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.

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

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.

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.

There is no substitute for attentive repetition.

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.

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.