Environmental and interroceptive cues for peak performance
From Daniel Coyle's The Talent Code
Alright, here’s the negatives about Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code:
It’s written in 2009 (so pre Replication Crisis).
It cites some probably-fake social science.
It’s written by a journalist rather than an athlete, coach, or scientist.
But here’s the upsides:
The author had enough pull to get in front of top level coaches and into a number of “talent hotspots” across the world.
The useful lessons that I’m going to focus on mainly came from those places, coaches and / or the athletes and performers, and are lessons I’ve seen and experienced myself.
It’s one of the few books I’ve read that had a good theory of talent hotspots, which I’ve always thought was an interesting topic.
I’ll let Coyle open us - he’s got pretty good prose, and it teases the diversity of “performance” he looked at in the book:
“Every journey begins with questions, and here are three: How does a penniless Russian tennis club with one indoor court create more top-twenty women players than the entire United States? How does a humble storefront music school in Dallas, Texas, produce Jessica Simpson, Demi Lovato, and a succession of pop music phenoms? How does a poor, scantily educated British family in a remote village turn out three world-class writers?”
“The first baseball players from the tiny island of the Dominican Republic arrived in the major leagues in the 1950s; they now account for one in nine big-league players. The first South Korean woman golfer won a Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) tournament in 1998; now there are forty-five on the LP GA Tour, including eight of the top twenty money winners. In 1991 there was only one Chinese entry in the Van Cliburn piano competition; the most recent competition featured eight, a proportional leap reflected in top symphony orchestras around the world.
Media coverage tends to treat each hotbed as a singular phenomenon, but in truth they are all part of a larger, older pattern. Consider the composers of nineteenth-century Vienna, the writers of Shakespearean England, or the artists of the Italian Renaissance, during which the sleepy city of Florence, population 70,000, suddenly produced an explosion of genius that has never been seen before or since. In each case, the identical questions echo: Where does this extraordinary talent come from? How does it grow?”
So he sells this “hotspot” vision, but to really think about talent and performance from a high level, he breaks it down to three main areas before coming back to hotspots.
Those areas are deep practice, ignition, and master coaching.
Deep practice
Deep practice is the famous subject that K. Anders Ericcson studies and has written on. Basically, if you’re not pushing a boundary, if you’re not pushing *yourself,* you’re not really practicing or improving anything, you’re just wasting time.
“When you're practicing deeply, the world's usual rules are suspended. You use time more efficiently. Your small efforts produce big, lasting results. You have positioned yourself at a place of leverage where you can capture failure and turn it into skill. The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your present abilities; to target the struggle. Thrashing blindly doesn't help. Reaching does.”
But until you get into the habit of it, it’s hard to tell whether you’re doing deep practice or not.
Practice for many people has an aversive element in it already, some friction to overcome, and it’s easy to mistake pushing through that friction as pushing yourself and being in the deep practice zone. This is why coaching is valuable - a coach (or most skilled outside observers) can tell whether your skill frontier is actually being challenged or not. But we don’t always have a coach every hour that we train.
What are the interroceptive cues to look for?
“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.”
“As I traveled to various talent hotbeds, I asked people for words that described the sensations of their most productive practice. Here's what they said:
Attention
Connect
Build
Whole
Alert
Focus
Mistake
Repeat
Tiring
Edge
Awake
This is a distinctive list. It evokes a feeling of reaching, falling short, and reaching again. It's the language of mountain climbers, describing a sensation that is stepwise, incremental, connective. It's the feeling of straining toward a target and falling just short, what Martha Graham called "divine dissatisfaction.”
I second the “straining and falling short.” Part of challenging yourself is *failing.* If you’re never failing a lift, if you don’t semi-regularly whiff your target time or pace or laps or intensity, you are not actually pushing yourself! It’s that simple.
More, deep practice should be genuinely mentally fatiguing, not just physically fatiguing. And there’s a limit to how much deep practice you can usefully 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.
People at most of the hotbeds I visited practiced less than three hours a day.”
“Another sign that the teachers look for is snoring. Deep practice tends to leave people exhausted: they can't maintain it for more than an hour or two at a sitting (a finding Ericsson has observed across many disciplines).”
