Category: Science

Passion is the nuclear reaction at the core of every talent. It’s the glowing, inexhaustible energy source. It’s also pretty darn mysterious.

Where does intense passion come from? How does it start, and how is it sustained?  How does someone fall wildly in love with math or music, stock trading or figure skating?

Most of us intuitively think of passion as uncontrollable — you have it or you don’t, period. In this way of thinking, passion is like a lightning strike, or a winning lottery ticket. It happens to the few, and the rest of us are out of luck.

But is that true?  Or are there smart ways to increase the odds?

We get some insight into that question from none other than Keith Richards, whose book Life just came out. My favorite part of the book (and that’s saying something) is the part where Keith tells how he fell in love with music, and specifically with the guitar. The process went like this:

Step one: Keith’s Grandpa Gus, who was a former musician and a bit of a rebel, noticed that Keith liked singing.

Step two: whenever young Keith would come over, Gus placed a guitar on on top of the the family piano. Keith noticed. Gus told him, when he was taller, he could give it a try.

Step three: one momentous and unforgettable day, Gus took the guitar down from the piano, and handed it to Keith. From that moment, Richards was hooked (his first addiction). He took the guitar everywhere he went.

As Richards writes:

“The guitar was totally out of reach. It was something you looked at, thought about, but never got your hands on. I’ll never forget the guitar on top of his upright piano every time I’d go and visit, starting maybe from the age of five. I thought that was where the thing lived. I thought it was always there. And I just kept looking at it, and he didn’t say anything, and a few years later I was still looking at it. “Hey, when you get tall enough, you can have a go at it,” he said. I didn’t find out until after he was dead that he only brought that out and put it up there when he knew I was coming to visit. So I was being teased in a way.”

Reading it, I couldn’t help but think that most parents and teachers — me included — do precisely the opposite. We don’t put things out of reach — in fact we put them within reach. We go fast, not slow. We try to identify passion, not to grow it. We don’t take the time to make the nuclear reaction happen on its own.

For me, the lessons are these:

• Don’t treat passion like lightning. Treat it like a virus, one that’s transmitted on contact with people who already have it. Grandpa Gus loved music. He noticed Keith liked singing.
• Create a space for private contact with a vast, magical world. The guitar was totally out of reach. It was something you looked at, thought about, but never got your hands on.
• Give time for the ideas to grow. And I just kept looking at it, and he didn’t say anything, and a few years later I was still looking at it.
• Know that it’s never about today, but rather about creating a vision of the future self. “When you get tall enough you can have a go at it.”

For parents and teachers, Gus provides a useful model. Because Gus didn’t hover. He didn’t push. He didn’t even try to teach, beyond some rudimentary chords. But he did something far more intelligent and powerful. He understood what makes kids care. He carefully put the elements in place, sent a few pointed signals at the right time, and let the forces of nature take their course.

Smart man, that Gus.

And I can’t help but wonder: are there other Gus stories out there that might be instructive? How do we take the Gus Method and apply it to schools, or sports, or math?

PS — Thanks to all you readers who requested Spanish editions — they’re being mailed today. Venga!

We spend a healthy amount of time here trying to identify good habits for building skill. In fact, we do it so much that I can’t help but wonder: what if we turned the question on its head? What if we tried to identify the worst, most unproductive, most deadly habits? What habits are skill-killers? What’s the fastest way to slow down your talent development?

Let’s start with a well-established truth: many top performers are obsessive about critically reviewing their performances – either on videotape or with a coach or teacher.

A good example of this is Bill Robertie, who’s a world-class poker player, world champ in backgammon, and a grand master in chess (and who’s written about by Alina Tugend in her soon-to-be-released book Better by Mistake). Robertie reviews every game obsessively—even the ones he wins—searching for tiny mistakes, critiquing his decisions, breaking it down. The same is true of many top athletes, musicians, comedians, and (I can vouch) writers.

Which leads us to Deadly Habit #1: Thou Shalt Ignore Your Mistakes.

• In order to develop your talent slowly, you should never, ever review your performance. You should regard errors as unfortunate, unavoidable events, and do your best to immediately hide their existence or, even better, erase them from your memory.

