The Talent Code

the fact that the unconscious mind is able to process 11 million pieces of information per second, while the conscious mind can manage a mere 40. This disproportion points to the efficiency and necessity of relegating mental activities to the unconscious—and helps us to understand why appeals to the unconscious can be so effective.

“Repetition is the key to learning.”

John Wooden uses the deep-practice part of the talent mechanism, speaking the language of information and correction, honing circuitry. Miss Mary, on the other hand, deals in matters of ignition, using emotional triggers to fill fuel tanks with love and motivation. They succeed because building myelin circuits requires both deep practice and igniti

explanation, demonstration, imitation, correction, and repetition. “Don't look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That's the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts,” he wrote in The Wisdom of Wooden. “The importance of repetition until automaticity cannot be overstated,” he said in You Haven't T

Pick a target. Reach for it. Evaluate the gap between the target and the reach. Return to step one.

Gallimore and Tharp recorded and coded 2,326 discrete acts of teaching. Of them, a mere 6.9 percent were compliments. Only 6.6 percent were expressions of displeasure. But 75 percent were pure information: what to do, how to do it, when to intensify an activity. One of Wooden's most frequent forms of teaching was a three-part instruction where he m

He taught in chunks, using what he called the “whole-part method”—he would teach players an entire move, then break it down to work on its elemental actions.