Instant proverb of the day:

You are what you count.

Many of the talent hotbeds I visited for the book don’t rely on conventional performance yardsticks. Instead, they design their own.

The other day I met Graham Walker and Steve Robinson, who coach many of England’s fast-rising crop of junior golfers. Their most important teaching tool? A long piece of rope, which they use to mark off distances for accuracy-improving games they’ve designed. For instance, players make a series of wedge shots from 10, 20, and 30 yards, marking each result on specially designed scorecards.

Or there’s the technique of Pinchas Zuckerman, the great Israeli violinist, whose practice method consisted of a two jars and a bunch of marbles. Each time he played a piece perfectly, Zuckerman transferred a single marble from one jar to the other. When the second jar was full, he was ready.

In both cases, the strategy is the same: to realize that conventional measures (scoreboards, for instance, or hours of practice time) are far too loose and vague, while homemade yardsticks connect to real practice goals — improving accuracy or perfect repetition. All well-designed yardsticks share a few common features:

• Clarity. There are no gray areas; just cool, inarguable, trackable numbers.
• Stretchiness. A well-designed yardstick can accomodate a variety of abilities, and there’s an improvement ladder implicitly built in.
• Ownability. Feedback is direct, not filtered through a higher authority.

It’s not just what you keep track of — it’s also what you don’t keep track of. Unlike virtually every other company in the world,  dot-com shoe company Zappos doesn’t keep track of how long its employees talk to each customer. Instead, it actively encourages its employees to spend as much phone time as they need to make their customers happy — even to the point of helping arrange a pizza delivery to a hungry customer. The longest call so far? Four hours.

A couple weeks from now, when Shaun White wins his medals at the Vancouver Olympics, you’ll want to remember this video. Because here we get a vivid picture of what’s really beneath his unworldly skills — and it’s not merely gallons of Red Bull. Rather, it’s White’s highly organized method of high-velocity learning — a deep-practice technique that lets him accomplish, as he calculates here, “a couple years of riding in one day.”

So courtesy of Professor White, here are a few lessons that might apply to the art of learning and teaching fast, fluent, complex actions — like playing a new song, trading stocks, making a sales pitch, or (a bit closer to home for me) coaching Little Leaguers.

• • Lesson 1: Start out with the complete move in your head. As White says, it should play like a movie in your mind. Song, sales pitch, soccer trick, whatever — it should be vivid and in HD.

• • Lesson 2: Isolate and compress the key elements. The foam pit is vital, because it allows White to isolate on the moves of the trick itself and not worry about the danger. It allows him the ultimate advantage: to operate in the sweet spot on the edge of his ability; fire circuits, make mistakes, fix them, and fire again (and again, and again) in perfect safety. Danger — whether it’s an icy half-pipe or a live audience — is added last.

• • Lesson 3: Work in a stepwise manner, a little bit farther each time, zooming in and out between the whole trick and its elements. Watch how White does part of the trick on the wall, then the whole thing into the pit, then goes back to the wall, then puts it all together. This back-and-forth isn’t random. White is systematically isolating the move’s key elements, then linking them like so many Legos into one fluent circuit. All fluidity is made of Legos in disguise.

(Special thanks to Jeff Albert.)

Like many of you, I spent part of yesterday staring curiously at Steve Jobs’s latest creation, and wondering how it might affect my life and my brain.

Certain truths are already clear: this device will make a lot of people more connected, more efficient, and it’ll certainly make them cooler in certain circles. But the real question is this: will it make people smarter?  What’s the best way to use new technology to grow our talents?

• Theory 1: It’ll Make Us Dumber

The iPad, is built for three basic purposes: 1) absorbing media (video, books, web); 2) curating our stuff (music, photos); 3) connecting to other people. While these activities might make us more connected, or more deft organizers, the basic truth is that we don’t learn best by passively browsing media. To grow high-speed neural circuitry we need action — we need to fire the circuit, make mistakes, fix those mistakes, and repeat.

This is why studies have found that immersing our brains in the Internet diminishes certain aspects of intelligence (see Why Google is Making us Stoopid). It’s also why some schools that had previously introduced laptops in the classroom have now decided to get rid of them, because they diminish test scores.

Here’s why: the Internet is a warm bath of information and entertainment — and warm baths, while they feel fantastic, are an absolutely terrible way to built high-speed neural circuits. (How do you think Apple’s famously obsessive design team got to be skilled enough to produce the iPad? Hint: it wasn’t a warm bath.)

By this way of thinking, the real danger of the iPad is that it will be a time-thief. It is so incredibly delightful, personal, and obedient that it’s the ultimate warm neural bath; the comfort zone we never want to leave.