Another general truth about top performers is that they love rituals. Whether Rafael Nadal prepping for a serve or Yo-Yo Ma prepping a sonata, a lot of top performers are addicted to idiosyncratic, persnickety rituals that seem, to the neutral observer, insanely detailed and RainMan-esque. They tie their sneakers just so, they place their violin case at a certain precise angle.  These behaviors are usually described as a superstition, but I think that misses the point: their ritual is their unique way of prepping themselves to deliver a performance.

Which brings us to Deadly Habit #2: Thou Shalt Avoid Ritual.

• In order to develop your talent slowly, you should approach each practice and performance as if you’ve never, ever done it before. You should be casual. You should avoid any repetition of actions, thoughts, or patterns of any kind, and instead make every day completely different.

A third commonality of top performers is that they are thieves. They are incurable shoplifters of ideas and techniques, constantly scanning the landscape for something they can use. As Picasso said, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”

Which gives us Deadly Habit #3: Thou Shalt Not Steal.

• In order to develop your talent slowly, you should regard your talent as your own private creation, and your challenges as private challenges that only you can solve. Don’t look elsewhere for guidance; certainly not to other performers.

It’s interesting to note that each of these deadly habits is not a big thing. They are small, nearly innocuous-seeming patterns that we can all fall into. We’ve all ignored past mistakes, avoided ritual, and failed to find guidance in the experiences of others. But here’s the real point: perhaps these little habits are a lot bigger than we might think.

This point is underlined by a fascinating paper I just bumped into called The Mundanity of Excellence, by Daniel Chambliss. Chambliss makes a powerful case that top performers aren’t great because of any overarching superiority, but rather because they do a lot of ordinary things very well. They pay attention to detail. They make each repetition count. They seek small, incremental improvements one at a time, every single day. And these little habits, over time, add up to great performance.

As Olympic gold-medalist swimmer Mary T. Meagher puts it, “People don’t know how ordinary success is.”

Of course, these three habits aren’t the only ones. What other deadly habits are out there? I’d love to hear your suggestions.

When it comes to developing our talents, we all hear a lot of good advice. In fact, there’s never been a moment in the history of the world when we’ve had such an incredible bounty of good advice – a teeming ocean of it, provided by teachers, coaches, parents, the Internet.

For example, pick up a golf magazine. Each page brims with dozens of perfectly sound, smart tips; it’s a cornucopia of good advice. But does all that good advice actually make you better? (Judging by the historical average of golf scores, the answer is a resounding no.) It’s the same with other sports, music, art, math, business, you name it.

This surplus creates a uniquely modern problem: with good advice so plentiful, how do you know when you’ve located truly great advice – the rare, powerful ideas that really matter?  How do you know when you’ve found advice that might change your life?

For instance, here’s one of the the greatest pieces of advice I’ve heard. It’s from the late John Wooden, and it goes like this: You haven’t taught until they’ve learned.

That’s it.

You haven’t taught…until they’ve learned.

I know what you’re thinking. Because I thought it when I read it for the first time a few years back. My thought was, no kidding, dude.

But then one day shortly afterward I was coaching my Little League team, trying to teach them to field grounders. I was, as usual, putting my attention into my coaching – saying the correct words, showing them the correct form – and presuming if they picked it up, that was their responsibility.

Wooden’s words hit me like an avalanche.  I wasn’t really coaching, because they hadn’t learned it yet. I wasn’t teaching, I was just talking. And no matter how wisely I talked, no matter how brilliantly the drills were designed, it didn’t matter until they actually learned it. That was the only yardstick.

His advice showed me that it really wasn’t about me at all—it was 100 percent about them, about doing whatever it takes to create a situation where they learned. It seems strange to say now, but that was a titanic realization, and I still find myself thinking about it a lot.

I think this kind of advice–truly great advice–tends to follow a distinctive pattern.

• It seems super-obvious at first, then gets deeper as you live with it.
• It expresses a basic scientific truth about learning.
• It jolts your perspective and leaves you somewhere new.

And so here’s the next step: I think it would be good and useful to start to gather some of these jewels of great advice in one place. Namely here, on this blog.

What’s the single greatest piece of advice you’ve ever heard? What’s the one that changed your life? It could be anything – something you heard or read or saw – all that matters is that it works for you.

You can write them in the comments section below, or email them to me at djcoyle@thetalentcode.com and I’ll start a master list to use and share.

