Borot'sya

Is success about talent or process?

In "The Talent Code", Daniel Coyle examines hotbeds of talent throughout the world, music academies, schools, the Brazil soccer experience, Moscow's Spartak Tennis Club, and more. 

Here's an image from his marvelous book, that I recommend for every coach and every serious athlete. The proper 'deep practice' or from Anders Ericsson's 'deliberate practice' is the key. Developing technical mastery of your musical instrument, scholarship, or athletic event creates your 'talent'.  

Muscles have no memory. We imprint, myelinate nerve pathways in our brain that allows us to perform better, faster, and more consistently. The problem is that if we learn to do it 'wrong', then we perfect doing it WRONG. We learn poor technique and poor decision-making, the negative intersection of hard skills with soft skills. All of which is why learning 'the right way' means so much, whether it's learning to study or the offensive attack in volleyball. 

But what's BOROT'SYA? It's a Russian word for "struggle" or "fight", the challenge the would-be expert must face to achieve mastery. 

In a subsequent book, "The Little Book of Talent" Coyle tells us the following:

EMBRACE STRUGGLE
At all of the talent hotbeds, from Moscow to Dallas to Brazil to New York, I saw the same facial expression: eyes narrow, jaw tight, nostrils flared, theface of someone intently reaching for something, falling short, and reaching again. 

Deep practice has a telltale emotional flavor, a feeling that can be summed up in one word: “struggle.” Most of us instinctively avoid struggle, because it’s uncomfortable. It feels like failure. However, when it comes to developing your talent, struggle isn’t an option—it’s a biological necessity. The struggle and frustration you feel at the edges of your abilities—that uncomfortable burn of “almost, almost”—is the sensation of constructing new neural connections, a phenomenonthat the UCLA psychologist Robert Bjork calls “desirable difficulty.” Your brain works just like your muscles: no pain, no gain.

Borot'sya.