The Sweet Spot II

The reason, Bjork explained, resides in the way our brains are built. "We tend to think of our memory as a tape recorder, but that's wrong," he said. "It's a living structure, a scaffold of nearly infinite size. The more we generate impulses, en-countering and overcoming difficulties, the more scaffolding we build. The more scaffolding we build, the faster we learn." When you're practicing deeply, the world's usual rules are
suspended. You use time more efficiently. Your small efforts produce big, lasting results. You have positioned yourself at a place of leverage where you can capture failure and turn it into skill. The trick is to choose a goal just beyond your pres-ent abilities; to target the struggle. Thrashing blindly doesn't help. Reaching does.

"It's all about finding the sweet spot," Bjork said. "There's an optimal gap between what you know and what you're try-ing to do. When you find that sweet spot, learning takes off."* Deep practice is a strange concept for two reasons. The first reason is that it cuts against our intuition about talent. Our intuition tells us that practice relates to talent in the same way that a whetstone relates to a knife: it's vital but useless without a solid blade of so-called natural ability. Deep prac-tice raises an intriguing possibility: that practice might be the way to forge the blade itself.

The second reason deep practice is a strange concept is that it takes events that we normally strive to avoid—namely, mistakes—and turns them into skills. To understand how deep practice works, then, it's first useful to consider the unexpected but crucial importance of errors to the learning process. In fact, let's consider an extreme example, which arrives in the form of a question: how do you get good at something when making a mistake has a decent chance of killing you?

EDWIN LINK'S UNUSUAL DEVICE

In the winter of 1934 President Franklin Roosevelt had a problem. Pilots in the U.S. Army Air Corps—by all accounts the military's most skilled, combat-ready airmen—were dy-ing in crashes. On February 23 a pilot drowned when he landed off the New Jersey coast; another was killed when his plane cartwheeled into a Texas ditch. On March 9 four more pilots died when their planes crashed in Florida, Ohio, and
Wyoming. The carnage was not caused by a war. The pilots were simply trying to fly through winter storms, delivering the U.S. mail.

The crashes could be traced to a corporate scandal. A re-cent Senate investigation had exposed a multimillion-dollar price-fixing scheme among the commercial airlines contracted to carry the U.S. mail. President Roosevelt had swiftly re-sponded by canceling the contracts. To take over mail deliv-ery, the president called upon the Air Corps, whose generals were eager to demonstrate their pilots' willingness and brav-ery. (They also wanted to show Roosevelt that the Air Corps deserved the status of a full military branch, equal to the Army and Navy.) Those generals were mostly right about Air Corps pilots: they were willing, and they were brave.  But  in the harsh winter storms of 1934, Air Corps pilots kept crash-ing. Early on the morning of March 10, after the ninth pilot died in twenty days, FDR summoned General Benjamin
Foulois, commander of the Air Corps, to the White House. "General," the president said fiercely, "when are these airmail killings going to stop?" It was a good question, one that Roosevelt might have di-rected at the whole enterprise of pilot training. Early pilot training was built on the bedrock belief that good pilots are
born, not made. Most programs followed an identical proce-dure: the instructor would take the prospective student up in the plane and execute a series of loops and rolls. If the student did not get sick, he was deemed to have the capability to be-come a pilot and, after several weeks of ground school, was gradually allowed to handle the controls. Trainees learned by taxiing, or "penguin-hopping" in stubby-winged crafts, or
they flew and hoped. (Lucky Lindy's nickname was well learned.) The system didn't work too well. Early fatality rates at some Army aviation schools approached 25 percent; in 1912 eight of the fourteen U.S. Army pilots died in crashes.  By 1934 techniques and technology had been refined but training remained primitive. The Airmail Fiasco, as Roosevelt's prob-lem swiftly became known, raised the question pointedly: was
there a better way to learn to fly? The answer came from an unlikely source: Edwin Albert
Link, Jr., the son of a piano and organ maker from Bingham-ton,  New York, who grew up working at his father's factory. Skinny, beak-nosed, and epically stubborn, Link was a tin-kerer by nature. When he was sixteen, he fell in love with fly-ing and took a $50 lesson from Sydney Chaplin (half brother of the movie star). "For the better part of that hour we did loops and spins and buzzed everything in sight," Link later re-called. "Thank heaven I didn't get sick, but when we got down, I hadn't touched the controls at all. I thought, 'That's a hell of a way to teach someone to fly." Link's fascination grew. He started hanging around local
barnstormers, cadging lessons. Link's father didn't appreciate his interest in flying—he briefly fired young Edwin from his job at the organ factory when he found out about it. But Link kept at it, eventually purchasing a four-seat Cessna. All the while his tinkerer's mind kept circling the notion of improv-ing pilot training. In 1927, seven years after his initial lesson with Chaplin, Link went to work. Borrowing bellows and pneumatic pumps from the organ factory, he built a device that compressed the key elements of a plane into a space
slightly roomier than a bathtub. It featured stubby prehensile wings, a tiny tail, an instrument panel, and an electric motor that made the device roll, pitch, and yaw in response to the pi-lot controls. A small light on the nose lit up when the pilot made an error. Link christened it the Link Aviation Trainer and put up an advertisement: he would teach regular flying and instrument flying—that is, the ability to fly blind through
fog and storms while relying on gauges alone. He would teach pilots to fly in half the time of regular training and at a frac-tion of the cost.

