The Science of Genius: Myelin, Practice, and Motivation

Genius is cultivated through deep practice, ignition, and master coaching, enabling anyone to enhance their skills.

### Unlocking Genius: The Science of Myelin and Skill Development
* 🧠 "The key difference between geniuses and average individuals is the **amount of myelin in their brains**, which enhances the **speed and strength of neural signals**."
* 📚 In his book "The Talent Code," Daniel Coyle explains that **genius can be cultivated through specific practices**, even outside of talent hotbeds.
* ⚡ Myelin acts like insulation around nerve fibers, allowing for **faster and more efficient skill execution**; thus, the more myelin present, the **better the skill**.
* 🔄 To grow myelin, one must engage in **deep practice**, which involves **repetitive, focused efforts** on a skill, and is **essential for myelin development**.
* 🔥 Ignition, the second ingredient, is the **internal spark or motivation** that drives individuals to persist in deep practice, often ignited by **primal cues from mentors or role models**.
* 🏆 Master coaching is the final ingredient, emphasizing the **importance of guidance from experienced individuals** who can provide **feedback and keep motivation high**.
* 🌐 With the rise of online communities and AI, aspiring geniuses can now access resources and feedback, making the journey to **skill mastery more attainable than ever**.
* ⏳ Ultimately, developing genius requires **consistent practice, motivation, and the right support**, proving that anyone can **train themselves to excel** in their chosen field.

you can train yourself to become a genius. Cristiano Ronaldo, Michelangelo, insert whoever it is that you consider to be a genius. If you were to take a picture of their brain and compared it to those of normal people, the key difference you would find is that in certain parts of their brain, they have more of this sticky white gooey stuff called myelin, and that is what genius looks like. But it's not like they were just born this way. There are literally places in this world called Talent hotbeds where people would go to grow their brains and to become geniuses. So, I recently learned this by reading this book called The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. In this video, I wanted to break down this book to understand how genius is made and if you happen to unfortunately not live in a talent hotbed, how to train yourself to become a genius in the field of your choosing. These are nerve cells called neurons that are activating like a circuit, and this one just resulted in a baseball swing. These ones a beautiful

recital and these ones is a dude eating a hot dog. So, you might be thinking right now that these kind of all look the same, and you would be correct because you see from a brain's perspective. Every skill is just specific neurons firing tiny electrical impulses and activating like circuits. But what is the difference between a shitty baseball swing and that of a Pro's home run? Me playing a piano versus Yo-Yo Ma? An average dude just enjoying his Costco hot dog versus Joey Chestnut, who just broke the hot dog eating record by eating 83 hot dogs in under 10 minutes. The answer is myelin. Specifically, the experts have a lot of myelin, and normal people have not that much myelin. The way that myelin works is similar to how insulation works around copper electrical wires. Like, for example, here I have a pretty standard charging cable. You have your USB plug over here, and then your USBC over here. And along here, inside, you can't see it, but there's actually copper wires to conduct electricity. But

What you can see on the outside is that there's this rubber that wraps around it, and the rubber is there for a couple of important reasons. The first one is that so that I don't touch it and shock myself to death, and the second reason is that prevents the signal from leaking out, so it allows the signal to be faster and stronger. And this is how myelin works as well. It wraps around the nerve fibers of these neuron cells, so the signal is able to go through stronger and faster. So, the more myelin that a person's circuit has, the faster and stronger that signal will be, which would lead to them being more skilled. All right, I got to go charge my phone. Okay, so that was a little bit simplified, and of course, there are other factors out there as well, but it is true. The key to genius and to talent is to have more myelin in the right circuits, and that is why the secret to genius is learning how to grow more myelin, which is what the rest of the book is about.

