We continue with our Improve Your Talent series with a sixth tip from The Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle. Today’s tip falls into the first category for improving habits: Getting Started.  In this category, the idea is to focus on ideas for igniting motivation and creating a blueprint for the skills you want to build.

Coyle notes that the talent hotbeds are not luxurious.  In fact, Coyle writes, they are so much the opposite that they are sometimes called chicken-wire Harvards. “Top music camps—especially ones that can afford better—consist mainly of rundown cabins. The North Baltimore Aquatic Club, which produced Michael Phelps and four other Olympic medalists, could pass for an underfunded YMCA. The world’s highest-performing schools—those in Finland and South Korea, which perennially score at the top of the Program for International Student Assessment rankings—feature austere classrooms that look as if they haven’t changed since the 1950s,” Coyle notes.