To get things going, here are a few gathered from a peanut gallery of friends:

–Practice on the days that you eat

–If you want to get better, double your failure rate

–Do one thing every day that scares you

PS – Does anybody know of someone who could use Spanish-language copies of The Talent Code — or, as it’s titled,  El Código de Talento?  I’ve got a couple dozen, and would be happy to send them to a good home. Bueno.

When we think about creative people, we usually think of people who can produce something brilliant and amazing out of thin air. The kind who are, as the saying goes, naturally creative.

But here’s a strange pattern: when you look more closely at the daily habits of super-creative people, they are doing exactly the opposite. They’re not creating out of thin air. Rather, they are creating, then destroying, then creating again. It’s not one step. It’s three.

A few examples.

1. Jon Stewart. This recent profile provided a vivid X-ray into a typical day. In the morning Stewart and staff write the script for The Daily Show. Then, a couple of hours before taping,  “Stewart and his team go on a nonstop, rapid-fire jag that tears up and rewrites nearly three-quarters of the script.” Then those new ideas are discarded and replaced by better ones. They keep churning until air time, throwing away a huge percentage of what they create.
2. Great charter-school teachers. When Doug Lemov set out to study the habits of top teachers for his Teach Like a Champion, he found a strange pattern: when he asked about their lesson plans, the best teachers said they didn’t have any lesson plans right now, because they were in the midst of ripping up and rewriting the whole program. This wasn’t an exception or a fluke; Lemov gradually realized: it was a telltale sign that they were high-quality teachers.
3. U2. A few hours before the kickoff of their stadium tour in Chicago last year, Bono hijacked the dress rehearsal and completely reshaped a 14-year-old song – even writing new lyrics and melodies. The session ended with drummer Larry Mullen wisecracking a sentence that could be the a motto of this approach: “If it ain’t broke, break it.”

The changes that Stewart, Bono, and the teachers are making are not small changes; this could never be called editing or honing. No, this is the equivalent of a skilled carpenter taking the time to build an entire house and then – while the paint is still wet – tearing it down with a bulldozer and building a brand-new house on the foundation. And I’m fascinated by it because I think it takes creativity out of the realm of magic, and into a place we can understand.

The takeaway: To build the good stuff, first you have to build the bad stuff. The bad stuff isn’t really bad – it’s a step; a blueprint that shows you where we need to go next. Without the bad script, there is no good script; without the crummy lesson plans, there is no great lesson plan.

If you think of creativity the traditional way, this makes zero sense. (Why in the world would creative geniuses consistently produce bad first drafts?) But if you think of creativity as a stepwise process – a literal construction of wires in your brain – then it begins to add up. This process is not about simply being picky or relentless. The early attempts are like probes, exploring the landscape, seeing what works and what doesn’t. The later attempts use that information to be more accurate, to deliver a better lyric, or joke, or lesson plan. The bad stuff is not accidental; it’s required. If it ain’t broke, break it.

So how do we apply this pattern to our lives?

• Cultivate the mental habit of circling back, to reconsider things you take for granted.
• Have the willingness to chuck what is perfectly good in order to try to try something better. This requires a tolerance we find often in the arts and all too rarely in sports and business, which are more risk-averse. But creativity and innovation are not about being efficient; they’re about hitting the mark.
• Avoid getting married to one approach. When it comes to ideas, it’s always better to play the field.

(Of course, now that I’ve written this, I can’t stop circling back and trying to see where I might tear it apart and replace it with something better. Damn you, Jon Stewart!)

I love looking into the private daily routines of great performers, from da Vinci to Dickens to Dave Matthews. Part of it is pure voyeurism (they eat what for breakfast every day?), but a larger part is to treat their lives as a detective story. What are they doing that helps them perform so well? What clues can we detect?

Most of us instinctively look for Big Clues. Are they tightly disciplined, or do they work only when the spirit moves them? Are they from happy families, or tragic ones?  Are they hermits or do they fly around in a social whirlwind?

And it usually turns out (surprise!) there’s really not much of a pattern. Some top performers are super-disciplined, some famously not. Some are from happy families; some sad; some are hermits, some social. Judging by this, it would seem that top performers are pretty much like the rest of us (except, you know, better).

However, there’s one small clue; one tiny, almost unnoticeable habit a striking number of top performers share. They keep a pocket notebook.

I’m not talking about a journal or a diary filled with reflections or dreams – this is a messy, working notebook that is with them all the time, like an appendage. (In da Vinci’s case, the attachment was literal – he tied it to his belt.)

