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.

Although talent feels and looks predestined, in fact we have a good deal of control over what skills we develop, and we have more potential than we might ever presume to guess.

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.

Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows in response to certain signals.

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

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. Or to put it in a slightly different way, experiences where you're forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them-as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go-end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it.