I agree there too. Key up there was “you can’t do this for more than an hour or two.” That means for a full training day, you need at least one pretty substantial break where you can recharge and hit it again later in the day, after some calories, mental resetting, and ideally a nap (and indeed, in Ericsson’s book Peak, he notes that elite musicians and performers sleep about 5 hours a week more than the next tier down, and this is usually in the form of naps).
What are some of the characteristics of deep practice?
Coyle calls out four elements: looking at the big picture, chunking, repetition, and feeling it.
Looking at the big picture
Or mapping the whole thing in your head.
“This means spending time staring at or listening to the desired skill—the song, the move, the swing—as a single coherent entity. People in the hotbeds stare and listen in this way quite a lot. It sounds rather Zen, but it basically amounts to absorbing a picture of the skill until you can imagine yourself doing it.”
Chunking
A big picture is made of many moves, all of which can be reduced to sub-moves. Think practicing a given sub-move, that’s a chunk. And you can refine it with variation. Faster, slower, at odd distances (21 or 24 feet from the net in basketball vs 22).
“Chunking is a strange concept. The idea that skill—which is graceful, fluid, and seemingly effortless—should be created by the nested accumulation of small, discrete circuits seems counterintuitive, to say the least. But a massive body of scientific research shows that this is precisely the way skills are built—and not just for cognitive pursuits like chess. Physical acts are also built of chunks. When a gymnast learns a floor routine, he assembles it via a series of chunks, which in turn are made up of other chunks. He's grouped a series of muscle movements together in exactly the same way that you grouped a series of letters together to form Everest. The fluency happens when the gymnast repeats the movements often enough that he knows how to process those chunks as one big chunk, the same way that you processed the above sentence.”
He digs into Brazilian football excellence, and finds that they spend their first 10 years playing futsal instead of soccer:
“It resembled soccer, if soccer were played inside a phone booth and dosed with amphetamines. The ball was half the size but weighed twice as much; it hardly bounced at all.
The players trained, not on a vast expanse of grass field, but on basketball-court-size patches of concrete, wooden floor, and dirt. Each side, instead of having eleven players, had five or six. In its rhythm and blinding speed, the game resembled basketball or hockey more than soccer”
By concentrating everything and speeding it up, you are learning better precision, accuracy, and mental schemas for each move, because you have to focus harder and chunk better mentally to execute.
The Suzuki method of learning the violin has the kids handling a shoebox with strings for the first few weeks, while they’re learning to hold the box and violin properly.
Repetition
“There is, biologically speaking, no substitute for attentive repetition. Nothing you can do—talking, thinking, reading, imagining—is more effective in building skill than executing the action, firing the impulse down the nerve fiber, fixing errors, honing the circuit.”
“What would be the surest method of ensuring that LeBron James started clanking jump shots, or that Yo-Yo Ma started fudging chords?
The answer: don't let them practice for a month. Causing skill to evaporate doesn't require chromosomal rejiggering or black-ops psychological maneuvers. It only requires that you stop a skilled person from systematically firing his or her circuit for a mere thirty days.”
“As Vladimir Horowitz, the virtuoso pianist who kept performing into his eighties, put it, "If I skip practice for one day, I notice. If I skip practice for two days, my wife notices. If I skip for three days, the world notices.”
On “firing the impulse down the nerve fiber,” Coyle has some weird obsession with myelin and myelination as the answer to everything skill-based, but it’s obviously an empty concept and a buzzword he’s just hammering on to make rubes feel like they’re getting some exciting neuroscience insight from reading the book. Of course, practice and repetition has physical correlates, but if you can’t predict anything new or derive a better training program from your bold new concept (myelination), then what good is it?
Learning to feel it
All of the cues we already covered - feeling like it’s exploring a dark room, the feeling of reaching and straining towards a target and falling short, and so on.
“It's a feeling that brings to mind Robert Bjork's idea of 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 out a particular struggle, which involves a cycle of distinct actions.
1. Pick a target.
2. Reach for it.
3. Evaluate the gap between the target and the reach.
4. Return to step one.
Here is a list of words I didn't hear: natural, effortless, routine, automatic.”