specifically, there are three key ingredients to growing myelin. But before I get into that, I do want to cover some of the other fundamental traits that myelin has, which will come in handy when you learn more about how to grow myelin. Number one, the firing of the circuit is paramount. You see, myelin doesn't just grow whenever it is that you want it to grow. In order to get it to grow, it's very important for you to activate the neural circuit for that specific skill in order to trigger the myelin to grow around it. In other words, you need to repeat a skill in order to get the myelin to grow, and it's not some sort of like repeating however it is that you want kind of situation. You need to repeat the skill in a very specific way in order to trigger myelin growth, and I'll explain exactly how in just a bit. Number two, myelin is universal, one size fits all skills. I kind of touched upon this earlier in the video, but basically, your brain doesn't care

what it is that your skill is. It could be, you know, playing a violin. It could be cating. It could be whatever. The circuit is in your brain. Myelin works the same way. If there's more myelin in that circuit, it means the circuit will be stronger and faster, and the skill will be better. This is why learning any skill, becoming a genius in any field, follows the same fundamental principles. Number three: myelin wraps, it doesn't unwrap. It's why that if you develop a skill and then, even if you don't use it for a really long time, it's still fundamentally there. This is also why habits are so hard to break, because if you develop a certain habit and it's encoded into your brain circuits and there's myelin surrounding it, myelin doesn't unwrap, right? So the habit never truly goes away. And finally, the last fundamental principle is that age matters. It is true if you've ever looked at kids when they're trying to learn a new skill, like learn a new language or like learn how to bike or something. They

do it so quickly. They kind of just like almost absorb that information in. And that's because when you're younger, it's a lot easier to form myelin. But before you click off this video and think, Oh no, I am old. I might as well just learn nothing. It is good to also know that there are still 5% of illegal sites which are cells that produce the myelin that remain immature for your entire life. So even if you're over the age of 30, over the age of 50, you still are able to create more myelin and to learn more skills. This is a clip of someone doing deep practice versus just normal practice. Write in the comments what kind of differences you can see. This girl who's doing deep practice, what's happening inside right now is that there's a lot of myelin that's being produced, just wrapping around the circuits for violin playing. Now for the normal practice one, the circuit is still activating, like it's still going off every time that the song is being played, but it's not really

activating any myin production. In other words, she's not actually improving her skill; she's just sort of doing it. Deep practice, which is when you actually generate myin, is a very specific sweet spot that's only reached when you're at the boundary of pushing your skill. You can actually see that in her face, right? She's like really concentrating. You can tell that it is taking a massive amount of energy and effort to be doing what she's doing. This is the first ingredient on how to grow myin on the road to genius. The first thing you do is that you want to do the whole skill as in a complete ho to kind of get an understanding of what it feels like. So, let's actually use that violin example. So, when you first see a new violin piece that you've never played before, the first thing that you do is that you try to play the whole thing through, probably pretty [Music] terribly. What you do after this initial chunk is that you break up the music score into different components into

smaller chunks, and you practice each of these chunks until you get to perfection. While you're doing that, you also want to play with the dimension of time. When you take that chunk of music, you want to slow everything down, like painfully slow it down, until you're playing every single note painstakingly to perfection with perfect precision. Then you do that with all your other chunks until ultimately you put everything back together again. Chunking, of course, is not just for music. I'm sure you've heard of drills before, especially in the context of maybe like sports, like basketball or football. A dribbling drill in basketball is an example of chunking because you're taking the entire gameplay and focusing only on the dribbling portion of it. You'll notice that the best players will practice doing that dribbling drill over and over and over again, doing it really, really slowly or doing it really, really quickly, and just experimenting and getting to feel for it until they can get it to perfection. Then they do that for all

the other parts of gameplay as well, like shooting, passing. I also want to give you a non-physical example, like coding. Maybe when you start learning how to code, you're just really bad at it. It's like a piece of whatever it is that you wrote. So, you break down that skill and chunk it together into its subcomponents, like understanding the requirements of a code, choosing the right algorithm to be using, optimizing runtime. Pop Quiz: how many hours a day do you think is the ideal amount of time to practice any skill of your choosing? A. less than 1 hour, B. 1 to 4 hours, C. 4 to 8 hours, or D. 8 hours to as much as you possibly can. The answer is B. 1 to 4 hours. Let me know in the comments what you guessed. So, this is actually pretty surprising to me because it's kind of like this thing where people are like, Oh, like how do I, like how do you, like work for 4 hours, 8 hours, 10 hours, you

