Hi,

I recently finished reading The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle; it’s a fascinating look into how people become talented and develop their skills with an emphasis on science. The book analyzes talented athletes, musicians, and more in an effort to explain how they actually become successful.

As someone interested in how creatives operate, the book ended up being a super interesting read. I thought it was worth sharing some of my favorite takeaways, applicable to creators and artists everywhere.

(Preface: this is my longest one yet but worth the read and can change how you think!)

Let's dive in ⬇️

For context, I finished the book while traveling last week. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to speak at the Music Ally conference in London last Thursday - the presentation covered how industry professionals & artists can use vibe coding to build tools and enhance their business. (side note: vibe coding isn’t just vibes lol)

There has been a lot of mixed feelings about how AI is used in the music industry over the past year or so, (and rightly so) so it was fun getting to share some of the positive utilities of AI. If you know me, you know I’ve become increasingly passionate about the productivity side of AI - how the barrier to entry has dropped and almost anyone can utilize it to do things for their career that didn’t previously exist.

The conference was an amazing time and filled with enthusiastic people looking to find ways to continue supporting artists and adapt to the fast changing music landscape.

People from all over Europe flew in to attend. My biggest takeaway was probably how much (and fast) the music industry is evolving right now. So many of us are searching for the answers and simply exploring and experimenting.

I figured if I was going to London, instead of coming home right after, I could utilize already being in Europe to travel somewhere else and make the most of the trip. I landed on spending a few days in Barcelona, Spain and had an amazing time.

The weather was beautiful, the people were friendly and kind, and the paella was the best I’ve ever had. Here’s a pic for proof lol.

Okay…enough about my personal life, now onto the book.

I'm not going to summarize the whole thing here - it’s actually worth reading and I try not to use this newsletter to just summarize things as opposed to pulling out applicable themes and concepts.

Instead, I’ll focus on the frameworks that hit me the hardest.

The premise of the entire book is basically:

Greatness isn't a gift that we either have or don’t have. It can be developed.

What makes the book interesting is that the author went and visited tiny random places around the world that produce a highly disproportionate amount of talent to try and understand why.

For example:

He calls them "talent hotbeds” and as his research progressed, he discovered that they actually had commonalities. Once I saw them, it became clear that it isn’t just about being born with natural skill - that skill can be developed with intention.

Here are the four ideas that stuck with me:

This is essentially the foundation the book is built on.

Based on science, every skill we have (whether it's singing, playing a sport, playing an instrument, etc) is literally a circuit of brain cells firing in a specific order.

Every single time we fire that circuit correctly, our brain wraps a layer of a substance called myelin around it, kind of like insulation around a wire. The more insulation, the faster and cleaner the signal travels down that wire.

The book theorizes that all skill comes down to circuits that grow by the same rule. Fire it correctly, wrap a little more insulation, get a little better.

This sounds a bit abstract and nerdy so in lamens terms…when you watch someone who seems "naturally gifted," what you're really watching is someone who just has a very well-insulated circuit. That circuit was built on tons of reps so their brain could wrap more myelin. It doesn’t necessarily mean they are naturally gifted.

This is also why those hotbeds are so wild…for example, there’s a run-down Moscow tennis club called Spartak. Apparently in the mid-2000s it produced more top-20 women's players than the entire United States. It was basically a shabby indoor court (not some luxurious, fancy training facility).

So…how did that run down court produce so many talented players? What actually happened?

For one, the head coach had her students practice their strokes in extreme slow motion…so much so that a lot of the time they practiced with no ball at all.

It’s called imitatsiya. They'd swing through a forehand at an insanely slow pace, freezing at the key positions, practicing the exact shape of the motion over and over. It looks completely ridiculous but it works because moving that slowly is the only way to actually feel and fix every little error in the stroke.

In order to know when you’re making an error or swinging improperly, you first need to know what a good technique or swing is. So the foundation is focusing on just the swing itself, over and over, until the motion lands.

The other big one is that beginners at Spartak weren't allowed to play real matches for something like their first three years, which is crazy. Literally no tournaments…they just focused on their technique.