The question is, why is a pocket notebook so apparently useful when it comes to developing talent?

Let’s count the ways:

• It’s a handy net, to capture and organize ideas and facts that memory won’t hold.
• It’s an organizing tool, to track their progress in various key areas. Ben Franklin famously graded each of his days according to his performance in 13 areas of virtue. At 79, Franklin wrote, “I am indebted to my notebook for the happiness of my whole life.”
• It’s a testing ground for ideas – a safe, private place to try, fail, and try again. Mark Twain is a nice example of this. Look below how he uses his notebook to build one of his famous bon mots – failing twice before nailing it with “Modesty died when false modesty was born. (Which of course, he would later toss off as if he’d just thought of it.)

That these top performers (along with so many others) avidly used pocket notebooks is not a coincidence. Their scribble-filled notebooks are the best example of their minds doing the regular, habitual gymnastics that build skill – reaching, testing, making mistakes, gradually improving. The notebooks are X-rays of brains that are improving themselves day by day.

All of this, of course, makes me wonder why in the world I don’t carry a pocket notebook. I sometimes jot notes on 3×5 cards or on my phone, but it’s not quite the same, since both lack the deep, layered feel of a real notebook.

What do you think?

(If you want to check out pages from 20 famous notebooks – go here )

We love whiz kids. We love pint-size Michelangelos and Michael Jordans who can pull off fast, sophisticated feats of agility and speed at an impossibly young age.

But here’s a surprising little secret : when you take a hard look at the science, the majority of super-talented whiz kids do not become world-class adult performers. Check here and here for some of the evidence – or consider the mediocre record of those “experts” who evaluate talent for the NFL, MLB, and NBA draft – and whose multimillion dollar bets on the Next Big Thing so often come up empty.

All this adds up to a profound mystery: why don’t prodigies succeed more often? Why don’t kids who are the world’s best at  age 10 or 15 end up being the world’s best at age 25 or 30? Because logically speaking, prodigies should succeed at a reasonably high rate. After all, they have a heck of a head start. But they don’t. It’s like they hit a Prodigy Wall.

Conventional thinking places most of the responsibility on the prodigy – they burn out, they lose their passion. But I don’t think that’s quite accurate. To be blunt, I think it’s mostly the parents’ fault. The modern parental response to having a prodigy — which is well-meaning — has an unfortunate side-effect: it cuts the prodigies off from the humble, stepwise, self-motivated process that grew their skill in the first place.

When a prodigy appears, modern parents have three powerful instincts:

• To celebrate – to show the prodigy (and everybody else) how marvelous their skill is.
• To elevate – to place the prodigy on a different plane. They are not like others. They are different and special.
• To accelerate – to expose the prodigy to new levels of competition, usually involving other prodigies.

The parental urge to celebrate, elevate, and accelerate is powerful and nearly irresistible, particularly given the many institutions that excel in identifying prodigies and funneling them like so many Dickensian orphans into a grid of specialized, often far-off opportunities.

So yes, those instincts are powerful. But are they the right thing to do?

A nice case study is found in the story of Debbie Phelps and her three kids – Michael (yes, that Michael Phelps) and his older sisters, Whitney and Hilary.

Growing up in suburban Baltimore, Whitney and Hilary were prodigial swimmers. Whitney was a national champion at 14. According to one of their coaches, Whitney and Hilary possessed more talent than Michael ever had. Debbie was the very image of an involved sports mom – celebrating each of Whitney and Hilary’s successes with great enthusiasm.

Then, as happens with so many, Whitney and Hilary hit the Prodigy Wall. They got really good, but couldn’t get any better. They couldn’t crack through.

Michael comes along. He’s really good — nearly as talented as his sisters. And when Michael was 15, he set a new American record at an out-of-town meet. As Michael traveled back to Baltimore, Mother Debbie did the instinctive thing – she festooned the house with balloons, streamers, and yard signs commemorating his remarkable feat.

But then something unusual happened. A few hours before Michael arrived, Michael’s coach, Bob Bowman, came to the house and removed all the streamers. He popped the balloons. He pulled down the signs. And he threw it all into the trash.

When Debbie Phelps saw what Bowman had done, she was understandably upset – why was he doing this? Didn’t he understand that this was a big moment, a time to celebrate?

Bowman let her protest. Then he told her, “This is a journey of a thousand steps. If we celebrate now, like this, that leaves us nowhere to go.”