know 12 hours plus a day. It's kind of like tooted, touted, I don't know the right word. It's like people see it as a badge of honor in terms of the number of hours that they can put in towards working towards a skill. But the research actually shows that 1 to 4 hours of deep practice a day is the most productive and the most sustainable. It's also a little different for each person. Like for me personally, I realize that the amount of deep practice that is sustainable for me is around 2 hours, like 3 hours max. This is the second ingredient on growing genius ignition. Ignition is that spark that lights that passion and motivation. As you saw earlier, deep practice is a lot of work. It's very strenuous, it's very frustrating, and it's really, really hard. So there needs to be something that motivates someone to do that deep practice day in and day out, painstakingly, even missing out on a lot of other fun activities, just to sit there and continue practicing and

developing their skills and ignition is a tricky thing because if you ask geniuses or geniuses and training um why it is that they feel so compelled and motivated and passionate towards their craft they'll probably just say something like oh like I don't know I've just always felt this way like I just I don't know I just this is just who I am and what I want to do but that's actually not true I'm not saying that they're lying or anything like that it's simply the fact that they themselves actually don't know either it's a very subconscious process or more accurately a collection of subconscious signals called primal cues. Primal cues are subconscious signals that tap into basic human motivations such as a need to belong, to achieve status, or to fulfill an identity, something that makes a person say I want that, I need that. A common primal cue is when you see someone that you consider to be an idol and inspiration, someone that you want to be for many South

Korean female golfers received this primal cue on May 18th, 1998. This is when a 21-year-old Siri Puck won the McDonald's LPGA championship, and she became a national icon. All across television, there were some little girls at that time that saw her there and thought to themselves, Wow, she is so cool, and she looks just like me, and I want to be like her. I want to be like that as well. And 10 years later, with lots of deep practice, some of those girls actually made it onto the LPGA tour and dominated the event. 45 players collectively won 1/3 of all the events. Many people also receive a primal cue from a teacher or a mentor, especially for young musicians. One day they're kind of just like me, whatever, uh, at another moment, they might see a teacher just play something in a very specific way, and they suddenly just get hit by how beautiful it is, and they realize that they also want to be like that, and

that ignites the fire in them. There's another very common one that is kind of sad. You'll find that many geniuses often have one where both parents die before the age of 15. And what that does is that it sends the Primal CU into that kid: You are not safe in this world. And that's something that could ignite a passion and motivation in someone because they want to get better and to improve, to be able to make a living out of their skill so that they can make themselves feel safe again. Ignition is a lot harder to manufacture because it's basically just being bombarded with a bunch of Primal cues until suddenly, like something just clicks in you. The Practical advice from the book is that just try your best to submerge yourself in places that have a lot of Primal cues. Like if you're potentially interested in golf, then you should kind of join golf clubs and golf tournaments, take some golf lessons, and be around people who are also aspiring to become a certain type of

Genius. So, I feel like that's all well and good, and definitely, I would agree. That's why I try my best to make myself go to certain events and then also just be around people who have the same goals as me. But when I read this part of the book, it kind of made me feel a little discouraged because it's kind of like, what if I don't have access to those things, right? Like, I want to become a really good YouTuber. What if I don't have access to really good YouTubers that I can hang out with and just do stuff with? And also, in addition to that, maybe I'm just too socially awkward to be able to kind of, you know, like, make those connections, if that makes sense. So, it was like a little bit discouraging, and maybe some of you guys watching this video as well feel like that as well. Like, you have something that you want to develop, some skill that you want to do, but you just feel like you don't really have access.

to kind of the right surroundings for you to do that. And after thinking about this, I realized that actually that's not exactly true because there are actually things I can do to get access to other people, and I'll go into more detail about this later in the video because I specifically titled the video How to Train Yourself to Become a Genius, not How Do I Get Myself into the Right Position So That I Can Be Trained to Be a Genius. So yeah, I do have some tips for [Music] that. Now we know the first two ingredients for creating genius: deep practice and ignition. And that is great and very important, but the next step is that you need to actually integrate these ingredients into your day-to-day life. In other words, make it into a habit. For deep practice, the good thing is that this is already automatic by nature of practicing something over and over again and mastering it. You are like repeating the cycle um, and so by doing that, you're also creating the habit of deep practice. The only thing to be careful about is that

