Interview: Talent + How to Tap into Your Greatness with Dan Coyle

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson.

More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Dan Coyle, who's written a number of books. The two that we're going to feature today are the Talent Code and the Little Book of Talent Tales, two of my absolute favorite books on cultivating talent. The Talent Codes subtitle captures it perfectly. Dan tells us that greatness isn't born, it's grown, and then says, here's how well, the Little Book of Talent. So we'll talk about the high level lessons learned in the Talent Code and then the Little Book of Talent is just what it sounds like. A little book with 52 tips for improving your skills. Super practical stuff, all really well written, inspiring and concise and grounded and easy to apply today. So I'm really excited to unpack some ideas. Dan, I appreciate you taking the time.

My pleasure, Brian. Thank you for having me.

All right, let's do this. So the Talent Code. Two things come to mind, actually. I was surprised as I was preparing to realize that. I want to hear you describe what talent is and then we'll talk about how it's not born, it's grown. But how do you frame talent?

Talent is something that you. You can do. Sometimes we think about talent in terms of potential. You look at someone and say, oh, they're so talented. But actually talent is performance. Talent is the ability to do something, not the hope to do something or the wish to do something. So can you deliver the skill that you want to deliver at a time that you want to deliver it? That is talent in a reliable way.

That's cool. Okay, like it. So subtitle Greatness isn't born, it's grown. What does that mean?

It means, well, sort of. There's a story behind it. I started this book when I got a newspaper clip and it was a story about a little Russian tennis club outside of Moscow called Spartak, which had produced more top 20 players than the entire United States. And out of this one club, and it had only one indoor court. And I went there and I was blown away by the way that they prepared and practiced and thought and taught and they. That got me visiting other similar places, places in different domains, places in chess, places in music, places in math, places in business. And trying to, you know, when you visit those places, it doesn't take long before you realize they're all kind of the same place. They're all kind of doing the same thing. And the science behind that feeling is that all human skill resides in the wires of our brain. You know, you've got the thing called muscle memory, but as we know, muscles don't really have any memory. They're doing exactly what the brain tells them to do. So everything you've ever seen, that's talent. Every Michelangelo painting and Michael Jordan jump shot, that originates in the circuitry of our brains. And it turns out that that circuitry grows in a very particular pattern in response to a very particular set of behaviors and motivations. And that's what the growth is. It's combining the right kind of behavior with the kind of motivational environment. And when you visit the talent hotbeds, that's the pattern of growth you see over and over again. And it's the same pattern that's going on with us when we look hard at what we're all good at and what we want to get good at.

That's amazing. So the talent hotbeds a. That must have been extraordinarily fun to go exploring, to see greatness in action like that. And then I appreciate you exhibiting your talent to synthesize the ideas and kind of unpack it, as you did in both of the books. We haven't used the word yet. Which is the essence of how talent has grown, which is myelin. Can you talk to us about myelin?

You bet, yeah. When I started visiting the various labs that research these questions, several of the scientists showed me this stuff. It was a picture. It sort of looked like electrical tape wrapping a wire is what it looks like in an image. I have an image of it in the book. And it's just sort of like. It looks sort of like tree rings, you know, that sort of wrapping look. And they started telling me about myelin and about its link to learning. And it's linked to intensive practice and how it works. And it really captures your imagination, because what they described is myelin is an insulator, and it wraps the wires of our brain exactly like electrical tape wraps a wire. And its function is to make sure that the signal doesn't leak out. Just like the reasons the wires of everything in our lives are insulated. Because it's useful to have that signal get delivered where you want to get it delivered. And it turns out that myelin grows in response to certain forms of practice. And there is a direct connection between the hours you spend doing something and the amount of myelin that you grow. And when your myelin and you're around the wires of your brain gets thicker and thicker the signal speed gets much faster and you can deliver that signal much more accurately. And as, as Dr. Douglas Fields, who studied this, told me, he said, this stuff is broadband. This is human broadband. This is what skill is made of. That ends up being a core part of the book. This idea that when we look at human skill, we're looking at this growth process and the growth happens in our brain. It happens in response to certain forms of practice. Of course, being a journalist, I visit these places as an objective outsider. But I saw all these people getting good and I saw the science and so I got a little bit obsessed with it. I don't know if you know this. Remember that commercial with Tiger woods some years ago? He was juggling a golf ball.

Yeah, I love that.

