To sum up: it's time to rewrite the maxim that practice makes perfect. The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect.

The staggering babies embody the deepest truth about deep practice: to get good, it's helpful to be willing, or even enthusiastic, about being bad. Baby steps are the royal road to skill.

Deep practice feels a bit like exploring a dark and unfamiliar room. You start slowly, you bump into furniture, stop, think, and start again. Slowly, and a little painfully, you explore the space over and over, attending to errors, extending your reach into the room a bit farther each time, building a mental map until you can move through it quickly and intuitively.

To sum up: it's time to rewrite the maxim that practice makes perfect. The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect.

Failure is not a verdict; making mistakes is the price of the ticket.

A true leader is someone who maximizes the potential of their people; who ignites their passions and gives them the opportunity to make the most of their gifts in the service of a larger goal. The leaders I met at the talent hotbeds embodied those values.

I fall in love with certain stories. Those stories tend to be connected to my life some way - for instance, with my first book I was writing about the experience of coaching Little League in the Chicago inner city. But the common thread tends to be exploring some kind of mystery. Simple questions that spiral deeper.