Ignition - getting motivation high and keeping it that way
This is motivation, or the energy and will and desire to put in the work required for deep practice and excellence. This is how motivation is created and sustained.
“Ignition supplies the energy, while deep practice translates that energy over time into forward progress.”
This happens on both individual and aggregate levels, and the aggregates are the talent hotspots.
One interesting fact at the individual level, when children “take off” in a discipline, it’s basically a transition from external motivation (doing what your parents want) to internal motivation (seeing yourself as a musician or swimmer or mathematician). Elites as children had a “self-fueling, self-motivating drive for tremendous work.” Ericsson points out that musicians enjoy playing music, and soccer players enjoy playing soccer, and although it’s possible this is due to self-selection, it’s also possible “that the pracice itself may lead to physiological adaptations that produce more enjoyment and more motivation to do that particular activity.”
On aggregate motivation and ignition, one interesting tidbit Coyle had here was that a number of “igniters” of talent like Andruw Jones (an MLB baseball player originally from Curaçao), Roger Bannister (of 4 minute mile fame), and Anna Kournikova (of Russian tennis fame), ignited their respective milieus of Curaçaoan baseball players, runners, and Russian tennis academists precisely because they weren’t necessarily the best in the world at the time. Jones was a middling talent when he was in Curaçao, John Landy was right on Bannister’s heels and would have broken the 4 soon, and Anna Kournikova was seen as a middling talent for a good chunk of her time at Spartak, her tennis academy.
That’s a handle as good as any for pivoting to look at talent hotbeds.
Talent hotbeds
I don’t know how anyone can NOT be fascinated by the Renaissance1 and things like that,2 so whatever ideas and data points he has here should be fun!
Let’s start at Brazilian soccer.
“Trying to describe the collective talent of Brazilian soccer players is like trying to describe the law of gravity. You can measure it—the five World Cup victories, the nine hundred or so young talents signed each year by professional European clubs. Or you can name it—the procession of transcendent stars like Pele, Zico, Socrates, Romario, Ronaldo, Juninho, Robinho, Ronaldinho, Kaka, and others who have deservedly worn the crown of "world's best player." But in the end you can't capture the power of Brazilian talent in numbers and names. It has to be felt.”
But what makes the difference? Why Brazil, and not Hungary, for example?
“In this way of thinking, Brazil is great because it possesses a unique confluence of factors: a friendly climate, a deep passion for soccer, and a genetically diverse population of 190 million, 40 percent of whom are desperately poor and long to escape through "the beautiful game." Add up all the factors and—voila!—you have the ideal factory for soccer greatness.
But there's a slight problem with this explanation: Brazil wasn't always a great producer of soccer players. In the 1940s and 1950s, with its trifecta of climate, passion, and poverty already firmly in place, the ideal factory produced unspectacular results, never winning a World Cup, failing to defeat then-world-power Hungary in four tries”
And there’s lots of other tropical places with a passion for soccer and a lot of poor people - they’re not cranking out Ronaldos and Peles either.
As mentioned earlier, one major difference is that all soccer-interested Brazilian youth play futsal for years, described as if “soccer were played inside a phone booth and dosed with amphetamines.”
“The incubation is reflected in players' biographies. From Pele onward virtually every great Brazilian player played futsal as a kid, first in the neighborhood and later at Brazil's soccer academies, where from ages seven to around twelve they typically devoted three days a week to futsal. A top Brazilian player spends thousands of hours at the game. The great Juninho, for instance, said he never kicked a full-size ball on grass until he was fourteen. Until he was twelve, Robinho spent half his training time playing futsal.”
This leads to many more skill-building opportunities, as well as building sharper and more precise skills:
“Futsal players touch the ball far more often than soccer players—six times more often per minute, according to a Liverpool University study. The smaller, heavier ball demands and rewards more precise handling—as coaches point out, you can't get out of a tight spot simply by booting the ball downfield”
“Futsal compresses soccer's essential skills into a small box; it places players inside the deep practice zone, making and correcting errors, constantly generating solutions to vivid problems. Players touching the ball 600 percent more often learn far faster, without realizing it, than they would in the vast, bouncy expanse of the outdoor game”
Another factor: the environment is saturated with cues relevant to the domain.
