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

The key is that people have to linger in that uncomfortable area, learn to tolerate the anxiety.

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.

Deep practice, however, doesn't obey the same math. Spending more time is effective—but only if you're still in the sweet spot at the edge of your capabilities, attentively building and honing circuits. What's more, there seems to be a universal limit for how much deep practice human beings can do in a day. Ericsson's research shows that most

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. He formulated laws of learning (which might be retitled laws of myelin): explanation, demonstration, imitation, correction, and repetition. “Don't look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the

You will become clever through your mistakes. —German proverb

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

Almost all the master coaches I met followed Wooden's rule. They wanted to know about each student so they could customize their communications to fit the larger patterns in a student's life.

“We tend to think of our memory as a tape recorder, but that's wrong,” he said. “It's a living structure, a scaffold of nearly infinite size. The more we generate impulses, encountering and overcoming difficulties, the more scaffolding we build. The more scaffolding we build, the faster we learn.”