To say that the world overlooked Link's trainer wouldn't be accurate. The truth was, the world looked at it and issued a resounding and conclusive no. No one he approached seemed interested in Link's device—not the military academies, not private flying schools, not even barnstormers. After all, how could you learn to fly in a child's toy? No less an authority than the U.S. Patent Office declared Link's trainer a "novel,
profitable amusement device." And so it seemed destined to become. While Link sold fifty trainers to amusement parks and penny arcades, only two reached actual training facilities: one he sold to a Navy airfield in Pensacola, Florida, and an-other he loaned to the New Jersey National Guard unit in Newark. By the early 1930s Link was reduced to hauling one of his trainers on a flatbed truck to county fairgrounds, charg-ing twenty-five cents a ride.

When the Airmail Fiasco hit in the winter of 1934, how-ever, a group of Air Corps brass grew desperate. Casey Jones, a veteran pilot who had trained many of the Army pilots, re-called Link's trainer and ersuaded a group of Air Corps offi-cers to take a second look. In early March, Link was summoned to fly from his home in Cortland, New York, to Newark to demonstrate the trainer he'd loaned to the National Guard.
The appointed day was cloudy, with zero visibility, nasty winds, and driving rain. The Air Corps ommanders, by now familiar with the possible outcomes of such hazards, surmised that no pilot, no matter how brave or skilled, could possibly fly in such weather. They were just leaving the field when they heard a telltale drone overhead in the clouds, steadily de-scending. Link's plane appeared as a ghost, materializing only
a few feet above the runway, kissed down with a perfect land-ing, and taxied up to the surprised generals. The skinny fellow did not look like Lindbergh, but he flew like him—and on in-struments, no less. Link proceeded to demonstrate his trainer, and in one of the first recorded instances of nerd power trumping military tradition, the officers understood its poten-tial. The generals ordered the first shipment of Link trainers. Seven years later, World War II began, and with it the need to transform thousands of unskilled youth into pilots as quickly and safely as possible. That need was answered by ten thousand Link trainers; by the end of the war, a half-million airmen had logged millions of hours in what they fondly called "The Blue Box."* In 1947 the Air Corps became the U.S. Air Force, and Link went on to build simulators for jets,
bombers, and the lunar module for the Apollo mission. Edwin Link's trainer worked so well for the same reason you scored 300 percent better on Bjork's blank-letter test. Link's trainer permitted pilots to practice more deeply, to stop, struggle, make errors, and learn from them. During a few hours in a Link trainer, a pilot could "take off " and "land" a dozen times on instruments.  He  could dive, stall, and recover, spending hours inhabiting the sweet spot at the edge of his ca-pabilities in ways he could never risk in an actual plane. The
Air Corps pilots who trained in Links were no braver or smarter than the ones who crashed. They simply had the opportunity to practice more deeply.

This idea of deep practice makes perfect sense in train-ing for dangerous jobs like those of fighter pilots and astro-nauts. It gets interesting, however, when we apply it to other kinds of skills. Like, for instance, those of Brazil's soccer players.