• Theory 2: It’ll Make Us Smarter

Sure, whiz-bang new technology always gives us new ways to waste spectacular amounts of time and energy. But it also gives us new and immersive ways to grow our skill circuits. Meet Exhibit A:  Magnus Carlsen.

Carlsen is a youngest chess player ever to achieve a number-one ranking. (He was just profiled in Time magazine.) He is the first of a generation who’ve trained almost exclusively through computer chess (when asked if he owned a chessboard, Carlsen said he wasn’t sure). Carlsen has played and analyzed millions of games, and used that deep practice to develop an uncanny intuition that leaves older grandmasters speechless. As Jonah Lehrer puts it in his insightful blog entry:

“And this is why we shouldn’t be surprised that a chess prodigy raised on chess computer programs would be even more intuitive than traditional grandmasters. The software allows [Carlsen] to play more chess, which allows him to make more mistakes, which allows him to accumulate experience at a prodigious pace.”

Exhibit B would be Mark Sanchez, Joe Flacco, Matt Ryan, and other successful young NFL quarterbacks who’ve developed their skills by playing Madden NFL videogames. As Chris Suellentrop’s great story in Wired magazine shows, this generation is the first to have come up playing thousands of simulated games–recognizing defenses, selecting plays, spotting blitzes. As Suellentrop writes,

“[Playing Madden] isn’t just an exercise in self-obsession. Whether they know it or not, these athletes may actually be strengthening their brains. Cognitive scientists have published a series of studies demonstrating that playing fast-paced action videogames — mostly first-person shooters like Call of Duty and Halo — can alter “some of the fundamental aspects of visual attention,” as a paper published in the July 2009 issue of Neuropsychologia put it. By training on these games, researchers found, nongamers can achieve faster reaction time, improved hand-eye coordination, and greatly increased ability to process multiple stimuli.”

He goes on to cite studies that shows video gaming has been linked to improvements in the skills of surgeons and military pilots; the same dynamic accounts for the success of certain language software programs that combine vivid simulations with real-time feedback.

The overarching lesson here seems to be that growing skills depends on what you do with the device, not what the device does for you. Immersive simulations — which provide space to do things, fire circuits, make mistakes, and which provide vivid, immediate feedback — are by far the best way to learn certain kinds of skills.

All this leaves me imagining the next level in talent-building technology — to provide interactive access to the true magical software, the mind of a master coach. I’d love to see a quick, seamless way to video-link to a master coach anywhere in the world for a lesson. You would throw a ball, or swing a club, or play a song, and they would give you real-time feedback. Can you imagine?

For the last couple weeks, many of my NY friends have been extremely psyched about their Amazin’ Jets: a run-of-the-mill NFL team that suddenly, mysteriously started beating more talented teams, and which now stands one victory away from reaching the promised land of the Super Bowl.

It’s a great story, because we can relate. We’ve all been part of groups, in school or sports or business or music, that suddenly inhabit some magical zone of high performance — and then just as suddenly fall out of it. The deeper questions are: what causes this to happen? How can we make it happen more often?

I think part of the answer might be found in an unexpected place: a small, messy room on West 56th St. That’s where, from 1950 to 1954, a motley group of young comedy writers gathered to write the television program “Your Show of Shows.”

Each week, the writers (Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Mel Tolkin, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart–talk about a talent hotbed) invented an entire show from scratch. By various accounts, the pattern was always the same: Monday, hardly anything got done. Tuesday, a little bit, but not that much. By Wednesday, things started rolling — in part because cameras had to be set up. Thursday and Friday were insanely productive  — which was good, because Saturday night their inventions were beamed live nationwide for 90 minutes.  Every week the pattern was the same: the writers started slow, then (suddenly, miraculously) hit on a hot streak. Their work, so unpromising on Monday, became brilliantly funny by Saturday night.

I think there’s a useful connection between the Jets’ hot streak and those insanely productive days on West 56th St. — and not just because comedy and football are so similar (collaborative, complex, relying on precise timing).  But rather because both are beautiful examples of how to build a deep-practice hothouse; a place that combines intensive learning with an urgent set of emotional cues. Three common elements jump out:

1) Super-high goals, from the start. On his first day, to the open-mouthed disbelief of media and fans alike, new Jets coach Rex Ryan talked about how the team would be visiting the White House after winning the Super Bowl. The West 56th St. writers set their goals even higher. As Mel Brooks said, “It wasn’t only a competition to be funnier. I had to get to the ultimate punch line. I was immensely ambitious. It was like I was screaming at the universe, like I had to make God laugh.”

