Courtesy: The Hindu


When you find the sweet spot, learning takes off

by D. Murali

Every human skill, be it about playing fiery baseball or composing soulful music, is created by ‘chains of nerve fibres carrying a tiny electrical impulse – basically, a signal travelling through a circuit,’ instructs The Talent Code: Greatness isn’t born, it’s grown by Daniel Coyle (www.landmarkonthenet.com). Wrapping these nerve fibres is myelin, a neural insulator, with a role similar to that of rubber insulation for copper wire, to make ‘the signal stronger and faster by preventing the electrical impulses from leaking out.’

When we fire our circuits in the right way – when we practise swinging that bat or playing that note – our myelin responds by wrapping layers of insulation around that neural circuit, each new layer adding a bit more skill and speed, the author explains. “The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates, and the faster and more accurate our movements and thoughts become.”

Definition of skill
Skill, therefore, is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and grows in response to certain signals, Coyle defines. Importantly, he lists the properties of myelin – that it is universal, so everyone can grow it, most swiftly during childhood but also throughout life; that it is indiscriminate, so its growth enables all manner of skills, mental and physical; and that it is imperceptible, which means we can’t see it or feel it, but we can sense its increase only by its magical-seeming effects.

Talent discussion unfolds in the three parts of the book, viz. deep practice, ignition, and master coaching. Each element is useful in its own, but their convergence is the key to creating skill, the author notes. “Remove one, and the process slows. Combine them, even for six minutes, and things begin to change.”

Deep practice
Struggling makes us whine, but struggling in certain targeted ways – operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes – can turn you smarter, assures Coyle while elaborating on the need for deep practice. “Experiences where you’re forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them – as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go – end up making you swift and graceful without your realising it.”

Deep practice enables you to use time more efficiently, because your small efforts will then produce big, lasting results. But to achieve that you have to position yourself at a place of leverage where you can capture failure and turn it into skill, counsels the author. “The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your present abilities; to target the struggle. Thrashing blindly doesn’t help. Reaching does.”

Optimal gap
There’s an optimal gap between what you know and what you’re trying to do, educates a quote of Robert Bjork cited in the book. “When you find that sweet spot, learning takes off.”

To those who make the intuitive argument that practice relates to talent in the same way that a whetstone relates to a knife – it is vital but useless without a solid blade of so-called natural ability – Coyle’s answer is simple: “Deep practice raises an intriguing possibility: that practice might be the way to forge the blade itself.”

Soccer in a box
An example given in the book is about a study by soccer coach Simon Clifford, who travelled from an elementary school in the UK to Brazil, on a mission to discover the secrets of the game.

Futsal, invented in 1930 as a rainy-day training option by a Uruguayan coach, was the missing link, found Clifford. To him, the game looked like soccer ‘played inside a phone booth and dosed with amphetamines.’ The ball was half the size but weighed twice as much, and it hardly bounced at all, one learns.

“The players trained, not on a vast expanse of grass field, but on a basketball-court-size patches of concrete, wooden floor, and dirt. Each side, instead of having eleven players, had five or six. In its rhythm and blinding speed, the game resembled basketball or hockey more than soccer: it consisted of an intricate series of quick, controlled passes and non-stop end-to-end action.”

Secret of futsal
The strength of futsal is that the players touch the ball far more often than soccer players, six times more often per minute, according to a Liverpool University research that Coyle mentions. “The smaller, heavier ball demands and rewards more precise handling… Sharp passing is paramount: the game is all about looking for angles and spaces and working quick combinations with other players. Ball control and vision are crucial.”

So much so, when futsal players play the full-size game, they feel as if they have acres of free space in which to operate, the author avers. Futsal, he says, compresses soccer’s essential skills into a small box, and places players inside the deep practice zone, making and correcting errors, constantly generating solutions to vivid problems.

Fruits of coaching
Enriched with insights, Clifford returned home, and began teaching Brazilian soccer to children drawn from a rough, impoverished area of Leeds, with ‘samba music on a boom box’ creating the proper ambience.

The ‘sweet spot’ chapter concludes by tracking the results of his experiment, thus: “Four years later Clifford’s team of under-fourteens defeated the Scottish national team of the same age; it went on to beat the Irish national team as well. One of his Leeds kids, a defender named Micah Richards, now plays for the English national team…”

Imperative read.




Posted by Luca Ranocchiari --> luca.ranocchiari@futsalplanet.com