Today, Bowman sees that day as a vital turning point in Michael’s development. Debbie remained incredibly supportive, but she gave her son and his coach ownership of the journey in a way she hadn’t done with the older girls.

When it comes to prodigies, I think we should take a cue from Bowman and employ the Opposite George theory. (Random reference alert: do you remember that episode of Seinfeld where George – realizing that every instinct he’s ever had has been wrong, decides to do the opposite? Real George is a complete failure – Opposite George is a raging success.)

The Opposite George Theory of Prodigy Parenting goes like this:

• Instead of celebrating a prodigy’s victories, let the rewards speak for themselves The true reward of winning is in the act of winning itself. (Let’s be honest – yard signs are not really for the kid, are they?) This gives a kid rightful ownership over the process.
• Instead of elevating and isolating a prodigy, emphasize the connections to others. Remind a kid that they might be better right now, but in the long run, they have a lot in common with everybody else. This makes the ups and downs of the journey (which are inevitable) easier to endure.
• Instead of accelerating to ever-new and exotic levels of outside competition, find innovative ways to increase the internal level of competition in the practice routine. This keeps the focus inward, on the controllable internal process of stretching and reaching toward a goal, and not on the uncontrollables of a scoreboard or an opponent.

To be clear, I’m not arguing for cold, uncaring, balloon-popping parenting – it’s fun having a prodigy in the family, and it should bring happiness and pride. But I am arguing for boundaries and clarity. Because I think it’s easy to forget a basic fact about being a kid: it’s pretty scary. Being a prodigy is triple scary, and isolation only adds to that feeling. Prodigies don’t need to be set apart – rather, they need to remain connected to the people and forces that help them grow.

Dear Kids,

Happy first day of school! I’ve got good news and bad news.

First the bad news: You are about to spend hundreds of hours learning a bunch of small, interconnected facts, most of which you will never, ever, ever use again. (Proof: ask your parents how to calculate the area of a rhombus. I rest my case.)

Now the good news: school is hugely, amazingly, life-changingly worthwhile. Here’s why: learning bunches of interconnected facts makes your brain faster and stronger. School is like a machine for improving your brain. But in order to improve it the most, it helps to know the basic rules of how that sucker works.

(Why don’t more schools spend time — a half-day, say — teaching kids the how their brains work? This state of affairs seems utterly crazy to me. Would you try to teach someone to drive a car without showing them the accelerator and steering wheel?)

So before you get started filling your brains with facts, here is a (very) brief user’s manual for your brain.

Rule 1: Feel the Burn

If you want strong, fast muscles, do you:

• A)   do nothing and wait for your muscles to get strong
• B)    Go to the store, buy bags of marshmallows and lift them over and over
• C)   Go to the gym and work out until your muscles burn

Congratulations for picking C) – because here’s the deal: your brain works exactly like your muscles. To get stronger and faster, you have to push yourself right to the edge of your ability, until you feel the burn — which in this case is that spot where you make mistakes.

This is not easy. It feels uncomfortable – sort of like lifting a heavy weight. But it’s how you’re built. Struggle is not optional – it’s a requirement.

• Do: Be willing to make mistakes, fix them, reach again. Mistakes aren’t verdicts – they’re navigation points for the next try.
• Don’t: Sit back and let information flow over you like a warm, comfortable bath.  This feels good, and it’s an absolutely terrible way to learn.

Rule 2: Repetition is Underrated. (Repetition is Underrated.) Also, Repetition is Underrated.

When it comes to learning, there is nothing (repeat: nothing!) you can do that is more powerful than repetition. The reasons are complicated, but boil down to this: intense repetition makes the wires of your brain work faster. A LOT faster.

• Do: Picture the wires of your brain working faster and faster with each rep.
• Don’t: Think of repetition as drudgery. It’s not like doing boring chores. It’s a lot closer to installing high-speed broadband.

Rule 3: Steal From the Best

Look, I know your teacher and parents tell you that you are special and unique, but the truth is, you aren’t the first person in the history of the world to do math, music, art, or sports. In short, it’s not about you. When you encounter a problem, look to others. Find the people who do it well, and copy how they study, how they listen, how they take notes. Rip them off. Steal their habits, figure out the way they think, break into their vault. Your brain is built to mimic.