Most places rush kids into competing because winning and playing feels like progress, but winning early usually means developing a pile of bad habits just to get the result. Spartak flat out refused to let that happen. They insulated the right circuits first and let the winning come later.

That same theory is so much of the K-pop development model. HYBE and other big Korean companies put new and developing artists through years of pure development before they ever release a song (or sometimes even post anything on socials). Training can run 8 to 12 hours a day, six days a week, and while the average is somewhere in the two-to-five-year range, plenty go much longer.

Bang Chan of Stray Kids trained for seven years before he was allowed to debut. Jihyo of TWICE trained for around ten, after signing as a kid. That's a decade of reps before the public hears them.

At Spartak, instead of tournaments, trainees get monthly evaluations, where they perform for executives and coaches and can get cut if they're not progressing. No charts or scoreboard. Just reps and feedback, over and over, for years.

So by the time a group finally debuts, the circuits are already insulated to an absurd degree, which is exactly why they look so impossibly polished the second you see them.

They didn't figure it out in public.

They spent years wrapping myelin in a practice room so the debut would be impressive.

The system has real human costs that deserve their own conversation, but the developmental logic underneath it is the exact same logic as that Moscow tennis court.

Build the circuit right first. Compete later.

Essentially, the premise of Spartak is…people need to make mistakes to get better. They should make as many as possible in the areas where they need work to get better. Make those mistakes in private so when they debut in public, they are already elite. (this doesn’t always need to happen and shouldn’t stop artists from releasing and getting better as they go) but does explain the theory on how we develop.

What that means for artists and creatives: the reason their 50th song or video is better than their 5th isn't inspiration, it's insulation.

It’s repetition over and over and over and over.

If the first idea is the importance of skill, the second is how we build it.

Myelin doesn't wrap much when things feel easy…it wraps fastest when we're working right at the edge of what we can do, reaching for something just past our current ability, missing it, and correcting.

The author calls this "deep practice" and he calls that edge the "sweet spot." The big thing here is that mistakes aren't failures. The act of trying, screwing it up, and fixing it is literally the signal that tells our brain to insulate that circuit.

Struggling is the growth and making mistakes is actually necessary for our brain to learn how to get better. It’s less about trying to be perfect and not make mistakes and more about making as many mistakes as needed to get the reps in and build that muscle. In a way, the person who makes more mistakes over time has a better shot than someone trying to be perfect making less mistakes because they’re focusing on what they’re good at, not improving what they’re bad at.

Two examples from the book highlight this.

The first is a girl the author calls Clarissa - an average clarinet student who was filmed during practice by a music psychologist named Gary McPherson. On the tape she's not doing anything impressive; she plays a bit, stops, fixes a note, backs up, tries again. But McPherson calculated that in about 6 minutes of that stop-start struggling, she made close to a month's worth of normal progress. The fumbling and messing up accelerated her by 10x.

The second example is a flight simulator. A guy named Edwin Link built one of the first ones back in the 1930s, and it turned out pilots who made their mistakes inside the simulator, over and over, safely, learned to fly dramatically faster than pilots who just went up in real planes. Same idea. Targeted, repeated mistakes in the sweet spot beat smooth, comfortable repetition every time.

The theory is basically - if your practice feels smooth and you're nailing everything, you're not really practicing, you're performing something you already know.

The frustrating key you can't sing in, the hook that won't land, the project that's a little above your level and scares you a bit, that friction is the rep that levels you up.

Practicing and messing up the areas that need work help scale learning. The more you do in a short amount of time, the more momentum you build to learn faster.

This is Coyle's number one rule of deep practice, and it's one of the most practical things in the whole book.

He states that we don't get good at a big skill by doing the whole big skill over and over. We should break it up with a 3 step process:

The example that made this stick for me is a place called the Meadowmount School of Music in upstate New York. Students there slow music pieces down so much that someone walking past the practice room literally can't recognize the song because they’re just hearing fragments.