With a sand wedge. So I decided to try to teach myself to do that. And I'm from Alaska. I didn't grow up playing a ton of golf in my life, but set out to do that. And after, oh, it took. It took probably eight months of a few minutes a day, a few intensive minutes a day, I was able to finally do it. So it's the kind of stuff that once you sort of realize it's hard not to start applying to your life when you start feeling how it works.

Yeah. And just that image of the insulation and in many ways moving from kind of a dial up to that broadband. Right. Where you mentioned that. A little passage from the Little Book of Talent. Every time you practice deeply, which we're going to talk about, what that means, the wires of your brain get faster over time, signals speeds increase to 200 mph from 2 mph. I just love that image of literally increasing the amount of throttle we have. Right.

It's a goat path to a superhighway. And it happens in response to our behavior. That's the fun part.

Well, let's talk about some of that behavior and what triggers it. A big theme of the book, of course, both books is deep practice. Can you talk to us about what deep practice means? Yeah.

You know, practice is a word that we use a ton. You know, we go to go to soccer practice, spend two hours running the field, music practice, practice your presentation, practice your coding, whatever it is. And yet when you really think about that word, it's sort of vague, you know, it's a word sort of like eat. You know, I'm going to go eat. Well, what exactly are you eating? You know, there's a lot of different stuff you could eat. Practice is exactly the same way. And I tell the story, the first pages of the book is a story about a study of a girl who's practicing clarinet. And it's a study of her learning velocity. It's a study of how much she learns each minute. And there's one section of her practice where her learning velocity goes up 10 times, where she's able to get a month's worth of practice done in under 10 minutes. And it's stunning because it's a very different feel. It feels completely different. In one song, she's practicing, I would say shallowly. She's playing the song. She's playing clarinet. Her name is Clarissa. She's playing the song, and she's just kind of playing it through. And she's making mistakes, but she's not really noticing those mistakes. She's free and easy. She's just kind of toodling along. And then she switches. She starts playing this different song, and she plays a phrase and she makes a mistake. And she feels that mistake so deeply that she almost, like, drops her clarinet. She feels that mistake. And then she goes back to the beginning and she plays a little bit more. And then she feels another mistake. And then she just fingers the keys really slowly so she can really feel what she's doing and what she's not doing. And in that way, she practices deeply. She gets on the very edge of her ability and she makes mistakes. She feels those mistakes, and then she fixes them. And what's actually happening is she's changing the wiring of her brain in that moment. In the first session of practice, she was just sort of tootling along in the shallows. When she got deep, she was able to make those changes to her brain and get better in a much shorter amount of time. That idea. I mean, we understand it when we go to the gym, right? You go to the gym and you say, well, if I just go there and don't actually lift anything heavy, that won't make me stronger. Because you have to actually strain in order to get your muscles to compensate and get stronger. Well, our brains are built exactly the same way. If you don't get into that. Into that area on the edge of your ability, which we would call the sweet spot, or the deep practice zone, if you want to call it that. If you don't get in that area, you're not going to get any better. You can get a lot done in a short time. If you tune in to exactly where that area is and you tune into.

What it feels like, that's great. I want to talk more about the sweet spot, which I love. The way you describe in the Little Book of Talent as between your comfort zone and your survival zone. This morning I was reading Cal Newport's new book called Deep Work, where he referenced influences you and your work with both of these books and talks about intense focus. And you mentioned the shallows. You can't be shallowly engaged in this. You need to be deeply engaged in this. And that requires an intense focus, which, as you described, comes right at that edge of our abilities. Can you describe that sweet spot for us?

It feels sour. It feels bad. It's like you're feeling sour. It feels off balance. Picture a figure skater right on the edge where you're about to fall kind of clumsily to the ice, which actually is what Wayne Gretzky used to do when he practiced. He would skate and get very much to the edge, and then he would occasionally fall. That's the spot you want to be. And it feels crappy, it feels bad, and it's difficult place to hang out. Actually, it's hard to hang out, which is why motivation and sort of filling your windshield is such an important part of the process. But it sort of feels like you're stretching for something you can't quite reach. There was a facial expression that I saw, actually, at all of the places I visited. I visited nine different hotbeds around the globe, and I saw the same face in each one, and it sort of looked like Clint Eastwood. I know that sounds kind of nutty, but it's sort of this kind of grim determination that is not comfortable, but it is very focused, very intentional, very deep focused. And you're sort of saying, make my day. I'm going to give everything I can in this zone at this moment. And that's what it looks like, and that's what it feels like.

