Groundbreaking ways to grow talent.

Highlights

Daniel Coyle is the author of The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How, a new way to get really good at almost anything based on how our brains work. The secret comes down to the physiology of learning, or what happens to the architecture of the brain during practice.

The right kinds of practice, coaching, and motivation promote the growth of myelin, a microscopic nerve fiber insulator that adds speed and accuracy to the neural pathways that govern movements and thought.

For The Talent Code, Daniel visited nine hotbeds of talent around the world in different fields to find out how they consistently produce extraordinary performers. He found they had many practices in common and these practices all improved the production of myelin.

The Talent Code is Daniel's third book about high performance.

Lance Armstrong's War was a New York Times bestseller. It chronicles the year Daniel spent following Lance Armstrong and the professional bike-racing circuit when Armstrong won his record-breaking sixth consecutive Tour de France.

Hardball: A Season in the Projects was Sporting News's book of the year and became the Keanu Reeves movie of the same name. In it he describes his experiences coaching little league in the Cabrini-Green housing projects of Chicago.

Daniel Coyle is a contributing editor at Outside magazine and a former Senior Editor. In addition to his three works of nonfiction, he has written a novel, Waking Samuel. In addition to his book of the year award, he has been nominated twice for the National Magazine Award and he's been featured in The Best American Sports Writing.

He has written for Sports Illustrated, The New York Times Magazine, and Play. He has appeared as a guest on Good Morning America, ABC World News Tonight, Nightline, ESPN, CNN, All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, Talk of the Nation, and numerous other national programs.

Dan has worked as an adjunct faculty member at Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University.

Hotbed: The Blueprint of High Performance

Daniel Coyle spent the last two years visiting the world's greatest talent hotbeds in sports, art, business, and music—tiny but powerful places that consistently produce huge numbers of extraordinary performers. Daniel reveals what makes them tick — and explains how you can use a few basic leadership principles to maximize high performance and potential in your organization. The secret is located in the brain; in the specific, targeted methods of training and motivation the hotbeds use to build the high-speed neural circuitry that underlies all greatness, from Michelangelo's sculptures to Michael Jordan's jump shot. Combining entertaining stories of his travels (ranging from a Russian tennis club to an Adirondack music school to Brazilian soccer fields to the Little League team Daniel coaches) with vivid takeaways, he shows how the hotbeds serve as useful instruction books that help leaders improve performance and maximize potential in their organizations, their families, and themselves.

The Talent Code

How to dramatically improve virtually any skill.

The talent code is built on revolutionary scientific discoveries involving a neural insulator called myelin, which some neurologists now consider to be the holy grail of acquiring skill.

What is the secret of talent? In this groundbreaking work, NYTimes bestselling author Daniel Coyle gives parents, coaches, businesspeople and everyone else tools they can use to maximize potential in themselves and others.

Whether you’re coaching soccer or teaching a child to play the piano, writing a novel or trying to improve your golf swing, this revolutionary book shows you how to grow talent by tapping into a newly discovered brain mechanism.

Drawing on cutting-edge neurology and firsthand research gathered on journeys to nine of the world’s talent hotbeds—from the baseball fields of the Caribbean to a classical-music academy in upstate New York—Coyle identifies the three key elements that will allow you to develop your gifts and optimize your performance in sports, art, music, math, or just about anything: deep practice, nurtured passion, and master coaching.

These three elements work together within your brain to form myelin, a microscopic neural substance that adds vast amounts of speed and accuracy to your movements and thoughts. The good news about myelin is that it isn’t fixed at birth; to the contrary, it grows, and like anything that grows, it can be cultivated and nourished.

This presentation will not only change the way you think about talent, but equip you to reach your own highest potential.

Credentials

• Contributing editor, Outside magazine
• Adjunct faculty, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University
• Former Senior Editor, Outside
• Author, three books of nonfiction and one novel Lance Armstrong's War a New York Times bestseller

Awards

• The Sporting News Book of the Year (Hardball)
• Winner, 2005 Times of London Sports Biography of the Year for Tour de Force
• Two National Magazine Award nominations
  "The Captain Went Down with the Ship" – profile of Joseph Hazelwood and the Exxon Valdez disaster
  "Boy Wonder" – profile of snowboarder Roger Carver
• Featured in The Best American Sports Writing

Books

The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How. (Bantam; 2009)

Lance Armstrong's War: One Man's Battle Against Fate, Fame, Love, Death, Scandal, and a Few Other Rivals on the Road to the Tour de France (HarperCollins; 2006)

Lance Armstrong: Tour de Force (CollinsWillow; 2005)

Hardball: A Season in the Projects (G.P. Putnam's Sons; 1994)

Waking Samuel (fiction; 2003)