• Do: Keep a list of useful habits you’d like to steal.
• Don’t: Take defeat too personally. (Same with success, for that matter.)

In sum, making your brain fast and strong is all about doing the three R’s: Reach, Repeat, and Rob the Banks.

Good luck!

Late bloomers are underrated.

It’s not just the condescending phrase —  the whispered implication that they should have bloomed earlier. And it’s not the fact that our culture tends to sprinkle the young with the fairy dust of infinite possibility, while treating late bloomers with the grim surprise we give when spotting an escaped farm animal roaming city streets – what are YOU doing here?

No, the real reason they are underrated is that these kinds of second-act successes are more common and possible than we might think.  So in the interest of germinating blooms in our own lives, here are a few random ideas.

1. Be Willing to Be Stupid Early On

We know about Julia Child taking her first cooking class in her mid-thirties, Shinichi Suzuki opening his legendary music school at 46 , late-arriving authors like Frank McCourt and Norman Maclean, and of course the official godmother of late bloomers, Grandma Moses, who learned to paint in her seventies.

What’s not mentioned in those stories is how the rest of the world — often including their closest friends — regarded their venture as borderline insane. To persist in the face of this sentiment is not an easy thing to do, and requires a particular combination of muleheadedness and dreaminess.

Muleheadedness also comes in handy during practice, because it takes an older brain more repeats to learn something. On the other hand, older brains tend to be good at remembering what they’ve learned.

I like the way Abraham Lincoln put it: “I am slow to learn and slow to forget what I’ve learned. My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch anything on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out.”

2. Play to Your Strong Suits

Young people are good at learning certain kinds of skills — okay, lots of skills. But older brains actually work better as they get older in many softer integrative tasks, especially those requiring discernment and reasoning.

Cheerful fact: People aged 40-65 score more highly than younger people on four of six major mental capacities, including the most vital: inductive reasoning. So while teens make good figure skaters and violinists, there’s a good reason we don’t choose many 19-year-olds as CEOs, teachers, or leaders. So pick something that plays to your increasing neural strengths — soft skills rather than hard ones. For more on this, check out Barbara Stauch’s wonderful and useful new book, The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain.

3. Use Your Freedom to Screw Up

Let’s take a moment to feel sorry for super-talented young people, because their lives too often resemble a fast-narrowing corridor of endless practice routines, early pressure, and the kind of devilish bargaining that led a violinist Yeou-Cheng Ma (sister of Yo-Yo Ma) to produce the saddest quote I’ve ever heard: “I traded my childhood for my good left hand.” Their skill comes to defines their identity and thus their possibilities — and creates a mindset where they are often afraid to take risks.

Late bloomers, on the other hand, get to develop their own identities and, equally important, screw up. If something doesn’t work out, they have other skills to fall back on — particularly emotional skills. And when it comes to building their talent, they’ve got the most important asset: the freedom to experiment, to make mistakes and fix them.

For a good lesson on doing this, check out this Julia Child clip (interspersed with Meryl Streep’s re-enactment from a recent movie). Child takes a risk, screws up royally, and it comes off as a triumph of late-bloomer resilience.

If tomorrow you were given the chance to be great at every single skill in your life — I’m talking world-class level, in each of your various interests — would you do it?

For many of us, the answer comes easily: Yes. Being tops at everything is considered Life’s Big Goal. Accordingly, we spend a lot of our time fervently traveling toward the promised land — shoring up weaknesses, honing strengths, targeting where to excel.

But I’d like to point out that this way of thinking misses out on a potentially important point: that there are some real advantages to being terrible.  There’s an underrated beauty in clumsiness. There’s virtue in sucking.

At this point I’d like to introduce the piece de resistance of bad, the great pyramid of terribleness: the golf swing of Mr. Charles Barkley (see above). It is not just bad. It is an Everest of ineptitude, a Versailles of discoordination. (Note: this video is not a fluke — it’s his real swing, as seen here and here in terrifying slow motion.)

Historically speaking, there are two ways of looking at being bad:

1) It’s bad. It’s to be ignored, avoided, and spoken of as little as possible.

2) It’s secretly kind of good, because it teaches important lessons we can’t learn anywhere else.

In this second way of thinking, being bad contains a potential silver lining: character development, teaching the invaluable skill of resilience. We see this all the time, not just in the work of psychologists like Albert Bandura, but also in the biographies of luminaries like Beethoven, Churchill, Darwin, Emily Dickinson, Harry Truman, and John Grisham — all of whom endured excruciating stretches of ineptitude before they got good.