2) Strong shared identity. It’s no coincidence that Coach Ryan and Sid Caesar resemble each other in personality; or that they have created teams in the images of themselves — tough, sharp, provocative, funny as hell. Because they’re not just building a team — they’re creating a story.

3) Early failure is not a verdict, but a navigation point for better work. The Jets went through a tough patch early in the season, much like the Monday-Tuesday doldrums on West 56th. The bad days weren’t the end; they turned out to be stepping stones.

Of course, that’s not to say that doing these things is any kind of guarantee. Hot streaks are mysterious because they always depend on factors beyond our control. Truth is, the Jets could easily have lost to the Chargers last week; truth is, “Your Show of Shows” was sometimes hilarious, sometimes not so much. But the deeper truth is, both caught a hot streak because they had build a structure to do so.

Side note: There’s an interesting school of thought that holds that hot streaks don’t actually exist. Several studies have found that what we see as hot streaks is really just our narrative-hungry brains superimposing a story on a random run of luck. But I’d like to point out that most of these studies involve coin flips, NBA scorers, and MLB batters —  highly compartmentalized, either/or scenarios that don’t resemble the complex, emotional group interactions we find in football, comedy writing, and, I’d argue, our everyday lives.

A few years back I was eating dinner with Ted Nugent (for this Outside magazine story). The Nuge was on a roll — you know,  shredding on his guitar, raging against The Man — until midway through our venison steaks he lets drop a little family fact. His brother, Jeff, happens to be a successful businessman. In fact, he was CEO of Neutrogena (now CEO of Revlon).

I thought Nugent was pulling my leg. But in fact it turned out to be true.

While it’s relatively common to find siblings who are talented at the same skill (Venus/Serena Williams; the chess-playing Polgar sisters, the skiing Mahre twins, the Jackson/Osmond/Gibb singing dynasties, etc.). It’s quite another — and perhaps worth exploring — how a single family can produce two unique and diverse talents.

Because the Nugents aren’t the only ones who follow this pattern. Consider Irving and Arthur Penn — one a great photographer; the other an Oscar-winning film director. Then there’s William and Henry James (psychologist/philosopher and writer), and more recently brother and sister Maile Meloy (fiction writer) and Colin Meloy (songwriter and lead singer of The Decemberists. On a personal scale, I can think of a handful of familie, including the Putnams, a brother and sister who were my childhood neighbors in Anchorage, who grew up to be a successful filmmaker and a Sports Illustrated writer.

So what accounts for this pattern? To put it more concisely, what makes these remarkable families tick?

I think the first thing to point out is that the talents in question aren’t quite as diverse they first appear. Look closer at the Nuge and you’ll find an incredibly disciplined, calculated, message-conscious, ambitious entrepreneur — perhaps not as unlike his buttoned-down brother as you might suspect. The same deeper connection exists with the James brothers (pioneering thinkers), the Penns (visual artists), and the Meloys (creative types). It’s not like one sibling is an Olympic sprinter and the other an impressionist painter. (Though if anybody knows of an example like that, I’d be curious.)

If we think about talent as a neural circuit requiring practice and motivation, this pattern makes sense. Siblings usually share a common identity that can fuel motivation, especially when there’s some competition. The shared environment helps those talents along exactly as it does in the case of the Williams sisters or the Brontes: they are motivated to deeply practice in that area.

These families also help underline the importance of what we might call meta-skills — the larger qualities that form the foundation for all high performance: qualities like self-control, focus, ability to project toward a goal. As a neurologist might point out, these are also neural circuits; they’re also partly a result of the shared family environment. We could theorize that these families are examples of a kind of hothouse effect, where kids with a shared identity have a tendency to develop meta-skills in certain areas.  Then they diverge, as siblings tend to do, into their own narrower areas of expertise.

That’s kind of what happened in my family. I’ve got an older brother who’s a writer/editor and a younger brother who’s a doctor, and I’m in between — a guy who came very close to going to med school (even took the MCATs) but who ended up writing. We three brothers are different in many ways, but underneath we share the same way of looking at the world, analyzing it to see the underlying patterns, the same work habits — the same meta-skills, you might say, along with obviously much of the same identity.

To be fair, someone else could look at this pattern and see it as evidence for some talent gene that predestined the Nugents, Osmonds, et. al. It’s tempting to see it this way — and in fact Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton, along with his modern successors, tried for years to prove that such a gene or gene combination exists. But they haven’t had much luck. Because the fact is, there is no gene for family talent because it simply takes too much deep practice, time, and motivation to build fast, fluent neural circuits.