They actually take the sheet music, cut it into little strips with scissors, throw the strips in a hat, and pull them out at random, which forces them to master each tiny fragment completely out of order. Concepts that would normally take a week get learned in a day because the mastery of those individual pieces allows them to play the entire concept with ease (because they have such an understanding of it)

The other one is Brazilian futsal - a type of indoor soccer played on a hard court about the size of a basketball court, with a smaller, heavier ball. Because the space is tiny and the ball barely bounces, players end up touching the ball way more often, in way less room, which forces thousands of reps on the small skills of close control and quick decisions.

Coyle makes the case that this is a big reason so many Brazilian legends share that same silky close-control style. They “chunked” the game in a tiny gym for years before they ever played it full size.

This is the idea where the way you apply it really does change depending on who you are, so:

If you're an artist: try chunking the song creation process. Spend time on nothing but melodies, a week on nothing but song structure, a week on nothing but how you mix your vocals. Get good at the pieces, then assemble them.

If you're a creator: stop trying to "make better videos." Break it into hook, pacing, thumbnail, and story, and grind one of those chunks for a month. A killer hook practiced 100 times will do more for you than 100 mediocre full uploads.

If you're a creative professional: stop trying to "get better at pitching" or “cold emailing”. Chunk it into your open, your one-line value prop, and how you handle the first piece of pushback. Drill your 30-second open until it's automatic before you ever worry about the rest.

If you want a shortcut, here's a copy-paste prompt you can drop into Claude for any skill you're building:

What that gets you is a real training plan that targets the pieces, which is the only thing your brain actually insulates. Vaguely "practicing more" usually just means firing the easy circuits you already own.

Deep practice can be draining, and you have to keep doing it for years, so Coyle asked a question:

Where does anyone get the energy to keep struggling that long?

He calls the answer “ignition”. It's essentially the spark or motivation to wanting something. Ignition is the why that makes all the boring, uncomfortable reps survivable.

The clearest example in the book is Se Ri Pak, the South Korean golfer who won big in 1998. Before her, basically no Korean women played pro golf at that level. Within about ten years there were dozens of them, often dominating the tour. The author theorizes that one person made the dream feel reachable, and that single image lit up a whole generation of women behind her who suddenly thought "someone like me did it, so maybe I can too."

I already preach discipline over motivation and I stand by that..but this added a layer for me. Discipline itself runs on a vision you can actually picture. So find your "I could be one of them." I don’t mean Drake lol. Moreso the artist or creator or exec (or person on similiar journey to you) who's one or two rungs ahead of you, close enough that it feels real.

Get a clear, reachable picture of where you're going, and the unglamorous reps don’t feel pointless.

Some of you are prob reading this thinking "okay Mike this was long af lol and sounds good but how do I actually use this?” To that I reply…fair!

My takeaway is…pick one skill you've been quietly telling yourself you're "just not naturally good at." Then this week, do three small things.

And keep in mind…that mistakes are necessary to get better. So..when you’re releasing that song or piece of content, don’t worry about NOT making mistakes. Understand they are inevitable and necessary for growth. Do so many shows that you make every mistake possible and have so much pattern recognition in that experience that you’re literally prepared for anything at any time.

Essentially - some of the most talented people referenced in the book are partially that talented because they’ve developed insane pattern recognition. They’ve put soooo many reps in that they’ve trained their brains on what to do in almost every possible scenario - they see the playing field in a way others don’t because they see it from every possible angle as a result from messing up so many times.

And tying in the Music Ally mention from the beginning of this…building your own tool with AI is also actually deep practice but in a different way.

You try something, it breaks, you fix it, you go again.

You're not passively watching a tutorial, you're firing the circuit and wrapping the myelin yourself. The people who get the most out of AI in music won't be the ones who read the most about it. They'll be the ones reaching past what they can currently do and fixing the errors as they go.

The book also kind of reframes the word talent for me - in a way, it’s not really a description of who someone is but more a description of what they did.

Hopefully this was helpful on your journey.

Thanks for reading, until next time.

1) Moises — an AI practice app that lets musicians practice songs. Upload any song and it splits out the stems, finds the chords, and lets you slow or speed up songs. It can help chunk a song and drill the hard parts in isolation. More info HERE