We continue with our Improve Your Talent series with an eighth 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 writes that “to develop reliable hard skills, you need to connect the right wires in your brain. In this, it helps to be careful, slow, and keenly attuned to errors. To work like a careful carpenter.”
An example can be found on a worn piece of paper inside the wallet of six-time Super Bowl winning quarterback Tom Brady. On that paper is a handwritten list of fundamental keys to throwing technique, Coyle notes. “All of them are simple (example: “Throw down the hall”), and all of them connect to the drills Brady’s been doing with his personal coach Tom Martinez since he was fourteen years old. In fact, until Martinez died in 2012, Brady visited his coach once or twice a year for a tune-up—or, to put it more accurately, a repaving of Brady’s neural highways to make sure they were still running smoothly.”
