Daniel Coyle Quotes & Sayings

All the world's parenting advice can be distilled to two simple rules: pay attention to what your children are fascinated by, and praise them for their effort. [Paraphrasing Carol Dweck, a psychologist who studies motivation] — Daniel Coyle

Repetition. "Don't look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That's the only way it happens - and when it happens, it lasts," he wrote in The Wisdom of Wooden. — Daniel Coyle

Studies show that even a brief connection with a role model can vastly increase unconscious motivation. — Daniel Coyle

According to a 1995 study, a sample of Japanese eighth graders spent 44 percent of their class time inventing, thinking, and actively struggling with underlying concepts. The study's sample of American students, on the other hand, spent less than 1 percent of their time in that state. "The Japanese want their kids to struggle," said Jim Stigler, the UCLA professor who oversaw the study and who cowrote The Teaching Gap with James Hiebert. "Sometimes the [Japanese] teacher will purposely give the wrong answer so the kids can grapple with the theory. American teachers, though, worked like waiters. Whenever there was a struggle, they wanted to move past it, make sure the class kept gliding along. But you don't learn by gliding. — Daniel Coyle

The blame lies with our brains. While they are really good at building circuits, they are awful at unbuilding them. — Daniel Coyle

The revolution is built on three simple facts. (1) Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons - a circuit of nerve fibers. (2) Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy. (3) The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become. — Daniel Coyle

I have always maintained that excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work. - Charles Darwin — Daniel Coyle

A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary. - Thomas Carruthers — Daniel Coyle

In the interest of clarity, we'll define talent in its strictest sense: the possession of repeatable skills that don't depend on physical size (sorry, jockeys and NFL linemen). — Daniel Coyle

Ignore the bad habit and put your energy toward building a new habit that will override the old one. — Daniel Coyle

Skills are really just circuits in your brain — Daniel Coyle

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. - W. B. Yeats — Daniel Coyle

There is no substitute for attentive repetition. — Daniel Coyle

The good Lord, in his infinite wisdom, did not make us all the same. Goodness gracious, if he had, this would be a boring world, don't you think? You are different from each other in height, weight, background, intelligence, talent, and many other ways. For that reason, each one of you deserves individual treatment that is best for you. I will decide what that treatment will be. — Daniel Coyle

Struggle is not optional - it's neurologically required: in order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit suboptimally; you must make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes; you must slowly teach your circuit. You must also keep firing that circuit - i.e., practicing - in order to keep myelin functioning properly. After all, myelin is living tissue. — Daniel Coyle

You will become clever through your mistakes. - German proverb — Daniel Coyle

One does not become a master coach by accident. — Daniel Coyle

Things that appear to be obstacles turn out to be desirable in the long haul," Bjork said. "One real encounter, even for a few seconds, is far more useful than several hundred observations. — Daniel Coyle

Although talent feels and looks predestined, in fact we have a good deal of control over what skills we develop, and we have more potential than we might ever presume to guess. — Daniel Coyle

Carol Dweck, the psychologist who studies motivation, likes to say that all the world's parenting advice can be distilled to two simple rules: pay attention to what your children are fascinated by, and praise them for their effort. — Daniel Coyle

Deep practice, however, doesn't obey the same math. Spending more time is effective - but only if you're still in the sweet spot at the edge of your capabilities, attentively building and honing circuits. What's more, there seems to be a universal limit for how much deep practice human beings can do in a day. Ericsson's research shows that most world-class experts - including pianists, chess players, novelists, and athletes - practice between three and five hours a day, no matter what skill they pursue. — Daniel Coyle

Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows in response to certain signals. — Daniel Coyle

I discovered when I went all out, when I put 100 percent of my energy into some intense, impossible task - when my heart was jack-hammering, when lactic acid was sizzling through my muscles - that's when I felt good, normal, balanced. — Daniel Coyle

Deep practice feels a bit like exploring a dark and unfamiliar room. You start slowly, you bump into furniture, stop, think, and start again. Slowly, and a little painfully, you explore the space over and over, attending to errors, extending your reach into the room a bit farther each time, building a mental map until you can move through it quickly and intuitively. — Daniel Coyle

Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect. — Daniel Coyle

Inspiration is for amateurs. — Daniel Coyle

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

TO LEARN IT MORE DEEPLY, TEACH IT — Daniel Coyle

If you were to visit a dozen talent hotbeds tomorrow, you would be struck by how much time the learners spend observing top performers. — Daniel Coyle

Think of your windshield as an energy source for your brain. Use pictures (the walls of many talent hotbeds are cluttered with photos and posters of their stars) or, better, video. One idea: Bookmark a few YouTube videos, and watch them before you practice, or at night before you go to bed. — Daniel Coyle

Don't look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. — Daniel Coyle

To get good, it's helpful to be willing, or even enthusiastic, about being bad. Baby steps are the royal road to skill. — Daniel Coyle

Struggle is not an option: it's a biological requirement. — Daniel Coyle

Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways - operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes - makes you smarter. Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you're forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them - as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go - end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it. — Daniel Coyle

Lamm's system - dubbed the Baron Lamm Technique - worked well. From 1919 to 1930 it brought Lamm hundreds of thousands of dollars from banks around the country; after his death it was taught to John Dillinger, among others.* Lamm's system, still employed today succeeded not only because of its conceptual strength but also because Lamm was able to communicate his ideas and translate them into the seamless performance of an immensely difficult task. He was an innovator who taught with discipline and exactitude. He inspired through information. In short, Baron Lamm was a master coach. — Daniel Coyle

The sweet spot: that productive, uncomfortable terrain located just beyond our current abilities, where our reach exceeds our grasp. Deep practice is not simply about struggling; it's about seeking a particular struggle, which involves a cycle of distinct actions. — Daniel Coyle

People think doping is for lazy people who want to avoid hard work. That might be true in some cases, but in mine, as with many riders I knew, it was precisely the opposite. EPO granted the ability to suffer more; to push yourself farther and harder than you'd ever imagined, in both training and racing. — Daniel Coyle

A method of schooling founded by the Italian educator Maria Montessori that emphasizes collaborative, explorative learning, and whose alumni include Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page; Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales; video-game designer Will Wright; Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos; chef Julia Child; and rap impresario Sean Combs. — Daniel Coyle

Feeling stupid is no fun. But being willing to be stupid - in other words, being willing to risk the emotional pain of making mistakes - is absolutely essential, because reaching, failing, and reaching again is the way your brain grows and forms new connections. — Daniel Coyle