The Sweet Spot

In December 2006 I began visiting tiny places that produce Everest-size amounts of talent.* My journey began at a ram-shackle tennis court in Moscow, and over the next fourteen months it took me to a soccer field in Sao  Paolo, Brazil, a vocal studio in Dallas, Texas, an inner-city school in San Jose, Cali-fornia, a run-down music academy in New York's Adirondacks, a baseball-mad island in the Caribbean, and a handful of other places so small, humble, and titanically accomplished that a friend dubbed them "the chicken-wire Harvards."

Undertaking the journey presented me with a few chal-lenges, the first of which was to explain it to my wife and four young kids in as logical (read: un-harebrained) a way as possi-ble. So I decided to frame it as a Great Expedition, sort of like those undertaken by nineteenth-century naturalists. I made straight-faced comparisons between my trip and Charles Darwin's voyage aboard the Beagle; I sagely expounded how
small, isolated places magnify larger patterns and forces, sort of like petri dishes. These explanations seemed to work—at least for a moment. "Daddy's going on a treasure hunt," I overheard my ten-year-old daughter Katie patiently explain to her younger sis-ters. "You know, like at a birthday party."

A treasure hunt, a birthday—actually that wasn't too far off. The nine hotbeds I visited shared almost nothing except the happy unlikeliness of their existence. Each was a statistical impossibility, a mouse that had not only roared but that had somehow come to rule the forest. But how? The first clue arrived in the form of an unexpected pattern.

When I started visiting talent hotbeds, I expected to be daz-zled. I expected to witness world-class speed, power, and grace. Those expectations were met and exceeded—about half the time. For that half of the time, being in a talent hotbed felt like standing amid a herd of running deer: every-thing moved faster and more fluently than in everyday life. (You haven't had your ego truly tested until an eight-year-old
takes pity on you on the tennis court.) But that was only half of the time. During the other half I
witnessed something very different: moments of slow, fitful struggle, rather like what I'd seen on the Clarissa video. It was as if the herd of deer suddenly encountered a hillside coated with ice. They slammed to a halt; they stopped, looked, and thought carefully before taking each step. Making progress became a matter of small failures, a rhythmic pattern of botches, as well as something else: a shared facial expression. Their
taut, intense squint caused them to take on (I know this sounds weird) an unaccountable resemblance to Clint Eastwood.

Meet Brunio. He's eleven years old, working on a new soc-cer move on a concrete playground in Sao Paolo, Brazil. He moves slowly, feeling the ball roll beneath the sole of his cheap sneaker. He is trying to learn the elastico,  a ball-handling ma-neuver in which he nudges the ball with the outside of his foot, then quickly swings his foot around the ball to flick it the opposite direction with his instep. Done properly, the move gives the viewer the impression that the player has the ball on a rubber band. The first time we watch Brunio try the move, he fails, then stops and thinks. He does it again more slowly and fails again—the ball squirts away. He stops and thinks again. He does it even more slowly, breaking the move down
to its component parts—this,  this,  and  that.  His face is taut; his eyes are so focused, they look like they're somewhere else. Then something clicks: he starts nailing the move. Meet Jennie. She's twenty-four years old, and she's in a cramped Dallas vocal studio working on the chorus of a pop song called "Running Out of Time." She is trying to hit the big finish, in which she turns the word time into a waterfall of notes. She tries it, screws up, stops, and thinks, then sings it again at a much slower speed. Each time she misses a note, she
stops and returns to the beginning, or to the spot where she missed. Jennie sings and stops, sings and stops. Then all of a sudden, she gets it. The pieces snap into place. The sixth time through, Jennie sings the measure perfectly.

When we see people practice effectively, we usually de-scribe it with words like  willpower  or concentration or focus. But those words don't quite fit, because they don't capture the ice-climbing particularity of the event. The people inside the tal-ent hotbeds are engaged in an activity that seems, on the face of it, strange and surprising. They are seeking out the slip-pery hills. Like Clarissa, they are purposely operating at the edges of their ability, so they will screw up. And somehow screwing up is making them better. How? Trying to describe the collective talent of Brazilian soccer players is like trying to describe the law of gravity. You can measure it—the five World Cup victories, the nine hundred or so young talents signed each year by professional European clubs. Or you can name it—the procession of transcendent
stars like Pele, Zico, Socrates, Romario, Ronaldo, Juninho, Robinho, Ronaldinho, Kaka, and others who have deservedly worn the crown of "world's best player." But in the end you can't capture the power of Brazilian talent in numbers and names. It has to be felt. Every day soccer fans around the world witness the quintessential scene: a group of enemy play-ers surround a Brazilian, leaving him no options, no space, no
hope. Then there's a dancelike blur of motion—a feint, a flick, a burst of speed—and suddenly the Brazilian player is in the clear, moving away from his now-tangled opponents with the casual aplomb of a person stepping off a crowded bus. Each day, Brazil accomplishes something extremely difficult and unlikely: in a game at which the entire world is feverishly competing, it continues to produce an unusually high percent-age of the most skilled players.