And besides, if family talent was all about genes, how in the world would we explain Jermaine Jackson?

(I’d like to send special thanks to Bill Forward for bringing this to my attention–and who wisely suggests adding another sibling duo: Rahm and Ari Emanuel.)

In a couple hours my son and I are going to see the Chosen One: Mr. LeBron Raymone James, live and in person, on his 25th birthday (Cleveland Cavaliers versus Atlanta Hawks). We’ll be sitting in the rafters, but we’re excited to see Him in action. After all, it isn’t often you get to see a guy who makes the world’s best basketballers look like helpless kids.

But what will we be seeing, really? Fast, fluent neural circuits James built through deep practice? God-given talents? How can we see beneath the performance, to the forces that created it?

I was thinking of these questions when I came across this video of an 11-year-old from Washington who’s supposed to be the Next LeBron. His name is JaShaun Agosto, and here’s what he can do:

It’s pretty dazzling. But here’s the kicker: JaShaun’s daily four-hour workout consists of the following:

• • mile run

• • 50 free throws without missing

• • half hour of layup drills

• • 250 jumpers without missing three in a row

• • ten different dribbling drills (some using two basketballs)

• • 200 push-ups

• • 200 sit-ups

• • 150 squat-thrusts

Many of you have probably heard about the new “virtual reality” software. Basically, you aim your iPhone camera at something in the real world — a shop, a restaurant — and up pops pertinent information, such as price or user ratings.

So here’s my impossible game-day wish: I wish that someone would invent a virtual-reality app for famous athletes. Here’s how it would work: we’d aim our iPhone at a Roger Federer or LeBron, and up would pop the number of hours they train, or a sample of their daily workout. It’d work equally well with famous musicians (what would the numbers show on Lady GaGa, I wonder?). Because behind every great performance is hidden a great practice routine.

Check out the above photograph from the Kenyan town of Iten, just sent to me by Dr. Randy Wilber, a senior sport physiologist at the U.S. Olympic Committee Performance Lab. In it, two elite Kenyan runners trailed by a little kid who’s running to school.  It’s a tiny moment, and yet one that helps explain why this relatively small place produces the vast majority of the world’s great runners. As Wilber writes,

…it captures the “passing of the torch” from one generation of great runners to the next.  The little boy is serious and working hard to keep in contact.  The older runners are holding back just a bit so that the young one will stay relatively close and not get discouraged.  They are sending the message, “Yes, you are the next in line.  Someday you will be as good as we are.  Believe in yourself and grow in confidence.”  Please be aware that this is not an isolated image.  You see this same “passing of the torch” scene all over the streets and roads near the tiny town of Iten (pop. ~4000), both boys and girls.

Passing the torch is a nice way to put it. It’s the same thing that happens in Brazil in halftime of a futsal (indoor soccer) match, when flocks of four-and five-year-olds zoom around the court, pretending to be Robinho. Or at KIPP schools when inner-city fourth-graders travel to Ivy League colleges to visit KIPP alumni. It’s a simplest of connections; no words are required, no expensive facilities, no “development programs.”  Just two dots connected by a powerful idea: you could be them.

Let’s set all the psychology aside, and ask a question: where else can this kind of connection happen — in education, sports, art, in music, business? Where else are the opportunities to create this kind of identity-electricity?

My older brother Maurice has a talent for creativity. I could list dozens of of examples, but you should just click this: Men_R_Dogs It combines suggestive personal ads (complete with misspellings) and puppy photos. It’s pee-your-pants funny. And he churns out this kind of stuff all the time.

Most of us think of creativity as a kind of conjuring, where, as Webster’s puts it, something new is “brought into existence.” But I’m not so sure that’s right. In fact, I think it’s dead wrong.

My reasoning has to do with my brother and also with the prolific (and, for my money, underrated) writer Stephen King, who delivers some insights into the creative process in his 2001 memoir, On Writing.

King’s opinion: we don’t create ideas; rather we connect them. We make a link between two things that hadn’t been linked before. As he puts it, we unearth a connection, and then, POW!

This idea works to explain King’s immense creative output. In fact, most of his books are fueled by these sorts of combinations. For example: Mysterious Barrier + Quiet Maine Town = Under the Dome; Classic Car + Demon = Christine, High School Cruelty + Telekinesis = Carrie. Of course, there’s a lot more that goes into converting these primitive combinations into works of art, but they are like the uranium core of creativity: the big bang.

The deeper question is, how do we create more of these explosions?

