In this episode, we discuss the science of Talent. We look at how great talent is built into the very physical structure of the brain itself, explore the incredible importance of striving at the edge of your ability and staying there as long as possible, the vital importance of mistakes in the learning process, how a group of kindergartners beat a bunch of CEOs at a simple team-building exercise, a powerful tool Navy Seals use to make better decisions that you can apply to your life right now, and much more with our guest Daniel Coyle. 

Daniel Coyle is the New York Times Bestselling Author of The Talent Code, The Culture Code, several other books. He is a contributing editor for Outside Magazine and works as a special advisor to the Cleveland Indians. His most recent work focuses on how we can build cultures that last and high highly productive and his work has been featured on the TED stage and more.

• What is a talent hotbed? What are these little places that produce hugely disproportionate high achievers?

• How does the brain learn and what that has to do with Talent?

• What does great practice look like, what does great motivation look like,  what great coaching looks like?

• How do you learn a months worth of practice in 5 minutes?

• Repeatedly going to the edge of your ability, noticing your failure, and learning from it - that’s how great performance is built

• Modern science was deeply wrong about how the brain grows and responds - and the myelin (the wiring in your brain) grows 

• Muscle memory is a deep misnomer - all the memory comes from the wiring of the brain. 

• The faster and more accurately you build the wiring in your brain through deep 

• Great practice, great learning is really ugly - it's very effortful to hang out there and be in that place

• At most, you can really do this deep practice for 1-3 hours per day

• The 10,000-hour rule misses a key point - it's not just hours, but also quality reps

• Great talent is literally built in the physical structure of the brain

• The key idea is to REACH - get to the edge of your ability and play there - stay there as long as possible

• It’s not nature vs nature - it's not either or - its nature multiplied by nature 

• How do we learn at the edge of our growth zone?

• You should be aiming for a failure rate of 20-30% of the time

• If you’re failing more than that, move the target closer

  1. If you’re failing less, move the targets further away 

• This concept of learning at the edge of your comfort zone flips the entire idea of mistakes on its head - mistakes are WHERE the learning takes place 

• Mistakes are information that you can use for your next try - they’re a keep component of the learning process 

• Mistakes are the gift - they ARE the moment - when the learning is embedded in your brain

• If you flinch, turn away, and lose you the ability to learn from your mistakes

• Learning from your mistakes is not just a moral argument -it’s a physical reason - its a physical argument about your BRAIN STRUCTURE 

• Culture isn’t magic - it can be built - there are specific actions you can take to create a high-performance culture 

• The way to create feedback loops in business and areas with murky or long feedback loops is to define your scoreboard - define yourself against a very clear standard or dashboard for yourself - hold yourself accountable to metrics

• Define what you want - make the bar really clear

• Improvement comes down to 3 things

• Where are you?

  1. Where do you want to go?

  2. How will you get there?

• The first two pieces of that require a lot of reflection

• Learning = Experience + Reflection. Without the reflection, you won’t learn. 

• Get really specific on what skills you want to improve - and then build a process towards improving those skills and make it as measurable as possible

• Culture is not a mystical force - its something that’s really practical and specific

• When you look closer at cultures of high performance - you realize that there are specific activities 

• HBS study - different is net revenue for two identical companies with different cultures was 720% more net revenue over time 

• Culture is the MOST IMPORTANT THING you do in a group - it's your most important asset, it's your Achilles heel 

• “Signalling behaviors” - baked into us by evolution - can often short circuit 

• Being vulnerable and open builds trust - not the opposite 

• High-performance groups operationalize truth, vulnerability, and safety 

• Navy Seals “AAR” - After Action Review - hard conversation about what went wrong, what went right, what they’re doing to do differently next time 

• The most important words a leader can say is “I screwed that up"

• Groups that hide vulnerability are weak

• Leaders who are constantly radiating humility have more strength - humility takes strength 

• To be vulnerable at work - frame your vulnerability around learning

• How do you create a foundation of vulnerability in good cultures?

• Make sure the leader is vulnerable first and often

  1. Deliver negative things in person 

  2. 2 Line Email to your email

  3. One thing you want me to keep doing

     1. One thing you want me to stop doing

  4. Aim for warm candor and avoid brutal honesty. When you’re brutally honest you enforce a culture of brutality.

  5. Danny Meyer story - "If you don’t ask for help 10 times today, it will be a bad day"

     1. Give the truth, but give in a warm way

     2. When you make mistakes, I’m here to help - we are interconnected 

• How a group of kindergartners beat a group of CEOs at building a tower of spaghetti 

• Our mental model of group performance is wrong because it doesn’t include safety

  1. We are built to care about status - deeply wired into us is this worry about how we fit in and we’re constantly expending mental energy worrying about status 

• Group performance is not about how smart you are, not about how verbal you are - it’s about how safe you are

• How do we create psychological / status safety with those who we work with in order to foster a culture of high performance?

• Over-communicate safety

  1. Deliver a really clear signal of connection early on 

  2. Send a really clear signal that “I see you” “we are connected” 

• Smart groups use the first day, the first hour - to continually signal the basic human connective signals 

• Strong cultures over communicate their purpose by “a factor of 50x” - they talk all the time about their core principles and their core purpose

• Strong cultures have distilled what matters into a cohesive set of emotional GPS signals 

• Intensive questions about “what comes first” - really getting specific about what your values are 

• Build a map that show’s your organization what true north is - and be as vivid and explicit as possible about what that is

• Parables

  1. Stories

  2. Catch Phrases

  3. Images

  4. People

  5. Over-communicate what matters most to your organization 

• Do great cultures and organizations transcend conflict?

• We have a powerful instinct to hide away from negative moments and things we don’t like - and yet leaning into mistakes and problems is the best way to grow as an individual - and the best way to form strong organizations 

• Homework: “WSD” - Write shit down. Have a place and a time every day where you can get away from things and reflect on what happened. A cool calm place where you can reflect, trace threads, connect dots, reflect on your performance. This is the most powerful thing you can do. 

• “I've never met a high performer who doesn’t have a reflective habit"

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [SoS Episode] Research Reveals How You Can Create The Mindset of a Champion with Dr. Carol Dweck

• [Book] Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck

• [Wiki Article] Danny Meyer

• [Article] What a Marshmallow Reveals About Collaboration by The Build Network staff

• [Article] Does corporate culture drive financial performance? By Kotter

• [Personal Site] Daniel Coyle

Episode Transcript