That's awesome. And you make the important distinction as well that it's a healthy stretch. It's not a snap. So you're not going so far that you're overwhelming yourself and being drowned in anxiety and fear, right?

Yep. Yep. Exactly. Exactly. If you're failing more than half the time, maybe you should think about moving your target in a little bit. If you're skiing down a slope and you're on the edge, you're wiping out every six feet. You're not learning much. So you need to get in that area where you are stretching intently toward a target and feeling the gap between your stretch and the target.

That's awesome. And you mentioned, you know, 80% and above success rate is your comfort zone. It's too easy. 50 to 80% of the time, you can achieve it. So you're falling down half the time, but you also, you know, between that and three quarters of the time, you can succeed. That's your sweet spot. The survival zone is you're not even succeeding half of the time. You're not learning anything in that mode. So that sweet spot right at the edge of our abilities is huge.

Exactly. I think we're there right now. I feel like you and I was. This conversation we've got, we're succeeding a high percentage of the time.

We got the Clint Eastwood look going. Let's do this. That's great. Okay. Well, so many different directions we can go. What I want to do is you mentioned Michelangelo before, so I think he captures the kind of. We haven't discussed it directly yet, but this myth that greatness is born. Right. Vis a vis grown. Michelangelo provides a nice kind of discussion point. And you tell such a great story about him and his work and how his genius was built. Can you describe that?

Yeah. No. And actually, if we pull the camera back and say the story doesn't just apply to him, but to his whole generation in that particular area around Florence at that time, the story we hear about Michelangelo is that he's a natural born genius, and he was just flat brilliant. And the truth is, when you look closely at his biography, he worked with a family of stonemasons from very, very early in life. I think it was before he was 6, learning how to handle a hammer and a chisel, before he learned to read. He then apprenticed with a series of master artists where he learned every single step of the craft heavily for high stakes, this apprenticeship program. I guess if you imagine that someone apprenticed with a great movie director from the time they were 12 to the time they were 18, how good would they be at directing movies? That would be Michelangelo's position in life. He was apprenticed with the best in his area and learned every single step of that craft. And by the time he produced his first masterpiece, which was reasonably late in life, he was in his 20s. People hailed him as a genius. And his response was, if you knew how hard I had to work, you would not think this was so wonderful. Because he, of course, saw the sweat, the time, the hours, the effort, and the Clint Eastwood gaze that went into all of that. He saw it as a process. And, you know, that quote that he gives is exactly the same quote. If you ask Jerry Seinfeld why he's a good comedian, or if you ask Nelson Cruz why he's such a good baseball player. Or if you ask someone whether he's a great politician, they all give you the same answer. They all say, I worked hard. I worked really hard, and I got lucky. Nobody says, oh, yes, it's completely effortless for me. So Michelangelo, like all of us, is somebody who very slowly built his skill through a process that combined really deep practice with this incredibly motivating environment where his windshield was constantly crammed with visions of his future self and models with which he could use in his process.

And just to underscore, he learned how to use a chisel before he learned how to read. That puts it in perspective, right? What? That's amazing. So let's pivot back to the little book of talent where you talk about the most important skill that we can develop is actually learning how to practice properly. And I think you had a line in there about who said it. Practice on the days that you eat. I don't remember who said that, but I remember the line and how important daily practice is. Rather than binging, you talk about kind of snacking vis a vis binging. But I love the underscoring of the importance of actually getting good at learning how to practice. Can you talk to us about that and what you've learned?

Yeah, you really see that, especially when you visit these talent hotbeds. You look at people who become very targeted, very intentional, and they're constantly. And that skill essentially comes into doing a couple of things. They're zoom the camera way in really deeply and work intentionally on some tiny piece of their game. They don't just go up and say, oh, I'm going to work on every kind of shot, every kind of say, if it's basketball or whatever. They don't just sort of work on their whole game. They work on really, really isolated parts of their game, and then they pull the camera back to see where that's going to fit, where that's going to fit in their game. There's a beautiful video that somebody sent me recently of LeBron James learning how to play more of an inside game. There was a couple years ago where he was getting beaten a and the inside, and he needed to get better at that. So he went to Hakeem Olajuwon, who is another great basketball player, to learn how to do that. And his video shows LeBron James, who is the best athlete on the planet. I don't think anybody would dispute this guy's the best athlete on the planet. And he's dribbling slow motion. He's doing this move, like a seventh grader, he's, like, sort of practicing it really slowly, and he's trying to figure out exactly what to do with his body. And he does things. He doesn't have a ball for a lot of it. He's just sort of trying to move his body and super intentional, super focused, really dialing in on the mistakes he was making. And that is a guy who knows how to practice. That's a guy who targeted what he wanted to work on, who zoomed the camera in on it, who looked at it from a very sort of, I would say, like, carpenter sort of. I mean, looking at what do I need to build, where should I need to put it, and then is able to pull the camera back and implement that in his game. So these guys are all great learners, and learning is a craft, and they approach learning as a craft, not as something that sort of happens magically. If you just sort of screw around in a certain area, it happens. It's a pattern. It's a ladder, it's a system, and that's how they approach it.

