The Talent Code

The Talent Code cracks open the myth of talent and breaks it down from a neurological standpoint into three crucial parts, which anyone can pull together to become a world-class performer, artist, or athlete and form something they used to believe was not even within their own hands.

Here’s what happens in your brain when you think a thought, feel angry, or raise your left foot: The electrical energy in your brain increases, until it crosses a certain threshold called the action potential. Once crossed, electrons are fired off in one neuron (a node in your network of nerve cells), and start traveling towards the next.

Electrons traveling along a certain set of neurons in a certain order lead to you performing a certain action or thinking a certain thought.

But to get from one neuron to the next, the electrons have to travel quite the distance. To cover it, they use something called axons – think of it as a street connecting two cities. All of your axons are covered in a fatty, white substance called myelin. It protects your axons and insulates them, but not just that.

How big the layer of protective myelin around your axons is determines how fast and how accurately electrons can go from one neuron to the next, and therefore, how good you are at performing the corresponding skill.

When you pick up a new skill, say learning how to drive a car, your axons aren’t really streets yet. They’re more of a path in the woods – a few people have to tread it and build it, before you can really use it. More myelin is what turns those paths into streets and the streets into highways.

Note: This is also the way you form and change habits. It’s called neuroplasticity and I explain the concept here.

Therefore, the more myelin you develop, the better any skill gets hardwired into your body and brain. But how do you do that?

That’s where what the author calls deep practice comes in. It’s based on three things: Repetition. Making mistakes. Fixing them. Myelin is living tissue, which means that, like a muscle, it must be exercised to stay healthy and grow. The more you use the axons in your brain, the fatter the myelin layer around them gets, making it ever easier to perform the skill that you do when those particular neurons fire. Put simply: Practice makes perfect. But eventually, playing Yankee Doodle on the piano becomes easy, and there’s not much more myelin to grow. When growth slows down, it’s time to turn to a deeper way to practice. Some call this deliberate practice, Cal Newport calls it deep work, but it…