Daniel Coyle

Presents weekly rules for developing inherent abilities, drawing on cutting-edge science and insights by international trainers in a variety of disciplines to outline techniques that tap the brain's natural programming.

52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

The Little Book of Talent

- Don’t fall for the prodigy myth - Take off your watch - Embrace struggle - Take a nap - To learn it more deeply, teach it The Little Book of Talent is packed full of 52 simple, practical, proven tips that will help improve any skill. Whether you want a better singing voice, a more powerful golf swing or success in the business world, The Little Book of Talent’s method will help you realise your potential.

Liz Carpenter

Need to buy a physical copy of this book just so that I can mark it all up. Easy to digest, with plenty of common sense and some insights I hadn't expected.

Barry Hess

Pranav Mutatkar

I am just going to go about talking about where all of this fits into my PASTE frame work. 

Stare at who you want to become is classic P. Petri Dish ( to eat better). Steal like an artist from your idols. And learn from your learnings. 

Copying what others did is P and active deconstruction is A-Analyze like an asshole. These are questions like... what are the critical moves here? How do they perform these moves differently than I do. Part of A should get a notebook (basically form a selection where you write down your theories and analysis). This will also help for S - Systemize (and Fail Small). 

This is talked about in the willing to be stupid. You need to fail small and make little bets testing these theories you came up with in A. 

Spartan over luxurious goes into ELF (Embrace Laziness F**ktard) or LAZY habits. It's about designing the environment. Or zone to make sure you are autopiloting to success. 

The blind spot in my PASTE framework is hard skills. I have mostly been interested in acquiring soft skills and so when I learn boxing, salsa, etc. I should test the PASTE framework to see if it holds up as well as it has held up for public speaking, writing, self-improvement, systems thinking, and conversation. 

For certain skills, you want a coach. Not because you need them...but because it makes life unnecessarily hard not to get one if it's easy to do so. 

Coyle has his methodology for getting coaches. Here is my version building on and disagreeing with what he says. 

Pick someone who 

1.  Is Blunt 
You want someone blunt and honest telling you how it is. I am here to learn not to get jerked off (pardon my french). 

You want to be a bit scared by this guy/girl. Because they push you into uncomfortable territory, they know that's where growth happens

2.  Is Empathetic 
The second most important thing. They should care about you and your development more than money, validation, anything else. Notice how his/her's incentives line up with your success. A good coach wants to make himself/herself obsolete. 

3.  Remembers how it felt to suck 
Don't pick a great person because they are great. Pick a person who remembers what it was like to be you. Somebody who was shitty and learned through repeatable skills/actions the skills necessary to be as good. You want someone who can breakdown everything to continuous actions. Most people are terrible at this.

4.  Can speak in your language 
A great coach is a great explainer. He/She should have a lot of experience teaching and explaining all that they have learned. This is clear when they have simple, clear directions. Or when they are explaining abstract/difficult concepts they can use easy maxims, aphorisms or understandable conceptual metaphors. They should be able to tailor their metaphors to you. They should be able to understand who you are and teach you the way the expert you would teach you. 

5.  Relies on precise useful KPIs 
Coaching that is based on mushiness or feeling better is often not useful. You need to see progress with KPIs. A coach should be able to easily prove (over a long period) the difference he/she has made in your life by pointing out to specific KPIs that are indicative of bigger problems you are trying to solve. 

Coyle talks about the importance of fundamentals which I agree but is much less important than the above. I disagree with the advice to pick older people. I do agree you want to pick experienced people, but they should still be able to do 3/4. Remember how they sucked and speak your language. 

Find the sweet spot and break every move down into chunks is basically S --Systemize( and fail small). 

Embrace struggle is very directly linked to P - Petri Dish (to eat better). Part of the Petri Dish is creating the right mindsets, habits with stuff like identity shifts, emotional accounting, double loop learning. Because to be a successful person at something, you first have to believe you can be. You need the right mindsets, habits, etc for that thing you learn to grow. 

Don't do drills, instead play addictive games. This is an interesting idea. Something that is in S, but honestly I haven't really drilled down to figure out how to engineer the small failures to make them fun to play. It is truly important to make every small failure give you a hit of dopamine though. 

Think in images is something I haven't captured, but is interesting. I hear a lot about visualization, but I haven't really found it as useful to me. However, it is something that I should test out and try out for learning incorporating it in my framework if I need to. 

Pay attention to when you made a mistake is and should be covered in S. Failing small means immediately have win/lose situations so you can know when an experiment hasn't worked out and when a theory of yours is wrong or needs to be amended. 

When you get it right, mark the wins. This is extremely important goes into S. You have to like Pavlov creates these dopamine loops. Make sure your body knows what it means like to succeed and celebrate your victories. 

Swing the pendulum is something my coach explained to me. A metaphor I like. Sometimes to get better at something you have to overcorrect. Swing the pendulum in the other direction and it will keep going back and fro until eventually, it ends up in the middle. 

The sandwich technique is S. Basically learning is all about moving away from the bad and towards the good, it's helpful to see one step behind you and one step ahead at all times. The one step ahead can come in the form of a mentor, coach, or resources online (your petri dish). The bad can come from your own failing or you actively looking and deconstructing with A what could be better about something. 

I also disagree with rewards that aren't associated with the habit. Going to the gym shouldn't be associated with eating chocolate cake. It's stupid confuses the identity shift you're making to being a healthy person. Instead, the reward should be directly linked to what you did. Checking yourself out, looking at progress, playing motivation music and hurrah-ing, watching rocky, whatever gets you going. But it should be directly linked to that identity shift you are trying to reinforce. 

Does the task directly link to the skill you're trying to learn? This goes into vertical coherence and the idea that every single tiny thing you do should be directly linked to your why. This makes life happier, and more meaningful. 

T also comes into play in the book. T in my framework is Teach (to idiots)

The Little Book of Talent 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills

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