Baby steps are the royal road to skill.

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 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.

I discovered when I went all out, when I put 100 percent of my energy into some intense, impossible task - when my heart was jack-hammering, when lactic acid was sizzling through my muscles - that's when I felt good, normal, balanced.

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.

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

You have to be willing to stop and fix. Deep practice requires a willingness to do what many of us find uncomfortable: to admit to our errors, and focus on them.