“walking around one afternoon, I attempted to keep track of the number of signals about soccer I spotted: a TV highlight, a bill-board, an overheard conversation, four futsal pickup games, five kids juggling balls down the street. I lost track somewhere after fifty.”
So if we extract some of these elements, we see:
Play on “hard mode,” where higher levels of skill are ground stakes and expected
Concentrate more skill building opportunities to progress faster
The environment is saturated and bombinating with cues about your particular domain or discipline
And as a piece of evidence that futsal is a big part of the picture, he cites a British guy who goes and creates the Clifford Brazilian Soccer School by bringing futsal back to England, and it was hugely successful, incubated some elite talent (one of his kids, Micah Richards, went on to play for the English national team), and expanded to a dozen other countries around the world.
Let’s look at Curaçaoan baseball players next.
Curaçao is a poor country off the coast of South America, but their little leaguers routinely beat rich countries, even though they are much smaller physically.
The interesting contrast to Curaçao is Aruba - which speaks the same language, has a similar history, culture, and economy, and even produced a major league player, Sidney Ponson, at about the same time as Curaçao did (Andruw Jones). Yet Curaçao is the youth baseball powerhouse. It “ignited” and Aruba didn’t. Hotbeds have a motivational fire lit, in a way that keeps motivation high for sustained periods. Why is this?
2 months after he made the majors, as a fresh 19 year old rookie in the opening game of the World Series, Curaçaoan Andruw Jones hit back-to-back home runs in Yankee Stadium. It was called “the greatest debut in World Series history.” It wowed the world, and it galvanized baseball in Curaçao.
Jones went on five time all-star and ten time Gold Glove centerfielder.
Aruban MLB player Sidney Ponson turned out to have a drinking problem, gained weight, got traded a few times, and eventually got arrested and ordered to complete anger management courses.
Baseball remained ignited in Curaçao, but not in Aruba.
One interesting thing that Coyle points to with hotspots is that they create a legible ladder and visible road to the top, with each rung perceivable:
“Frank Curiel Field is not so much a field as a window through which these kids can see the ascending realms of heaven stacked above them in neat levels, as in a medieval painting. First comes making the league all-star team (being one of those guys). Then comes Williamsport in all its celebrity glory (being one of those guys). Then just above that is getting signed by a scout, playing in the major leagues (being one of those guys). For the kids at Frank Curiel Field, these are not gauzy dreams or glossy posters; they are tangible steps on a primal ladder of selection, distinct possibilities reflected in the crackle of the radio, the clutter of the trophies, the chrome glint off the major-league scout's sunglasses. (See that house down the street, the one with the nice SUV in the driveway? That's Andruw Jones's mom's house!) To be a six-year-old at this field is, motivationally speaking, sort of like standing in the Sistine Chapel. The proof of paradise is right here: all you have to do is open your eyes.”
This has similarities to running in Kenya and Ethiopia.
From Epstein’s The Sports Gene, referring to a trip to Kamariny Stadium in Kenya:
“about one hundred runners were training at the track the day I was there - striding right alongside world champions. Sporadically, an unfamiliar man will wander onto the track and right away try to keep pace with Olympians. If he holds up, perhaps he’ll come back.”
Every single runner at that track can look and see the top tier, and know the standard right there. Not just that, but:
“Successful runners quickly become one-man or one-woman economies. In Eldoret, the major city near Iten and Kamariny Stadium, Moses Kiptanui, the former steeplechase world record holder, owns a dairy farming business. He also owns the trucks that transport the milk, and the building in town with the supermarket that sells the milk. The results of these economic incentives is an army of aspiring runners who undertake training plans fit for Olympians, with many falling by the wayside, and those who survive becoming professionals”
So once again, the visible ladder of success, and a good amount of ignition and motivation for the area, too.
