The Talent Code

because they were willing to spend vast amounts of time and energy being immature and imitative,

The unskilled quality of their early writing isn't a contradiction of the literary heights they eventually achieved—it's a prerequisite to

Struggle is not an option: it's a biological requirement

Good advertising operates by the same principles of deep practice, increasing learning by placing viewers in the sweet spot at the edge of their capabilities

practice more deeply.

practice more deeply, to stop, struggle, make errors, and learn from them

Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways—operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes—makes you smarter.

“It's all about finding the sweet spot,” Bjork said. “There's an optimal gap between what you know and what you're trying to do. When you find that sweet spot, learning takes off.”*

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 present abilities; to target the struggle. Thrashing blindly doesn't help. Reaching does.

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, encountering and overcoming difficulties, the more scaffolding we build. The more scaffolding we build, the faster we learn.”