We continue with our Improve Your Talent series with a third 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.
For today’s tip, Coyle writes: “We are often told that talented people acquire their skill by following their “natural instincts.” This sounds nice, but in fact it is baloney. All improvement is about absorbing and applying new information, and the best source of information is top performers. So steal it.”
To clarify, stealing, with it’s long tradition in art, sports and design, often goes by the name of “influence.” Coyle further writes that stealing helps shed light on some mysterious patterns of talent. For instance, why do the younger members of musical families so often are also the most talented? (A partial list: The Bee Gees’s younger brother, Andy Gibb; Michael Jackson; the youngest Jonas Brother, Nick. Not to mention Mozart, J. S. Bach, and Yo-Yo Ma, all babies of their families.) “The difference can be explained partly by the windshield phenomenon (see Tip #1) and partly by theft. As they grow up, the younger kids have more access to good information. They have far more opportunity to watch their older siblings perform, to mimic, to see what works and what doesn’t. In other words, to steal,” posits Coyle.