The conventional way to explain this kind of concentrated talent is to attribute it to a combination of genes and environ-ment, a.k.a. nature and nurture. In this way of thinking, Brazil is great because it possesses a unique confluence of factors: a friendly climate, a deep passion for soccer, and a genet-ically diverse population of 190 million, 40 percent of whom are desperately poor and long to escape through "the beauti-ful game." Add up all the factors and—voila!—you have the ideal factory for soccer greatness.

But there's a slight problem with this explanation: Brazil wasn't always a great producer of soccer players. In the 1940s and 1950s, with its trifecta of climate, passion, and poverty already firmly in place, the ideal factory produced unspectac-ular results, never winning a World Cup, failing to defeat then-world-power Hungary in four tries, showing few of the dazzling improvisational skills for which it would later become
known. It wasn't until 1958 that the Brazil the world now rec-ognizes truly arrived, in the form of a brilliant team featuring seventeen-year-old Pele, at the World Cup in Sweden.* If sometime during the next decade Brazil should shockingly lose its lofty place in the sport (as Hungary so shockingly did), then the Brazil-is-unique argument leaves us with no conceivable response except to shrug and celebrate the new
champion, which undoubtedly will also possess a set of char-acteristics all its own.

So how does Brazil produce so many great players? The surprising answer is that Brazil produces great players because since the 1950s Brazilian players have trained in a par-ticular way, with a particular tool that improves ball-handling skill faster than anywhere else in the world. Like a nation of Clarissas, they have found a way to increase their learning velocity—and like her, they are barely aware of it. I call this
kind of training deep practice, and as we'll see, it applies to more than soccer.

The best way to understand the concept of deep practice is to do it. Take a few seconds to look at the following lists; spend the same amount of time on each one.
A  B
ocean / breeze  bread / b_tter
leaf/ tree  music / l_rics
sweet / sour  sh_e / sock
movie / actress  phone / bo_k
gasoline / engine  chi_s / salsa
high school / college  pen_il / paper
turkey / stuffing  river / b_at
fruit / vegetable  be_r / wine
computer / chip  television / rad_o
chair / couch  l_nch / dinner


Now turn the page. Without looking, try to remember as many of the word pairs as you can. From which column do you recall more words? If you're like most people, it won't even be close: you will remember more of the words in column B, the ones that con-tained fragments. Studies show you'll remember three times as many. It's as if, in those few seconds, your memory skills suddenly sharpened. If this had been a test, your column B score would have been 300 percent higher.

Your IQ did not increase while you looked at column B. You didn't feel different. You weren't touched by genius (sorry). But when you encountered the words with blank spaces, some-thing both imperceptible and profound happened. You stopped. You stumbled ever so briefly, then figured it out. You experi-enced a microsecond of struggle, and that microsecond made all the difference. You didn't practice harder when you looked at column B. You practiced deeper. Another example: let's say you're at a party and you're
struggling to remember someone's name. If someone else gives you that name, the odds of your forgetting it again are high. But if you manage to retrieve the name on your own—to fire the signal yourself, as opposed to passively receiving the information—you'll engrave it into your memory. Not because that name is somehow more important, or because your memory improved, but simply because you practiced
deeper.

Or let's say you're on an airplane, and for the umpteenth time in your life you watch the cabin steward give that clear, concise one-minute demonstration of how to put on a life vest. ("Slip the vest over your head," the instructions say, "and fasten the two black straps to the front of the vest. Inflate the vest by pulling down on the red tabs.") An hour into the flight, the plane lurches, and the captain's urgent voice comes on the intercom telling passengers to put on their life vests.

How quickly could you do it? How do those black straps wrap around? What do the red tabs do again?
Here's an alternate scenario: same airplane flight, but this ti me instead of observing yet another life jacket demonstration, higher than Group A. They'd studied one-fourth as much yet learned far more. (Catherine Fritz, one of Bjork's students, said she applied these ideas to her schoolwork, and raised her GPA by a full point while studying half as much.)