Deep practice is not measured in minutes or hours, but in the number of high-quality reaches and repetitions you make.
Daniel Coyle
The meaning of the quote
The Spartak Tennis Club in Moscow has one indoor court and a rundown look. In recent years it has still produced more top-20 women players than the entire United States. When Daniel Coyle visited, he found kids swinging rackets at nothing. The drill is called imitatsiya, and the coaches see the ball as a distraction. Players wait 3 years before they compete. One coach explained it like this:
“Technique is everything. If you begin playing without technique, it is big, big mistake!”
This quote explains why a place like Spartak works. Coyle wrote it in the book The Little Book of Talent, a set of 52 short tips built on the research behind his earlier book The Talent Code. The tip is titled “Take off your watch,” and the advice is to stop counting the time you spend practicing and start counting the attempts you make. A reach is an attempt at something just past your current ability. A repetition is trying it again with attention on what went wrong. Coyle describes the sweet spot as working “at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes.”
A piano student can spend 2 hours replaying songs she already knows and make only 3 shaky tries at the one bar that trips her up. Ten focused minutes on that bar can hold 12 tries. The clock says the first session was better, but the second one built more skill.
Brazilian soccer shows the same pattern. Great Brazilian players like Pelé, Ronaldinho and Juninho played futsal as kids, a game on a small court with a heavier ball. According to the excerpt on Coyle’s site, futsal players touch the ball 6 times more often per minute than soccer players. The hour on the clock is the same and the number of reps is not.
Coyle also reports that psychologists tested students who studied a text once and then quizzed themselves 3 times. These students scored 50 percent higher than students who studied the same text 4 times without any self-testing. Every quiz is a reach, because you have to pull the answer out of your own head. The book Make It Stick goes deep on this idea.
Action steps
These steps work for guitar, free throws, essays or code, anything with a hard part. Each one turns the quote into a small change in how you sit down to practice.
- Pick the hardest 10% of the skill.
Find the bar, the move or the paragraph you keep messing up. Reps on the easy parts feel good but teach you little. - Set a rep target and ignore the clock.
Tell yourself “I’ll play this passage 5 times, slowly enough to get it right” instead of “I’ll practice for 20 minutes.” Coyle’s own example in the tip is 5 intensive reps of a new song. - Stop and look after each miss.
When you slip, work out what happened before you go again. Rushing into the next try just repeats the mistake. - Keep sessions short and daily.
Coyle recommends 5 minutes a day over an hour a week, because the brain grows a little each day, even while you sleep.
The next time you sit down to practice, take off your watch and count your reps instead.
About the author
In 1992, Daniel Coyle took a leave from his job as a senior editor at Outside magazine and coached a team in the Near North Little League in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects. He came as a journalist, spent the season with the kids and wrote the book Hardball: A Season in the Projects, published in 1993. USA Today called it “an astonishing feat of eavesdropping on young boys’ games and fantasies.”
Coyle studied at the Medill School of Journalism and the University of Notre Dame. He started as a sportswriter at the Anchorage Times and went on to write for Sports Illustrated and Life.
In 2001, Paramount turned Hardball into a film starring Keanu Reeves. The movie centered on a coach with a gambling problem, which was not the story Coyle had written. He put it this way:
“I wrote a novelistic nonfiction account of what happened, and I focused on the kids. That’s not the movie they made.”
Coyle later set up the Near North Little League Scholarship Fund, which has helped former players attend universities including the University of Illinois and Michigan State.
The Talent Code came out of 2 ideas that collided. He had found Spartak, the tennis club with one court and a long list of top players. Then he read about myelin, a brain substance linked to skill development, in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. He spent 14 months visiting 9 talent hotbeds, from a Moscow tennis court to a São Paulo soccer field, to find out what they had in common. He followed it with The Little Book of Talent and later wrote The Culture Code, which turns the same curiosity toward why some groups perform better than others.
Resources
- The Little Book of Talent (Book)
- The Talent Code (Book)
- Unlocking the Talent Code With Dan Coyle (Podcast)
- Spartak Tennis Club, Moscow, Russia (Article)
- An Excerpt from The Talent Code (Article)
- A Q&A About The Talent Code (Article)
- Make It Stick (Book summary)
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