“Talent Whisperers” and Other Career Development Trends

Posted on | January 15, 2010 |

Like the guy looking for the perfect country song formula, most of us are looking for a formula for successful career development. In his book the Talent Code, Daniel Coyle claims the formula for a successful career depends on three crucial factors:

Practicing slowly, deeply, and attentively—operating right at the raw edges of your ability, making errors and fixing them. It’s a zone he calls Deep Practice, and he claims it increases skill acquisition by ten times over regular practice.

Get motivated and release unconscious energy, a process that he calls Ignition.

Get coached by a “talent whisperer”, usually a quiet, usually older, usually low-key person (didn’t this person used to be called a mentor?).

According to Coyle one of these factors isn’t enough by itself—you need all three. Through the right kind of practice, you are literally altering the electrical circuits of your brain and you are growing it. Just like a car engine is useless without a fuel tank, so, according to Coyle, Deep Practice is useless without motivation. Combine them, and things take off.

Coyle’s conclusions are similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s in his book Outliers. Gladwell claims that the best way to achieve mastery in any field of human endeavor is to spend 10,000 hours honing your skills. The greatest athletes, entrepreneurs, musicians and scientists emerge only after spending at least three hours a day for a decade mastering their chosen field. Ability, according to Gladwell, is just one factor in success—work ethic, luck, a strong support base and even being born in the right month play a far larger role than you would expect.

So putting it all together, the formula for career success seems to be a combination of:

Practice

Motivation

Luck

Getting born at the right time

And having a “Talent Whisperer”

I’m not sure the recipe for the perfect county song is fully there yet. You’ve seen it here first folks!

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January 15th, 2010 @ 8:50 pm

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