you need to do this pretty consistently. Like for most skills, you can't just do deep practice like one time, once a week, and then just be done with it. You do need to do that usually between three to five times a week, ideally daily, in order to form into a habit. There's something else I do now after reading this book and understanding how myin works and things like that. Um, and it sounds like kind of dumb. Um, but I don't know, maybe it will help you as well. Is when I'm practicing a skill like script writing or like reading papers, you know, we're doing deep practice and we're doing this. It can be like extremely frustrating, and I often want to give up all the time. But what I kind of picture in my head whenever I want to give up is just like imagining the myin wrapping around very, very slowly like every time and putting in a lot of deep practice, a lot of effort, um, into building that skill. Ignition, on the other hand, is different. There's a lot of situations

When somebody can be really interested in something super passionate and work really hard towards it, but at some point, they just kind of lose that motivation. It's very common for people who are doing things like music or art or sports, and the reason for that is that they weren't able to sustain that ignition. They weren't able to make that internalize that as a habit. So how do you make it into a habit though? So what you need to do is that you need to remind yourself of why it is that you want to do this in the first place, like that feeling of I want to become a musician or I want to get really, really, really good at this. Make that into a habit as well to sustain your ignition almost every day. We divide our players into groups at each end of the court, have them form lines, and use our stop-and-turn crossover drill. This is John Wooden, otherwise known as The Wizard of Westwood. As the book puts it, to describe John Wooden as a good basketball coach is like describing

Abraham Lincoln as a solid Congressman. ESPN actually named Wooden the greatest coach of all time of any sport. He's an amazing coach because he knows how to depress the levers of deep practice and ignition. He's able to design practices and drills to push his players into the state of deep practice and then provide them with feedback to guide them towards the right direction. He's also able to keep the engine of ignition going to keep his players motivated. He knows when to do out a compliment, an encouragement, or when it is that he needs to say something to trigger his player. Whatever it is that they need, he's able to give them so they continuously feel the drive to practice more and to better themselves. This is the third and final ingredient of how to make genius Master coaching. So yeah, basically you just need to go find yourself a John Wooden for whatever it is that your chosen field is. Yeah, not so fast. I mean, first of all, if you can get yourself access to John

Wooden or whoever the wooden is in whatever it is that you're trying to build. I think that is absolutely great, and you should 100% do everything you can in order to get access to master coaching. It would, you know, level you a lot, but if unfortunately you don't have access to that, it can be a little bit discouraging. That's really how I feel when I was especially reading this chapter of the book. I'm like, Damn, like what am I supposed to do? I don't know where I can find myself a coach that can teach me to make better videos and write better scripts. I mean, I could, but I don't really want to spend or have like thousands of dollars to spend to do that. But after kind of thinking about it a little bit more, I realized that it's not true that I'm just like doomed because I can't find a master coach. You know, that's kind of like a copout. What I need to do and what I can do is that I can at

least like immerse myself more in a community and try to like maybe not get like the most expert teachers but try to hire someone where like get into a class in which I would be able to practice these skills more so that's like number one right like I realized that I was making excuses for myself because I'm just like socially awkward don't want to interact with people for like whatever reason really like resistant to the idea of like working with other people I honestly don't know why I have this like resistance to working with other people to building certain skills but I realized like I I was just like coping out on that I could in fact like join more communities in order to learn a skill I can join Discord communities of other people also making YouTube videos or like script writing or whatever else it is that I want to learn this book was also written 15 years ago in 2009 which is probably why they didn't mention things like Discord communities online communities and things like that um but

that is something that especially now with the Internet. It's a lot more accessible. So, I knew for a fact that I need to try harder in order to actually put myself into that situation and try to reach out to more people, join classes and communities. And a second thing that wasn't mentioned in this book is AI. AI is actually a great tool to be able to provide feedback for things. Ideally, would it be better if I could hire an expert teacher that can teach me things? Yes, absolutely. But having AI providing feedback for certain parts of your skills is definitely better than nothing. It's actually pretty damn good. I've used AI for feedback for interviews, for public speaking, script writing, and Japanese. I'm not going to go into too much more detail about this in this video because this video is already really, really, really long. But I'll actually link a video up over here where I go through some learning techniques and how you can use AI to do them. But anyways, I realized that there are a lot of things that I am not currently