That's awesome. So that all kind of begs the question, well, how do we apply this to our lives? You know, I'm listening. Listeners are hearing this and saying, okay, well, how do I make this? How do I make my life more of a practice? And obviously, we can get kind of a general idea, but can you tell us a little bit about your practice? Like, how do you apply this to your life? It's easier to imagine the tennis player or LeBron James even doing this. But can you, if you're open to it, share a little bit of how you apply this?

You bet. You bet. I mean, beyond learning the Tiger woods trick, I guess I could two sort of ways. And actually, the way that golf ball juggling trick is the exact same way that I learned how to get better at my writing. Writing and reporting is what I do. I spend a lot of time sort of starting at the end a lot of times sort of. I call it staring. I find models of what I want to create. Models, books, articles, types of writing that I really admire. And I spend a lot of time staring at those. I spend a lot of time unpacking them and figuring out what they're made. I do that with books. I do that with articles. And I did that with learning that silly golf ball juggling trick. I stared at Tiger woods doing that thing over and over and over until I could start to feel it inside my body. And so I could start to really see what kind of muscles he was using to do it so I could look where his eyes were and his hands were and his balance was. I really tried to engrave. I really tried to engrave that in my mind. And then you set out to build it and you build it sort of chunk by chunky. Engraving it in your mind gives you a sense of what it's built of. And then you try to produce that. I remember when I was coming up as a writer, I would sometimes go watch us. There was a baseball team that played near us. I wanted to be a sports writer. And so I would go to the game and then I would come home and I would pretend I was on a deadline and I would write up a story about the game I had just watched as if I worked for a paper in one hand. It was completely pathetic, this 19 year old guy going to games by himself and typing up notes as if he worked for the New York Times. But it ended up being really, really crucial because it helped me understand what the skill really was. So much of our learning happens in the classroom or in these sort of safe environments that don't really recreate the kinds of real world pressures and real world craft that actually are the kind of environments where skill is built. I would say the same thing if we were to flash back to any of these environments. You know, Michelangelo wasn't in a class learning how to paint. He was not looking at different examples of great painting. He was copying it and doing it and he had deadlines and it was real. And so any way to pre create the kind of situation that you're actually going to be facing can be very beneficial. And so you can kind of divide that sort of practice. If we're learning how to practice, we can sort of divide all practice into two different kinds of. There's sort of hard practice where you're sort of assembling the skill piece by piece, chunk by chunk, trying to figure out what something's made of, staring it, engraving it on your mind. And then there's this sort of sense of soft skills and soft practice where you're taking that into a game, you're taking what you can do and trying to put it in a very realistic, pressurized situation where you're trying to deliver it. And combining those two, I think is a big part of understanding how to practice combining. Okay, now I'm going to be in the construction zone for a while. I'm going to construct my skill and then I'm going to take it into the arena and I'm going to test Drive it and see if I can deliver it. And that you see good performers and I think good learners toggle back and forth between the construction zone and the arena zone. And that's the way they approach the learning process.

I love it. Construction zone and arena zone, again, so many different directions we can go on that. I want to go to. I want to step back too, and just reflect on how cool it is that you did what you did as a 19 year old going home and practicing that. It reminded me. And your passion for staring at great work. We kind of jumped ahead and I didn't allow us to focus on ignition and kind of that inspiration part of the phase. Let's step back and talk about that for a moment, because I think you just touched on that in one way that I think would be great to make explicit.

