Metzger TheTalentCode
Metzger TheTalentCode
Metzger TheTalentCode
2009
Greatness isnt born. Its grown. Heres how.
Clarissa is an eleven-year-old who usually doesnt practice well and makes slow
progress with her clarinet. One day she hears Woody Herman play Golden
Wedding and she loves it and wants to play it really well. She gets the music and
starts to practise. She plays the first few notes, stops, frowning and intent, and
puzzles out the notes. She repeats and repeats correcting every note, every
rhythm. Adding layer after layer of spirit, rhythmic complexity and musical
artistry, she plays more and moves back and forth between playing phrases and
focusing intently, correcting errors, striving to perfect it. Her body posture is tilted
intently forward, her face squinting. Her work is carefully targeted, error focused,
aimed at improvement, repeating and refining, repeating again. In only minutes,
she achieves more that she has ever attempted to achieve before.
Clarissa was engaging in deep practice, the kind of practice that leads to talent. As she
was firing the neural circuits that would lead to knowledge, skill, and musicality, the
neural pathways were being insulated with myelin and the conductivity of those circuits
was therefore improving. A well-myelinated neural pathway becomes up to 100 times
more conductive and translates into what we call talent. The result is an unconscious
competence that often seems inherited, but is always the result of the myelinization
process. Recent research has led the following discoveries:
Myelin and the support cell that wraps myelin around the firing neural circuit are
present wherever nerve cells are present.
Whenever you exercise a skill: swing a racquet or a golf club, tune a chord, use a
turning tool on a lathe, a highly specific circuit lights up in your body, engaging
hundreds of thousands of neurons.
The more the skill is exercised, the less aware you are of using it. It begins to feel
natural, like youve always had it. Walking and talking are good examples.
Nerve firings cause the wrapping of myelin around the active neurons, myelin
increases impulse speed, and impulse speed is skill. The effect is similar to
increasing bandwidth.
Struggle is not optional struggle is required. To get a circuit to fire optimally,
you must fire the circuit as well as possible for you, inevitably making mistakes
and tending to those mistakes, slowly but surely correcting and honing the circuit.
Age matters. The availability of myelin peaks at various times of early growth, and its
availability increases generally until about age 50 when it begins to decline. But about
5% of our myelin wrappers still remain at the end of life. Learning and other skillbuilding activities remain possible throughout life.
World-class skill levels require about 10 000 hours of deep practice, usually over about
ten years. Geniuses are those who have developed an unusual facility for deep practice:
focused, passionate, obsessive practice.
Myelin allows human beings to adapt to circumstances and therefore learn an extensive
array of disparate skills. We have more myelin than any other organism, but fewer nerves
come wrapped at birth just the ones for crying, suckling, and hearing some distinctions.
i.
ii.
iii.
iv.
Pick a target
Reach for it
Close or reduce the gap
Return to step one
The longer you stagger, the more quickly you will succeed. Dont settle too soon and
accept an unsteady gait, so to speak. Emulate the toddlers learning strategy. The
genius is one who has made a life practice of Deep Practice.
In Summary
A chorus that wishes to succeed at a high level will be wise to adopt certain attitudes and
behaviours:
All should know of the relationship between talent and nerve pathway
myelinization.
All attend to conscious adoption of the characteristics of deep practice.
The leadership and members will also strengthen the sense of belonging for every
member.
All will strive to hunt for improvements to make, remaining unsatisfied with
current levels of expertise, whatever they may be.
All will seek to see the big picture in their learning, and simultaneously chunk
things down for careful attention and practice.
All will repeat and wrap myelin around the most perfect learning they can
manage.
All will honor and support each other, building an environment supportive of
learning.