conventional thinking, this discovery ranks as a fairly big surprise. Free time? Play? Aren’t coaches supposed to, you know, coach? It’s a bit like attending a gardening convention and discovering that everyone is trying to figure out how to grow dandelions.

But that’s exactly what they’re doing, and here’s why. Look beneath any talent hotbed, and you’ll find simple, intense, player-invented games. Venice Beach skateboarders riding inside an empty swimming pool, Brazilian soccer players on the futbol de salao court, cricketer Don Bradman learning to hit by bouncing a golf ball off a dented water tank, or baseball players trying to hit a flying yogurt lid — neurally speaking, it’s all the same story. A small, simple, concentrated game controlled and played by the kids. They play when they want. They get tons of reps. They create ladders of competition, always reaching upward. They get obsessed. They combine deep practice with the power of identity to earn myelin in excelsis; they grow superfast neural broadband.

(BTW, this all makes good evolutionary sense, as this article in the new Atlantic magazine on the power of play points out.)

[Play] seems to have multiple functions—exercise, learning, sharpening skills—and the positive emotions it invokes may be an adaptation that encourages us to try new things and learn with more  flexibility. In fact, it may be the primary means nature has found to develop our brains.

So the question is, how do we help make that kind of play happen? A lot depends on the culture, of course — with the right set of motivational signals, even multiplication tables can be an addictive sport. Here are a few interesting ideas that came out of the discussion — useful tips for growing dandelions in any sports or education culture.

• Use Ritual:  Most practice sessions begin when the coach tells players to warm up, or a school bell rings. Why not have a few ritualistic games that can be played as the players arrive? U.S.A. Volleyball coach John Kessel (who writes a marvelous blog) has created a culture of play where his arriving players dig, set, and spike against a stripe drawn at net height. As more players arrive, more join in — and hopefully take the game home with them.
• The Google Method: Google encourages its employees to spend 15 percent of their working hours pursuing their own projects. Why shouldn’t coaches do the same?  Putting athletes in charge of their workouts — for instance, asking them to design a handful of small games — would increase their investment in practice, and avoid the workaday, clock-punching mentality that coaches and teachers dread.
• Build in Open Time: These invented games happen on the margins; in the loose, unstructured times before and after practice, when kids are doing that crucial work of fooling around. Smart coaches should leave out the equipment, walk away, and watch what happens.

In Curacao, I remember watching baseball players feverishly playing a strange little game where every hitter had to bunt the ball and race around the bases. I asked the coach, Norval Fayenete, what they were doing, and he smiled.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But whatever it is, it’s working.”

What works for you?

PS — This idea can be summed up in a single golden quote:  “To systematize is to sterilize” —  from Common Sense About Soccer, a long out-of-print book by Nils Middelboe. Read more about how different nations are growing soccer talent here. (Big thanks to Mr. Kessel for the tip.)