Gregg Goodhart - The Learning Coach

Most of what we call talent is just focused practice you didn't see.

The people who 'have it' practice differently.

In this video I walk through why most people who think they lack talent actually don't, and what changes when you start treating skill as something you build through focused practice.

With everyone heading back to school, we should be thinking about how we teach kids. We spend years on what to learn and almost no time on how to learn.

Deliberate practice is the science of how real skill gets built, and it doesn't stop at practicing an instrument. It's how you get better at anything: math, music, a sport, a language, at any age, any skill level.

When was the last time you got so absorbed in fixing something in practice that you lost track of time?

Most players get the focus backwards: they coast in practice, then focus like crazy on stage. Do the opposite. Focus hard in practice and the stage starts to take care of itself.

Try this now: pick one rough spot and treat finding and fixing it like a level to beat. That hunt is where the mental strength gets built.

Every skill, math, music, a jump shot, comes down to two things: how much you practice and how you practice.

Most of us have the how much handled: suck it up and put in the hours. It works, eventually. But those same hours, spent differently, can make for far more progress, and practice stops being something you just endure.

Most of what people call practice doesn't make them better.

What's the thing you do that shuts out everything else for a while?

The right kind of practice isn't a grind. It's a quiet, structured place you actually want to be, where the hours disappear and skill reappears.

What's a piece you've pulled up so many times it now runs on its own?

Near the end of learning a piece, the work changes: you stop building it and start repping it cold. That's retrieval practice, and every rep makes the next one stronger, even the wrong ones. It's called the testing effect.

When you're performing, what's the first tiny flaw you catch that never seems to bother you in the practice room?

On stage we live and die by every note: that buzz, that clipped ending, that off fi*****ng. Performing doesn't create those flaws. It turns the volume up to 11 so you finally notice them.

Where does your base level show up: a lesson, a recording, the walk onstage?

There's a name for what shows up under pressure: base level playing. It's what you can pull from memory on the first try, with no second chance and no time to think.

Carol Dweck's book Mindset makes the case: nobody ever got good at anything without a lot of mistakes along the way. The only real choice is where you meet them: in practice, or on stage.

If you've read it, what stuck with you?