The Little Book of Talent by Nathan Coyle

The Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle offers tips on improving hard and soft skills.  He discovered these while reporting for five years on talent hotbeds around the world.  His tips focus on getting started, improving skills and sustaining progress.  

Hard skills are those that require practiced repetition.  An example would be shooting a basketball or playing a musical instruments.  Soft skills include the need to improvise or think on your feet.  These include managing people, raising children, creating new music or dance.   He describes the hard skills as the trunk of the tree and the soft skills as the branches.

He recommends watching and observing someone who is better than you are at a specific skill then attempt it.  Other authors have noted that you will fail to  exactly mimic the other person but you will become better and develop your own style. 

Coaching with vivid short examples

 

Use vivid images

 

He recommends that you stretch yourself by going to the sweet spot between easy and overwhelming difficulty.  Other's have described this as the Goldilocks zone.  He also notes that child prodigies often burn out because they fail to take the risks needed and think of talent as a gift rather than something that requires focused practice and effort.  Other authors have noted that children do better if they are told that they are good at learning from mistakes rather than having a fixed trait of being intelligent.

Book Summary from Main Take Away

The book, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills is available from Amazon.com.