The Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle 52 tips for Improving Your Skills

I. Getting Started Stare, Steal, and Be Willing to Be Stupid 1. Stare at who you want to become 2. Spend 15 minutes a day engraving the skill on your brain 3. Steal without apology 4. Buy a notebook 5. Be willing to be stupid 6. Choose Spartan over luxurious 7. Before you start, figure out if it is a hard or soft skill 8. To build hard skills, work like a careful carpenter 9. To build soft skills, play like a skateboarder 10. Honor the hard skills 11. Dont fall for the prodigy myth 12. Five ways to pick a high quality teacher or coach II. Improving Skills Find the Sweet Spot, then Reach 13. Find the sweet spot 14. Take off your watch 15. Break every move down into chunks 16. Each day, try to build one perfect chunk 17. Embrace struggle 18. Choose 5 minutes a day over an hour a week 19. Dont do drills, instead, play small addictive games 20. Practice alone 21. Think in images 22. Pay attention immediately after you make a mistake 23. Visualize the wires of your brain forming new connections 24. Visualize the wires of your brain getting faster 25. Shrink the space 26. Slow it down (even slower than you think) (continued) Improving Skills Find the Sweet Spot, then Reach 27. Close your eyes 28. Mime it 29. When you get it right, mark the spot 30. Take a nap 31. To learn a new move, exaggerate it 32. Make positive reaches 33. To learn from a book, close the book 34. Use the sandwich technique 35. Use the 3 x 10 technique 36. Invent daily tests 37. To choose the best practice method, use the R.E.P.S. guide 38. Stop before you are exhausted 39. Practice immediately after performance 40. Just before you sleep, watch a mental movie 41. End on a positive note 42. Six ways to be a better teacher or coach III. Sustaining Progress - Embrace Repetition, Cultivate grit, Keep Big Goals Secret 43. Embrace repetition 44. Have a blue collar mindset 45. For every hour of competition, spend 5 hours practicing 46. Dont waste time trying to break bad habits, instead build new ones 47. To learn it more deeply, teach it 48. Give a new skill a minimum of 8 weeks 49. When you get stuck, make a shift 50. Cultivate your grit 51. Keep your big goals secret 52. Think like a gardener, work like a carpenter