Let’s look at the Renaissance, the ultimate hotspot
“Consider the sights that a young Michelangelo would have encountered in a single afternoon in Florence. In a half-hour's stroll he could have visited the workshops of a dozen great artists. These were not quiet studios: to the contrary, they were beehives overseen by a master and a hustling team of journeymen and apprentices, competing for commissions, filling orders, making plans, testing new techniques. He could have encountered Donatello's Saint Mark statue, Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise, the works of painters from his boss Ghirlandaio through Masaccio, Giotto, and Cimabue—the greatest hits of architecture, painting, and sculpture. All of them were concentrated within a few blocks; all of them were simply part of the landscape of everyday life; and all flashed signals that added up to one energizing message: better get busy. “
This jibes with what we typically hear. In Florence, nexus of power of the Medici, everyone was apprenticing with everyone, and techniques were widely innovated, studied, and spread. Donatello trained Verrocchio, who trained Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, who trained Michelangelo.
Michelangelo not only apprenticed to Ghirlandaio, he attended the Platonic Academy to study the great philosophers, sculpted reliefs for Lorenzo de Medici as a 15 year old teenager, worked with sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni, and more. He was a sculptor, a poet, a painter, a philosopher, a student of anatomy and physiology, and much else. It was a time when artists were artists!
And the Renaissance had all the markers we’ve seen so far for hotspots.
So what are the key markers of a hotspot?
The people in the hotspot play on “hard mode,” where higher levels of skill are table stakes and expected
Skill building opportunities are concentrated, to give more opportunties to progress faster
The environment is saturated and bombinating with techniques and cues relevant to your particular domain or discipline
There is a legible ladder of success, where each step is visible and understandable, going all the way to the top
Coyle also mentions one other possible characteristic - most hotspots are rough, visually and in terms of amenities. They’re not nice. One of his friends calls the places he’s going “chicken wire Harvards.” This is actually why I’ve been putting pictures of some of these places in, so you can see and judge this yourself.
"If we're in a nice, easy, pleasant environment, we naturally shut off effort," Bargh said. "Why work? But if people get the signal that it's rough, they get motivated now. A nice, well-kept tennis academy gives them the luxury future right now—of course they'd be demotivated. They can't help it.”
What practical advice can we get out of this?
We aren’t necessarily going to move to Curaçao or Kenya or Russia or any of these “chicken wire Harvards” after all.
But I think there are pretty clear lessons to be had, informed by these findings.
If you’re not pushing yourself, you’re not training, you’re wasting time. Find the “sweet spot” where your skills and frontiers are being pushed, and really dial yourself in on the interroceptive cues (reaching, straining, falling short) until you’re confident you know what it feels like. Then make sure you’re there any time you’re training or practicing.
Map the whole thing, break it down into chunks, and repeat those chunks with variations, to get good.
Find a social milieu where people perform to a high standard - this is your local “hotspot.” If you’re the best person at your gym or studio or in your training circle, you need to change gyms or circles if you ever want to be better!
Engaging with other people socially / competitively while you train is an easy “concentration” buff - you’re going to be paying more attention, pushing harder, and be more in the zone if you have a training partner or social group who are also good and can challenge you - but they need to be as good or better than you.
Saturate *your* environment if it’s something you care about and want to improve in. Read books and blog posts, watch competitions and performances, talk to your friends and training buddies about finer points and strategy.
For your “ladder of success” mark an ambitious success point. Back when I was powerlifting, my target wasn’t the other guys my size - my target was the guy that was at the top of the gym leaderboard on all the lifts, who was 2-3 weight classes above me. I reached the top of that leaderboard, and I probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t explicitly marked that as my target.
Don’t choose the luxe gyms / studios / academies. I’m not 100% behind this, I’ve certainly patronized nice gyms or tracks that had competitive and elite performers there, but I’ll agree that I’ve seen general inverse correlations between average skill of participants and facility quality. The best powerlifting gyms are bare bones “warehouse” kinds of places with dim lighting and heavy metal playing. The best rock climbing gyms don’t have kids areas or parties or luxury cars out front.
This is running kind of long, so I’m going to save the insights about Master Coaching for my review of K. Anders Ericsson’s Peak, coming in the next week or so.