BRAZIL'S SECRET WEAPON

Like many sports fans around the world, soccer coach Simon Clifford was fascinated by the supernatural skills of Brazilian soccer players. Unlike most fans, however, he decided to go to Brazil to see if he could find out how they developed those skills. This was an unusually ambitious initiative on Clifford's
part, considering that he had gained all his coaching experi-ence at a Catholic elementary school in the soccer non-hotbed of Leeds, England. Then again, Clifford is not what you'd call usual. He's tall and dashingly handsome and radiates the sort of charismatic, bulletproof confidence one usually associates
with missionaries and emperors. (In his early twenties Clifford was severely injured in a freak soccer accident—suffering in-ternal organ damage, kidney removal—and perhaps as a re-sult he approaches each day with immoderate zeal.) In the summer of 1997, when he was twenty-six, Clifford borrowed $8,000 from his teachers' union and set out for Brazil toting a backpack, a video camera, and a notebook full of phone num-bers he'd cajoled from a Brazilian player he'd met. Once there, Clifford spent most of his time exploring the
thronging expanse of Sao Paolo, sleeping in roach-infested dormitories by night, scribbling notes by day. He saw many things he'd expected to find: the passion, the tradition, the highly organized training centers, the long practice sessions. (Teenage players at Brazilian soccer academies log twenty hours per week, compared with five hours per week for their British counterparts.) He saw the towering poverty of the
favelas, and the desperation in the players' eyes.

But Clifford also saw something he didn't expect: a strange game. It resembled soccer, if soccer were played inside a phone booth and dosed with amphetamines. The ball was half the size but weighed twice as much; it hardly bounced at all. The players trained, not on a vast expanse of grass field, but on 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 resem-bled basketball or hockey more than soccer: it consisted of an skills. This was an unusually ambitious initiative on Clifford's part, considering that he had gained all his coaching experi-ence at a Catholic elementary school in the soccer non-hotbed of Leeds, England. Then again, Clifford is not what you'd call usual. He's tall and dashingly handsome and radiates the sort
of charismatic, bulletproof confidence one usually associates with missionaries and emperors. (In his early twenties Clifford was severely injured in a freak soccer accident—suffering in-ternal organ damage, kidney removal—and perhaps as a re-sult he approaches each day with immoderate zeal.) In the summer of 1997, when he was twenty-six, Clifford borrowed $8,000 from his teachers' union and set out for Brazil toting a
backpack, a video camera, and a notebook full of phone num-bers he'd cajoled from a Brazilian player he'd met.

Once there, Clifford spent most of his time exploring the thronging expanse of Sao Paolo, sleeping in roach-infested dormitories by night, scribbling notes by day. He saw many things he'd expected to find: the passion, the tradition, the highly organized training centers, the long practice sessions. (Teenage players at Brazilian soccer academies log twenty hours per week, compared with five hours per week for their British counterparts.) He saw the towering poverty of the favelas, and the desperation in the players' eyes.
But Clifford also saw something he didn't expect: a strange game. It resembled soccer, if soccer were played inside a phone booth and dosed with amphetamines. The ball was half the size but weighed twice as much; it hardly bounced at all.

The players trained, not on a vast expanse of grass field, but on 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 resem-bled basketball or hockey more than soccer: it consisted of an intricate series of quick, controlled passes and nonstop end-to-end action. The game was called  futebol de salao, Portuguese for "soccer in the room." Its modern incarnation was called futsal. "It was clear to me that this was where Brazilian skills were born," Clifford said. "It was like finding the missing link."

Futsal had been invented in 1930 as a rainy-day training option by a Uruguayan coach. Brazilians quickly seized upon it and codified the first rules in 1936. Since then the game had spread like a virus, especially in Brazil's crowded cities, and it quickly came to occupy a unique place in Brazilian sporting cul-ture. Other nations played futsal, but Brazil became uniquely obsessed with it, in part because the game could be played
anywhere (no small advantage in a nation where grass fields are rare). Futsal grew to command the passions of Brazilian kids in the same way that pickup basketball commands the passions of inner-city American kids. Brazil dominates the sport's organized version, winning 35 of 38 international competitions, according to Vicente Figueiredo, author of History of Futebol de Salao. But that number only suggests the ti me, effort, and energy that Brazil pours into this strange homemade game. As Alex Bellos, author of  Futebol:Soccer,
the Brazilian Way,  wrote, futsal "is regarded as the incubator of the Brazilian soul."