To answer that, let’s look at what those connections really are. They are neural links — connected wires in our brain. Ideas don’t just float in the air — they exist, as electrical circuits. Maurice’s idea is funny because his brain built a connection between the neurons for “Suggestive Personal Ads” and the neurons for “Cute Puppies.” In fact, we could replace the word “creativity” with a new term: “connectivity.” And to maximize creative connectivity, you need to do two very different tasks:

1) gather ideas

2) connect them

For the gathering phase, we need lots of inputs, lots of filtering and categorizing. To be good at this is like being a human vacuum cleaner, hoovering up ideas and funneling them into various memory bins.

For the second phase, we need time and space to let the connections form and grow. It’s what management consultant and author Jim Collins refers to as “the white space” — the area of the day when real thinking happens.

Look closely at any creative person, and you’ll see that they have structured their lives to create acres of white space; Charles Dickens took endless walks through the city; Einstein played violin; Collins unplugs all electronics and goes “into the cave” from 8 a.m. until noon every day. All are good examples of Flaubert’s code: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

We’re living an interesting moment. For gathering ideas, it’s unquestionably richest time in history; we are standing in a torrent of stimulus and ideas. For finding that quiet place to connect those ideas, however, it’s exactly the opposite; white space is scarce and getting scarcer. Which makes it all the more valuable.

(Special thanks to my friend Michael Ruhlman for urging me to read On Writing.)

p.s. We went back to press for the eighth printing today — thanks, everyone!

If you could gather six of the planet’s best teachers in one place for three days, who would you choose?

Would you pick:

• Rafe Esquith, who teaches Los Angeles inner-city fifth-graders to perform Shakespeare?
• Hans Jensen, the world’s best cello teacher?
• Michael Sandel, whose Harvard class is so life-changing it was just turned into a public-television special?
• How about Idan Ravin, basketball’s Hoops Whisperer, who ignites NBA players to new levels of performance?

It’s not a hypothetical question. Some educators I know are aiming to do just that — to assemble six great teachers from sports, art, music, and math for a three-day workshop. The idea: to create a miniature Florence of master teaching. To explore the deeper parallels between these teachers; to see how they make emotional connections, to see how they work their magic.  (Which isn’t really magic, of course, but rather a skill set that can be analyzed, copied, and taught.)

More to come on this — but in the meantime, which teachers would you choose?

Editing has a bad name.

To many of us, the word evokes fussy red pens, nitpicking, stilted progress. Editing — which we can define as locating mistakes and fixing them — seems in every way to be the precise opposite of genius. After all, geniuses are fluid, perfect. Geniuses nail it the first time — that’s what makes them geniuses, right?

Uh, no.

In fact, when you peel back genius, you usually reveal editing. Lots and lots of editing. Ridiculous amounts of editing. Here are two useful case studies: Charles Dickens and Michael Jackson.

Check out this amazing original manuscript of “A Christmas Carol,” which went online today thanks to the cooperative efforts of the NY Times and the Morgan Library and Museum. It’s a riotous quilt of writing and rewriting — and looks for all the world like an 8th-grader’s term paper.

Of course, the changes are being made at an exceedingly high level — but the thing to recognize here is the pattern of work. Dickens read and re-read it dozens of times, finding fixes both small (changing “spot of mustard” to the more vivid “blot of mustard,” for example) and large (writing, then crossing out, a long paragraph comparing Scrooge’s character to Shakespeare’s Hamlet).

(See more examples of Dickens’s editing here.  And George Orwell’s spectacularly mashed-up first draft of 1984 here. And Bruce Springsteen’s six-month-long editing of the song “Born to Run” here. All proving why many writers hide their first drafts.)

It’s weird to think of writing a sentence as a neural circuit — as a chain of wires inside Dickens’s mind — but that’s precisely what it is. And in his editing, Dickens is firing those circuits, noting the mistakes, fixing the mistakes, then firing them again and again (and again) to gradually hone it into a smooth, natural-seeming result.

Michael Jackson, who was famous in the music industry for his work ethic, did the same thing with his dancing. Here is his tap-dance instructor, Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, on what it was like to work with Jackson.

“He was a perfectionist and in four hours we might work four bars [about one song 15 seconds]. He would not move on until he was completely comfortable with one movement. That way he took the material in and made it a part of himself. He polished it before he moved on. I saw the passion in his work, very intense.”

Think about that:  Four hours of work on one song 15 seconds’ worth of moves.

As so often with the truth, there’s a paradox here: the final performance is designed to create the illusion of naturalness and fluency — of genius — which distances observers from the deeper force that truly created it: the humbler but still powerful force of a craftsman at work.