Yeah, no, I guess it started visiting these places because they all sort of shared the same kind of windshield. They all shared, kind of people had been successful in that neighborhood. In that neighborhood in Spartak where I started out, there was one person who succeeded, Anna Kournikova. And then the next year there were three. And the next year there were seven. And the next year there were nine. And the next year there were 14. And nothing had changed. The water was still the same, the coaching was still the same. The rackets were still the same, the club was still the same. What changed was the windshield. What changed was suddenly they had an image of their future self. Our motivational system. We know how our respiration system works. We know how our circulatory system works. Well, our motivation system works if we stare and see someone that we want to become, not just somebody that we admire or somebody that we like, but somebody that we want to be, somebody that our identity gets linked up with that person. And that is where motivation comes from. And that is what gets created in these environments. And the term for it is ignition. That moment. And it's a very mysterious moment. You can't force it to happen. You can't sort of dictate it, but you can seed the clouds. You can take yourself and put yourself in situations, put your kids in situations where their windshield gets filled with images of their future self. In our family, it happened in a bluegrass concert when my daughter was about 4. One of my daughters just went to that. And she stared at those kids. I mean, she just stared. They were older kids, teenagers, playing this incredible fiddle music. And she just. You know, there's a. To stare is to think. And she was doing a lot of thinking. And when you stare at somebody. It's kind of an expression of love and interest. And when we got back, we sort of threw a violin in front of her and she took it up and she's still quite good today, a dozen years later. So it's those moments that as you want to kind of curate those and watch for those when they happen because they're really important moments and be alert to them when they happen in your own life and sort of figure out ways to fill your windshield to keep staring at somebody that you want to become. Because it's not natural to want to spend all this time in the Clint Eastwood zone. That is not a super pleasant place to be. It's difficult. It takes a lot of energy and focus. And you need a fuel tank. And that's what the windshield is. To mix metaphors a little bit. That's what ignition is. Ignition provides the motivational fuel to keep you in that sweet spot, building day after day, your skills.

Yeah. Just allowing yourself even just to get fired up. Right. To see that and say, wow, I've been ignited. I've seen what's possible. Kind of Albert Bandura style, right. Of self efficacy of seeing someone else being able to achieve that success. And you describe the story of Roger Bannister so well, of something flipped where all of a sudden people were ignited to see, wow, I can break the four minute mile barrier as well. It was just impossible. Now it's possible and a ton of people did it. And to integrate that into our lives and then to hold that vision with the passion required to actually live in Clint Eastwood zone for the. It's not a weeks or months thing, it's a months, years, decades thing to achieve the level of mastery we're capable of. Right?

Yep, that's right. That's right. And so we cost. We usually fill this kind of. We talk about motivation and things. We always talk about how it comes from within, it comes from the heart. But when you really look at it, it actually kind of comes from outside. In all these cases, at some point, that person, or rather it comes from the inside and the outside. It's a conversation between a person and the person that they want to be and finding ways to increase the odds of that happening, whether it's in our schools or our workplace or. Or whatever, are massively important leverage points for kind of creating the sorts of environments where skill and talent will bloom.

Yeah, that's great. Let's drill through a couple of the practical tips that I just loved napping, one of my favorites. And I love the way you describe it, professional athletes are basically professional nappers as well. Tell us about why that's so important.

Well, it's so fascinating to see how that's happened. It sort of was happening in a free range way until just a few years ago. You'd go into an NBA locker room or anything like that, and a lot of these players just, they would develop their own routines and they would all sleep and they'd rest. I hung around with, did a story once about the world's fastest men and they barely moved. They were sleeping all the time. And now science has caught up with that to where the different professional clubs are providing and really highlighting the fact of sleep as being one of the greatest sort of performance enhancing drugs there is. Not just on a physical way, but also in a mental way. And giving your brain a chance to kind of refuel and consolidate some of the learning that's gone on. That's what happens when we sleep. So it's a wonderful thing not to be avoided at all.

Yeah, that's awesome. I talked to Steven Kotler earlier who wrote the Rise of Superman and his whole work on the flow genome project. And his point was that being in flow is expensive. To live at that edge is expensive. You need to, as Jim Lohr says, train recovery. You need to make those waves and, and recover. And I love the way you frame it and just the permission. If we're serious about this, we need to get serious about the recovery and the naps and the sleep. And I talk about this a ton of my work. I took a 17 minute little nap. We're recording this in the early afternoon, but after my AM stint, I'm ready to turn it off. And it's boom. It's Amazing what even 10 minutes can do to kind of cleanse the system and get us back in the game.