The incubation is reflected in players' biographies. From Pele onward virtually every great Brazilian player played fut-sal as a kid, first in the neighborhood and later at Brazil's soc-cer academies, where from ages seven to around twelve they typically devoted three days a week to futsal. A top Brazilian player spends thousands of hours at the game. The great Juninho, for instance, said he never kicked a full-size ball on grass until he was fourteen. Until he was twelve, Robinho spent half his training time playing futsal.*

Like a vintner identifying a lovely strain of grape, a cognoscente like Dr. Emilio Miranda, professor of soccer at the University of Sao Paolo, can identify the futsal wiring within famous Brazilian soccer tricks. That elastico move that Ronaldinho popularized, drawing the ball in and out like a yo-yo? It originated in futsal. The toe-poke goal that Ronaldo scored in the 2002 World Cup? Again, futsal. Moves like the
d'espero, el barret,  and vaselina?  All came from futsal. When I told Miranda that I'd imagined Brazilians built skills by play-ing soccer on the beach, he laughed. "Journalists fly here, go to the beach, they take pictures and write stories.  But  great players don't come from the beach. They come from the fut-sal court."
One reason lies in the math. Futsal players touch the ball far more often than soccer players—six times more often per minute, according to a Liverpool University study. The smaller, heavier ball demands and rewards more precise handling—as coaches point out, you can't get out of a tight spot simply by booting the ball downfield. Sharp passing is paramount: the game is all about looking for angles and spaces and working
quick combinations with other players. Ball control and vi-sion are crucial, so that when futsal players play the full-size game, they feel as if they have acres of free space in which to operate. When I watched professional outdoor games in Sao Paolo sitting with  Dr.  Miranda, he would point out players
who had played futsal: he could tell by the way they held the ball. They didn't care how close their opponent came. As Dr. Miranda summed up, "No time plus no space equals better skills. Futsal is our national laboratory of improvisation." In other words, Brazilian soccer is different from the rest of the world's because Brazil employs the sporting equivalent of a Link trainer. Futsal compresses soccer's essential skills
into a small box; it places players inside the deep practice zone, making and correcting errors, constantly generating solutions to vivid problems. Players touching the ball 600 percent more often learn far faster, without realizing it, than they would in the vast, bouncy expanse of the outdoor game (where, at least in my mind, players run along to the sound-track of Clarissa tootling away on "The Blue Danube").

To be clear: futsal is not the only reason Brazilian soccer is great. The other factors so often cited—climate, passion, and poverty—really do matter. But futsal is the lever through which those other factors transfer their force. When Simon Clifford saw futsal, he got excited. He re-turned home, quit his teaching job, and founded the International Confederation of Futebol de Saldo in a spare room of his house, developing a soccer program for elementary-and high-school-age kids that he called the Brazilian Soccer School. He constructed an elaborate series of drills based on futsal moves. His players, who mostly hailed from a rough,
impoverished area of Leeds, started imitating the Zicos and Ronaldinhos. To create the proper ambience, Clifford played samba music on a boom box.

Let's step back a moment and take an objective look at what Clifford was doing. He was running an experiment to see whether Brazil's million-footed talent factory could be grafted to an utterly foreign land via this small, silly game. He was betting that the act of playing futsal would cause some glowing kernel of Brazilian magic to take root in sooty, chilly Leeds.

When the citizens of Leeds heard of Clifford's plan, they were mildly entertained. When they actually witnessed his school in action, they were in grave danger of laughing them-selves to death at the spectacle: dozens of pale, pink-cheeked, thick-necked Yorkshire kids kicking around small, too-heavy
balls, learning fancy tricks to the tune of samba music. It was a laugh, except for one detail—Clifford was right.

Four years later Clifford's team of under-fourteens de-feated 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. Clifford's Brazilian Soccer School has expanded to a dozen countries around the world. More stars, Clifford says, are on the way.