In the spin of myth of talent one of the most crucial interrogative sentences or big question is where the talents risen and born?
This spinning question has poked Coyle in his book “ The Talent Code”. As much as people said, and generally like to think, that “all men are created equal”. But in reality we are all different. It means that we all have strength and weaknesses.
Some of us have a natural gift, that we get at birth. We say: “They are gifted” or "We have talent”. These are almost identical. In both cases, may be it is innate, or something we get at birth an abilities and capabilities where we are better than others. And also breaks it down from a neurological standpoint background or other side of DNA.
Is it law of genetic? of course, genetics has to do with it. But that is only part of it. Think of all the champions, all the race. Some have siblings that do very well, yet many do not.
In other hand, Coyle shares and shows up his great expedition for finding and explore the origin of talent that comes and rises. And it is stopping in very simple words: deep practice!
Talent takes being in the right environment. Imagine we have a talent for singing or writing. If we have never been exposed to singing or writing, we may not discover this talent for quite a while. Right?
And can you achieve talent by practicing a lot? Certainly, but never as well as someone who is born with it. Never as good as someone who is innate with in.
By the using of Robert Bjork, the chair of psychology at UCLA arguments, Coyle elaborates and dig the meaning of "deep practice" which means: struggling in certain targeted ways, operating at the edges of ability, mistakes makes smarter learning experience (p.18).
Coyle also give explanations and adds some arguments that to find the secret of talent source,or to know the origin of talent, we should find "the sweet spot" which become “the bridge of what we know and what we are trying to achieve where learning takes off” (p.19).
Coyle suggests several evidences to support his arguments. First, the origin of Brazil soccer player comes from continuous, try hard as same as die hard, consistent, and committed futsal practice.
He also argues how the human memory and learning hit to the maximum level where human experience the difficulty, test, and struggle for their talents.
Coyle also shows Edwin Link’s pilot training method which claim that talent is not only born, instead, talent is grown with drilled training experience.
How about people argue that talent is in a personal that risen when he was born. And how about people said that talent is in the blueprint of a human being, in the DNA and genes in their bodies.
There are also understandings that argue that talent can be grown, honed primarily by family and the environment. Simple idea: one's talents lead to a neurological mechanism with certain training patterns that aim to improve proficiency.
People who have talent have unknowingly entered a zone of learning acceleration that can only be achieved by people who know how to access it. In short, they have solved the secret of talent.
The potential uses of his arguments are to inspire and motivate people to work out deep efforts to learn everything in this world consistently.
And to encourage people who do lots of mistakes evaluate their own mistakes as part of learning process, and to give confidences to everyone to have deeper and more experiences to achieve their talents.
However, Coyle’s arguments have some possible limitations. First, Coyle’s drilling practice that force people to achieve the talents could make people too ambitious to pursue his talents without caring their surroundings.
In fact, there are lots of meaningful things to be taken care such as family, environment, social life, and everything that might be not part of talents.
Then, Coyle’s argument could not be implemented directly to every aspects of education since it is too focus on skills because, the main goal of education is to shape the students holistically include personal, emotional, social, spiritual life of the students, not only skills.
There are several questions he raises for the readers to interact with the readers. First, he asks several rhetorical questions, “But how?” in the third paragraph (p.12) and “How?” (p.14), “How does Brazil produce so many great player?” (p.15).
These rhetorical questions draw the reader’s curiosity to think and find the source of talents based on Coyle's examples. Then, Coyle also challenges the readers to enter his world by answering personal questions to the readers to do words practice, “from which column do you recall more words?” (p.16).
As we know that "deep practice" has may rules such as repetition, we know that nothing can be done in building skills that are more effective than taking action. and then the other is about firing stimuli toward nerve fibers. And the last is about correcting mistakes. Don't forget about sharpening circuits, it is important.
Learn to feel it. However, we might feel a set of secondary feelings that are associated with efforts to acquire new skills. The purposes of Coyle’s arguments are to tell people that deep practice is what matters in talents.
He wants to tell people that the talents could be achieved by finding "the sweet spots" which is the moment when human committed to practice the talents deeply and perfectly.
Then, he also wants to encourage people to pursue their own talents by doing many activities such as deep practice, learning from mistakes, experiencing struggle, test, and difficulty. Those are the important elements for gaining and growing talents.
There are three methods that Coyle use to share his arguments. Coyle blows his argument with story-telling way that is shown by starting the chapter by using his story visiting many place such as Moscow, Brazil, Dallas, Carribbean, and New York (p.11).
He tries to wrap his arguments as someone who tell his own experiences that keep people want to know the end of his story. It is a good strategies for strengthen his evidences.
Coyle shares and sharpens his arguments by inviting the readers to interact with his concrete evidences that were shown when he asks the readers to think “How does Brazil produce so many great layers?” (p.16), and then to practice words memory (p.16), and also to think from pilot’s training mistakes (p.21).
Coyle also uses exaggerate and compelling words that attract the readers emotion such as “Everest size of talent”(p.11) and “Titanically accomplished” (p.11), and “Great expedition” (p.12).
The context of Daniel Coyle’s arguments comes from the era of positive thinking psychology that focus on self help, improvement, and actualization.
In addition, with the strong interest and his point of views in sports, Coyle tries to generalize and points the defined sport talents as all super talents that people want to achieve. This case was shown by how strong he put the defined sport examples to strengthen his arguments and to attract the reader’s mind.
In summary, I conclude that Coyle has made me not only understand his arguments of finding the sweet spots of the talents, but also he show us a good analyzing thing, evaluation, and reflection for the relevance of his arguments. It is critical things for personal life as human being who pursue the excellence of talents.