I know, I know. It's fantastic and it's great to kind of validate that. It's kind of happening on the down low for a lot of people. But now it's nice to have that out in the sunshine, so to speak.

Yeah, I agree. Let's connect that to another kind of rest sleeping thing. You talk about mental movies and visualization and how so many of these elite performers visualize themselves before they're going to sleep. Can you walk us through that?

Yeah. It's another one that's sort of a pattern that you see too often for it to be random. It goes back to engraving this skill on our brain and it goes back even also it kind of hits two different points it kind of goes back to the sort of when you're building that skill. But it also can be very motivating. It can be incredibly motivating to be thinking and picturing about what's going to happen. And the science on visualization is sort of a little bit all over the map but. But sort of anecdotally and instinctively it seems to make a ton of sense. And when you see, you know, there's a great story about the soccer star Wayne Rooney when he was I think eight, there was a great World cup goal scored and he first thing he did was run out in the street and recreate it exactly as it happened on the field. This 8 year old kid recreating something that happened on the world's biggest stage. And that's the kind of linkage which you constantly see in these places where they're sort of boldly and in some cases irrationally sort of saying I'm just like they are. I'm just like they are. I'm just like they are. And that is a really powerful message that has got, you know, that really can fuel a lot of positive behavior.

I love it. And then you connected to you have that I'm just like them. And what they get is those guys work or women work harder than anybody else.

So they.

The blue collar mindset. Can you talk to us about how important that is?

Yeah, it's so interesting. You know, when we see the, you know, the stars from a distance, it sort of looks, it looks really effortless. You know what they do looks really effortless. And then when you get the camera a little bit closer, you find that they all share this real lunch pail mentality. There's a great artist named Chuck Close who said inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just get to work. And that is Kobe Bryant, that is Michael Jordan, that is Michelangelo. They honor the everyday, they honor showing up every day. It's not a special thing for them to perform. It is a daily thing for them to work and perform. And so that. And they also welcome how hard that is. That is not easy. Especially when you've kind of got it made, you know, like a lot of these guys do. They've got money, they've got a great place to live, they've got a great life. But to actually have that, to keep and treasure that lunch pill mentality ends up being the thing that keeps them, keeps them where they're at and keeps them on top. They're not waiting for inspiration. They're not waiting for some special moment that's for the amateurs. They're getting to work.

I love it. Inspiration is for amateurs. I'm looking at right now on my windowsill in my office. I stole my son, my three year old son's little Lego lunch pail from one of his construction kits. This little red lunch pail thing that for me is front and center. It's right in my line of sight, which symbolizes everything and the power. As we talked about the myelin, you talk about repetitions and how if we want to grow that insulation and get that broadband, it's not mysterious, but it is. Does require the mundane repetition of the things we want to improve. Right, right.

And repetition has a terrible reputation in our culture. Like when you say the word repetition, people conjure up drudgery. People conjure up sort of sweeping the floor, people conjure up this boring drudge work. When in fact, like, repetition is incredible, repetition is magical. You know, repetition is gorgeous. And so. But when we sort of say, oh, I've got to play that song 20 times in a row, there's a couple different ways you could think about that. You can think about that, oh, I've got to sort of do the drudge work and just get through it. But each time you do that, you are actually a slightly different person. Each time you do that, you're making a small change to yourself. And the opportunity of that repetition and the change that that repetition can create is kind of magical. So seeing it that way is one of the first steps, I think, to kind of. You're not just sort of doing the reps, but you're embracing them in a way, and you're getting the most out of each. Which of course also means you don't have to do as many of them.

So.

Repetition isn't something to be allergic to. It's sort of. It's sort of. You wouldn't think that doing reps in the. You sort of see reps in the gym as being a positive thing. You should see the same sort of things as reps, any type of rep.

And then we get disciplined and we kind of make that switch where we realize that, wow, when I'm putting myself in that sweet spot, I'm actually in flow. And that's the best possible state a human can be in. And I want more of that. And then there's a joyful embrace of the reps and you can't wait to put them in. I imagine you at 19 years old wishing you can go to more games and write up more stories, because it's what Made you feel alive. And for me it's in your book. When I read this on the repetitions, it just continues to give me freedom of I'm doing this a thousand times. I want to go through a thousand books and stare at them and see, well, what are all these different ideas? And it gets me giddy to get up and go do the next rep and just get a little bit better each time. Have the humility to be where I'm at while I aspire to be where I'm going. And it's such a cool, subtle, yet significant twist. Right when we're able to tweak, when we're able to make that joy filled rather than kind of a pain.

