We learned about The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Anything, written by Daniel Coyle, from our firm’s coach at Krav Maga Houston—Chris Williams. Chris is a second degree black belt instructor and has been teaching people the Krav Maga self-defense system for 10 years. He oversees our firm “fight club” once a week and uses the methodology in Coyle’s book to break Krav down into discrete parts so students understand the techniques necessary to successfully execute Krav defenses. After we saw Chris apply the Talent Code principles in his teaching, we incorporated the book into our compliance class at the University of Houston Law Center because it got us thinking about how people learn various skills. The class loved it. And it’s made us more effective at putting together training plans and programs.

Early in the book, Coyle explains how people can master new skills by practicing deeper, rather than longer. According to Coyle, every human movement or thought is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a circuit of nerve fibers. A chemical in our body called myelin wraps around these nerve fibers, increasing signal strength, speed, and accuracy. When people talk about “muscle memory,” they are talking about myelin. 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. This is what Coyle calls deep practice—highly targeted, error-focused practice. Deep practice is effective because the best way to build a good circuit is to fire it (by practicing), making errors, correcting them, and repeating this process.

This content has been archived. It is available through our partners, LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law.

To view this content, please continue to their sites.

Not a Lexis Subscriber?
Subscribe Now

Not a Bloomberg Law Subscriber?
Subscribe Now

Why am I seeing this?

LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law are third party online distributors of the broad collection of current and archived versions of ALM's legal news publications. LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law customers are able to access and use ALM's content, including content from the National Law Journal, The American Lawyer, Legaltech News, The New York Law Journal, and Corporate Counsel, as well as other sources of legal information.

For questions call 1-877-256-2472 or contact us at [email protected]