Book Review - The Talent Code

I've been thinking about this one for a few weeks. I finished it a little while ago, and didn't know whether to do this all in one shot, or do a multi-part review. In that time I gave it another read. It's not that long, and it is worth it. I will probably give it a third read before too long. Ultimately I've decided to go a little light on what I could cover here. I might revisit it at a future date, or I might just suggest reading it yourself. Definitely read it yourself.

The Talent Code is a nice addition to any coaching library. There is a lot of great stuff here. The recurring theme of the book is that myelin is central to skill development, and that neurons are myelinated by repeated attempts at a skill. The proverbial 10,000 hours of deliberate practice required to become an expert at something is all about myelination. Even without all the talk of myelination, it is a very insightful and valuable book.

There are three parts of skill acquisition as described in this book. They are deep practice, ignition, and master coaching. Reworded they are the individual's work and effort to develop skill, the motivation to put in and maintain that work, and the coach or teacher who guides that work and effort. I could probably write a lengthy post about each of these three topics.

Deep practice is where all of the myelination happens. There are a lot of thoughts I had while reading this part about applying this to volleyball practice. One of the key points of this part is that simply rehashing a skill you have already mastered over and over is not going to help you improve. Deep practice is about pushing limits and trying to do things that are hard. A simple analogy can be found in weight lifting. If an individual can lift 100 pounds 10 times regularly, the individual is not going to increase in strength by continuing to lift 100 pounds 10 times at every training session. For a volleyball example, a player might first not be able to properly execute a jump serve. The player attempts to jump serve properly and makes adjustments until able to execute the skill. Then the player tries to successfully jump serve to a particular gap in the serve receive formation, or increase the speed or topspin of the jump serve. Deep practice is about fine tuning that control and ability.

Another aspect of deep practice that I thought about is the use of video in teaching. Video is often employed to show the player the performance of the skill and gives the coach the opportunity to show and correct technical errors. There was mention of a young tennis player in the book who performed a skill (I think it was a one handed backhand) in an unusual manner. The player, parents and coach didn't have any idea where that peculiarity came from. It turned out that the player watched a lot of a particular professional player's matches and was unconsciously imitating that player's technique. There was mention of how much more information can be communicated subconsciously visually. I don't remember the numbers but it was several orders of magnitude higher than verbal communication. A good collection of technically sound skill performance could be a valuable training aid. Modelling proper technique is a strongly established teaching method in motor learning. Providing a good video of a professional player performing the skill that the player can watch over and over at will could be a much more effective training aid than one of the coaches doing the same in the gym.

The book suggests deep practice can be accelerated. There is mention of putting in mental effort into thinking about what you just did, why the result is what it was rather than the desired result, and what needs to be done to get the result you want. It is an intensive effort. I long ago heard the suggestion to ask "how did that feel?" after a perfect execution of a skill. It's a way to help ingrain the right way to perform a skill in the athlete's mind. The book seems to support this concept. A possible volleyball application of this idea paired with the visual learning concept is to have players watch their opponents during warm up hitting lines. The goal would be to have the players guess which way the setter is going to set and make their first move to play the appropriate defensive play. Blockers would try to anticipate the set and make the first step to the right for a set to 4, or a step to the left for a set to 2. Just watching hitting lines when the other team is warming up for a match will give your team a lot of reps with immediate feedback on their results at close to game speed.

A very interesting example of deep practice was the discussion of Brazillian soccer. The book credits Brazil's love of futsal for Brazil's world standing in soccer. Futsal is a smaller scale version of soccer with fewer players and less space. Players have to deal with defenders more often and in closer quarters. They have to be able to make good passes. But the real reason it is helpful is that players have more opportunities to attempt the skill. They get more reps. They get more touches. This can be accomplished in volleyball in a variety of ways. You can play doubles and triples matches. You can play on half courts. You can extend rallies by introducing extra balls from the side (the serve is a time consuming skill that really shouldn't be sped up). It's all going to get you more skill attempts which results in more myelin and moves you closer to that 10,000 hours.

Ignition is something that serves as the athlete's motivation to continue practicing. Deep practice is more synonymous with work than play. That is a key reason some athletes do better and improve more than others. The ones that improve because they work harder at it are more likely to have experienced ignition. They are more likely to be motivated. An example in the book is a set of students who read an article about a mathematician that was edited to the mathematician shares their birthday choosing to do a harder test than students who read the same unedited article. There was some subconscious ignition or motivation. They associated with the mathematician because of that shared birthday. Something I thought about immediately after reading that part was to make use of shared birthdays with famous volleyball players, or to point out prominent volleyball players who started playing at their age. I recently heard that Matt Anderson started playing volleyball at age 14. Most high school freshman could form that kind of association and this could serve as a source of ignition. The same could be done for a number of characteristics. It might be a good practice to compile a list of prominent volleyball players that are from a certain state, the same height, the same religion, the same ethnic group, or any number of things that you could mention to players on your teams. It could ignite your player's inner drive to work hard and develop skills at a faster pace.

A couple of pieces of research that was mentioned in the book was examining players' views on the activity and another on the way they talk about practice. In the research on how the activity was viewed, when the participant viewed the activity as something they would do for the rest of their lives, they put in more work and improved more. This is something that can be encouraged by the coach. In the other, researchers found that 10% of skill can be predicted by how the participants talk about practice. This is also something that the coach can have some influence on.

Master coaching is more about teaching than a lot of people tend to think. The book mentions a couple UCLA professors who wanted to study teaching and asked to observe John Wooden. What they saw was instructive. There were many demonstrations of teaching within practice. They recorded that 75% of them were pure information. Compliments and statements of displeasure only amounted to about 7% each. The book also mentions master coaches have a matrix of information or domain knowledge. This is something we need to develop as coaches. The first two sections were to me more about methods to develop our athletes. This section was more about ideas for professional development. I thought more about where I measure up and where I lack than particular ideas for helping my athletes. I have less to offer here than with the other sections. Mostly I will just say that specific, targeted instruction, drills, and practice design are going to help our athletes the most. Other than that, encourage effort more than results.

A quote mentioned in the book by Irish writer and playwright Samuel Beckett sums up a lot of the great ideas in here:

“Try again. Fail again Fail better.”

 The Talent Code is a good read. I think this book belongs on every coach's bookshelf, regardless of sport. I highly recommend it, and I will be rereading it in the future.