Well said. That's true. You're living it and you start getting that progress and that feeds back on itself and it's exciting. It really is. It's nice to hear that.

Thank you. And it's nice to be encouraged and inspired by your wisdom. Let's talk about one more idea and then I want to see if we miss anything that you want to make sure we talk about. But you have a great phrase and I think it was from Spartac where they said that you need to think like a gardener and act like a carpenter. Can you talk to us about that? Right.

It's sort of a, you know, it's funny growing, growing skill has a lot of paradoxes in it and a lot of, a lot of sort of different types of moments where you're zooming in, out, thinking in different ways. And this is one thing that they did to sort of, sort of captures some of that, some of that paradox. You know, you want to really, in the big term think like a gardener. This is not a quick process. It takes time. You want to nurture, you want to care for, you want to keep things alive, you want to keep your motivation fresh, you want to bring a lot of nurturing to the process and you want to not have big expectations to. All of a sudden when we plant a seed, if it's not a redwood tomorrow, we don't get disappointed. We know that it takes time, especially with kids talents, it just takes time to grow. Nobody's good right away. So that's how you want to think about in the big picture. But when you work, you want to work like a carpenter. You want to connect A to B. You want to build a structure that's got integrity, that will stand. You want to work with good materials, you want to work with good tools, you want to make strong connections that will hold up over time, you don't want to build a little house of twigs. You want to build a big timber frame thing that'll stand up to the worst storms the world can offer. So thinking like a builder, like you are, practice is an act of construction. You know, learning is an act of construction. And so that mindset is what you want to use. So it's kind of. It's like you're toggling back and forth between these two mindsets where you're sort of, on the long term you're a gardener, and the short term, you're a carpenter.

I absolutely love that. So the patience, no judgment, long horticultural time, not clock time. I forget who said that, but just you're not planting a seed like you said. Tomorrow's it's redwood. That's insane. Yet you're showing up diligently and patiently and persistently and with precision, building something you're going to be proud of, little by little by little. Such a cool idea. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that is a favorite idea that you want to make sure we talk about?

Oh, you know, it's funny. I've been working on this new project which has to do with. With groups and the science of successful groups, which is sort of about culture and the soft stuff, and my mind is sort of going there lately. And the ways in which skills get grown in community. You know, all of these talent hotbeds I visited, they were communities, and they were real communities. You know, they were places where people were vulnerable with each other, where they cared about each other, where they were physically, mentally close. And it's. I think it's interesting. We sometimes think about talent and skill as being very individual. Like, it's my lottery ticket that I get a scratch off and show that. See what talent I've got. When in fact, when you really look closer, it is grown in community. So all these softer things come up. All, you know, how do people connect? How do you grow trust? How do you create belonging? Those end up being really important things in the long run. You know, the relationships with the coach, relationships with your fellow strivers. And so those things end up being really, really valuable and easy to overlook. Talent is. It's really grown as a group, and that's the exciting part of it. And so that's a nice. I guess that's a spot I'd want to highlight.

That's great. And while we're on that subject, tell us the name of your next book. Are you sharing the name of your next book? Might be Top secret.

It is top secret, actually. I'm getting on the phone tomorrow with my editor to pose a few names.

Fantastic. So we'll keep it secret, but Dan's new book, as he just mentioned, is going to be on groups and talent. I can't wait to check that out. Do you have a rough sense of when we can expect to see that?

About a year maybe.

Okay, cool. Well, that's awesome. And there's one final question I like to ask, and then we'll point people to where they can learn more about you and your work. If you could only share one piece of wisdom to someone who's passionate about optimizing their lives, and it might be something we discussed or something that we haven't yet. What would that one piece of wisdom be?

Wow. Besides listening to your podcast. Hmm. I think it would be to don't be afraid of feeling stupid. Don't be afraid of feeling stupid. That's where the good stuff happens.

Love it. Right outside that comfort zone. Right? All of our potential. Are you willing to be a little bit foolish?

Yep. Yep, that's the spot.

Right on. All right, well, the talent code, the little book of talent. Both phenomenal. Highly recommend them. What's the best place for the people to connect with you and all that good stuff?

Yeah, the talentcode.com is a good place to connect.

Thetalentcode.com Dan, thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be connected.

Thank you, Brian. Really enjoyed it. Great conversation.

Thanks.

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