implementing in my journey to become really good at some of the skills that I care about. After reading this book, it's giving me a much better idea about why it is that I'm not progressing as fast as I want to be. I'm still experimenting with applying more of these learnings into my own Learning Journey, which hopefully I can share more results with you guys sometime in the future. A portion of this video is sponsored by Brilliant. If you're interested in self-learning and getting more skilled at STEM subjects, I highly recommend that you check out Brilliant. Brilliant is a STEM learning platform that specializes in interactive hands-on learning. I first learned about Brilliant when I was interviewing for Meta, and they recommended that I use Brilliant to brush up on my math and stats prior to the interview. That's because it's just so effective at learning STEM subjects, which, let's be honest with each other, can get boring and feel really difficult sometimes. Brilliant incorporates little quizzes, analogies, and just like little dopamine hits that

help a lot when you're getting a little bit bored or feeling discouraged. If you're interested in gen, they have a short and sweet little course which is a great overview of the field and doesn't require any coding. They also have timeless course offerings like math and stats and programming with Python, as well as new course offerings to explore topics like AI, neural networks, and quantum computing. You can join millions of people already learning on Brilliant by heading on over to this link over here to get started for free, also linked in the description, or just scan the QR code on the screen. If you go through my link, you'll get 20% off the annual membership. Thank you so much, Brilliant, for sponsoring this portion of the video. Now back to the video. That is all I have for you today, and I really hope that this was useful and you learned something interesting and applicable. Let me know in the comments what skill do you want to develop, like what do you want to be an expert at, what do you want

to be a genius at, and I will see you guys in the next video or live stream.

How To Become The Best At What You Do

Hi! My name is Tina and I'm a ex-Meta data scientist. Now I create content and other internet things! 

This channel is about coding, tech, career, and self-study. I love learning new things and my goal is to always minimize effort and maximize outcome! 

I strive to do things in the most efficient way possible and with the highest reward. I basically refuse to do extra work to achieve my goals c: 




Tina Huang

The Science of Growing Genius: Myelin's Role

Myelin, a sticky white substance in the brain, is key to genius, with experts having more of it than normal individuals.

Talent hotbeds exist to help people grow their brains and develop genius-level skills.

The secret to growing myelin lies in consistently and specifically repeating the neural circuits associated with a skill.

Myelin in the brain strengthens and speeds up neural circuits, making skill acquisition more effective.

Once myelin wraps around a circuit, it doesn't unwrap, which is why skills and habits are hard to lose.

Age plays a role in myelin production, but even later in life, there are cells that can still generate myelin, allowing for continued skill development.

Deep practice, which pushes the boundaries of skill, is crucial for myelin production and skill improvement.

Chunking, or breaking down a skill into smaller parts and practicing them, is an effective strategy for mastering any skill.

The Importance of Deep Practice and Ignition in Skill Development

Deep practice, ideally 1 to 4 hours a day, is the most productive and sustainable way to develop any skill.

Ignition, or the spark of passion and motivation, is crucial for enduring the challenges of deep practice.

Primal cues, such as seeing an idol or receiving inspiration from a mentor, play a significant role in motivating individuals to pursue their craft.

Genius is often ignited by Primal cues, such as the loss of both parents before 15, driving a desire for safety and improvement.

Submerging oneself in environments with similar aspirations can help ignite passion, but access to such places may be challenging.

Integrating deep practice and ignition into daily life is crucial for developing genius, with consistent practice being key to forming a habit.

Sustaining Motivation and Mastering Skills

Losing motivation is common for those passionate about music, art, or sports, often due to the inability to make their passion a habit.

John Wooden, named the greatest coach of all time, effectively uses deep practice and ignition to motivate his players.

If master coaching isn't accessible, immersing oneself in a community and practicing skills with others can be a valuable alternative.

Leveraging AI and Online Resources for Skill Development

The internet has made it easier to connect with people and join communities for skill development.

AI is a valuable tool for providing feedback on various skills, such as interviews and public speaking.

The speaker is experimenting with applying learnings from a book and using Brilliant's STEM learning platform for interactive, hands-on learning.