Sweet Spot

The Sweet Spot-

Coyle goes for a journey in search of talent in young people. He explores lot of things in his journey. He finds that a talented person is always engaged in one activity that is special or surprising. Deep practice is the best way to achieve success. Experience helps to slow down, find out errors and then correct them. A person has to know the gap between what he knows and what he is trying to do. By this gap talent can be captured. He says that every small effort gives big lasting results. He also includes that every person has to position himself at a place of leverage, capture the failure and turn it into skill.

Coyle’s main argument is that talent can be achieved only by deep practice and efforts. He claims that “Deep practice has two strange concepts- One concept cuts against intuition about talent. Intuition tells that practice relates to talent. The second concept is that deep practice takes events that normally mistakes done will turn them out into skills”.

Coyle draws on various evidences. He takes many examples starting with the deer in the ice mountain which wants to climb the hill and reach the top. He says that all the deers struggles, slips, falls and stops. It tries again and again to get up and reach the top. It practices every step not to slip and fall down. This practice helps the deer to move up.  Coyle takes the example of Brazilian soccer team as an evidence to prove that practice helps the player to become the world’s best team. Each and every player had a kind of concentrated talent. Brazil produces great player because they have trained in a particular way , with a particular tool that improves ball-handling skill faster than anywhere else in the world. They have found a way to increase their learning. This can be called as deep practice.

Coyle has many sub-claims (smaller arguments). He takes the examples of small things like memory test. He gives one small test to remember few words that are written in coloumn A and B.  Coloumn A has few words and coloumn B has blank letters to be filled up. After reading that and filling letters we tend to remember the words from Coloumn B. while doing this exercise I stumbled, stopped and figured out the words that needs to be filled. .  That is because the memory is more when we start practicing things.  Coyle says that there is a micro second struggle and this has made a huge difference. He says that in this exercise a person will not practice harder but practice deeper.  The memory improves, but simply because of deep practice.

Coyle’s aim was to visit greatest talent hotbeds in sports, arts, business and music. He wanted to find out how they consistently produce extraordinary performers. He takes various scenarios and explains that to achieve anything there will be little bit of struggle and failures. He says that learning is the process to achieve success. He uses certain key terms to explain the concepts like “sweet spot, edges of ability, deep practice, corps pilot, penguin-hopping, tinker’s mind, the Blue Danube. Coyle says that the trick is to choose a goal, just go beyond the present abilities and target struggle with deep practice.

Coyle explains the concept by giving real life examples. He shows the real things happening around the world in talent code. He explains every example which says that there is a struggle, failure and practice for reaching the goal. The example of Brazilian soccer, Edward link’s unsual device is the real story of collective talent players to achieve success.

There are many key terms used are Great expeditions- explains his wife and children in logical terms. He uses statistical impossibilities – a mouse that had not only roared but that had somehow come to rule the forest. He uses elastic- trying to learn, ball handling maneuver. Time – into a waterfall of notes. Polymath-cheerful. He describes that memory as a tape recorder but says that is wrong. He uses whetstone as a knife - it is a vital but useless without solid blade of so-called natural ability. He uses bed rock- when pilots training were built on bedrock belief that good pilots are born not made. He uses penguin hopping- taxiing.  In stubby- winged crafts or they flew and hoped.

Coyle’s context or occasions for his argument is that he uses the example of Brazilian soccers with a collective talent in the football match. He says that there were different skills used to handle the ball from all the players. They have practiced it several times to get the perfection in their game. He gives the situation of the demonstration shown in the airplane for the life vest and life jackets. He uses all these context to understand that practice is required to do anything in perfection. It is also said that if we have to be good reader then we have to open the book and read. Without reading books a person cannot be a good reader.

Potential uses of all his arguments are that a person has to fix up a goal and put all his efforts to achieve it. Doesn’t matter if he fails and takes that as learning with the deep practice.