What’s more, we can take this idea even farther.  Because I think the advantages of being terrible go well beyond the eat-your-vegetables benefits of resilience and character. Being terrible can be useful because:

• • It gives us freedom to experiment. Maintaining greatness is a narrow pursuit — you are essentially playing defense, vigilantly guarding against erosion. Being terrible, on the other hand, is a license to try new things. It permits a looseness and a creativity, since there is very little to lose.

• • It connects us to other people. It’s interesting to see the contrast between the way people treat the ever-smiling Barkley and the ever-grim Tiger Woods.  People admire greatness. But they relate to Barkley’s awfulness because we’ve all been there.

• • It lets us practice the vastly underrated skill of knowing when to quit. In this overprogrammed world, it’s all too easy (especially for parents and kids) to say yes to tennis, music, golf, theater, everything. But to get really good at anything, you can’t say yes to everything. Knowing when and how to quit is not just handy — it’s a survival skill.

• • It keeps us humble and grounded. Lives built on the relentless pursuit of perfection tend to be relentlessly narrow. Witness some of the tone-deaf, clueless, and indefensible behavior we’ve seen lately from perfectionists on Wall Street, Washington, and in the athletic arena.  Being terrible is a reminder that we’re like everybody else — vulnerable, human, prone to error. It tilts us toward a learning mindset.

My area of terribleness is the guitar. I’ve played it for 12 years now, and I know all of 12 chords. (That’s one new chord a year, for those of you keeping score.) When it comes time to pick out a melody, I’m hopeless, if not downright Barkleyesque. But I still keep picking the darn thing up. I can’t imagine life without it. And if somebody asked me to justify why I spent time doing something I’m objectively so unskilled at,  I’d have to say that it’s because I just like it, and that’s all.

It’s a beautiful moment we’ve all experienced: a teacher or coach says something and all of a sudden – like sunbeams cutting through a cloud – we get it. We understand deeply.

The question is, how do we make these moments happen more often?

I think one of the best ways is by using more precise language.  Too often, teachers and learners alike settle for vague instructions, like “do it like this,” or “try it again.”  These are well intended, perhaps, but in essence they are squishy, meaningless words that create squishy, meaningless actions.  What learners need isn’t cheerleading – it’s information on what sensations they should feel, what techniques they should use, what goals they should aim for on the practice field or the classroom.

With that in mind, here’s a semi-serious list cobbled together from various talent hotbeds, and stolen from business, sports, art, music, and academics.  Some are undoubtedly more useful than others, but all reflect a simple idea: to reflect the sensations and goals of the way the brain really learns.

• Brick (v): The simple beginner’s errors that feel clumsy and stupid, but in fact form the crucial building blocks of future progress. Usage: “During the initial round of presidential-primary debates, Obama spent most of his time bricking.”
• Lego (v): To break a desired task into its most basic component parts; akin to chunking. Usage: “Little Wolfgang struggled with the chord changes until his father helped him lego it out.”
• Hack (v): To analyze the components of ideal performance with the goal of replicating it. Frequently assisted by the use of YouTube.
• Hi-Def (v): To deeply and completely memorize the image of an ideal performance. Often used while hacking. Usage: “Kobe spent hundreds of youthful evenings staring at the posters on his bedroom wall, high-deffing Michael Jordan’s jumpshot.”
• Ping (v): To send a short, concise instruction; typically from a teacher to a student. Usage: “Coach Wooden stalked the sidelines during practice, relentlessly pinging the team as it ran through its fast break.”
• Rainman (v): To productively obsess on a tiny, crucial detail until it is dialed in with 100 percent accuracy. Usage: “The calculus test was Friday, so Albert started rainmanning his derivatives on Wednesday night.”
• Sandwich (n): A three-part demonstration where a teacher vividly shows the right way to do something, then the wrong way to do it, then repeats the right way to do it. Usage: “In the movie ‘Stand and Deliver,’ Jaime Escalante teaches algebra by sandwiching.”
• Suck-cess (n): A surprising favorable outcome; typically occurs following the combination of bricks, hacking, and pinging.
• Vex Education (n): The process by which people grow familiar with the central paradox of learning: that being willing to be bad makes you good.

(What other words should we add?)