How To Train Yourself To Become A Genius

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 compare 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. 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 go to grow their brains and become geniuses.

I recently learned this by reading a 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. This one just resulted in a baseball swing, these ones a beautiful recital, and this one is a dude eating a hot dog. You might be thinking right now that these kind of all look the same, and you would be correct. 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 bad 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. The way that myelin works is similar to how insulation works around copper electrical wires. For example, here I have a pretty standard charging cable. You have your USB plug over here and then your USB-C over here. Along here, inside, you can't see it, but there are actually copper wires to conduct electricity. What you can see on the outside is that there's this rubber that wraps around it. The rubber is there for a couple of important reasons. The first one is so that I don't touch it and shock myself to death, and the second reason is that it prevents the signal from leaking out, allowing the signal to be faster and stronger.

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. 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 talent is to have more myelin in the right circuits. 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 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. It's not some sort of repeating however 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 your skill is. It could be playing a violin, it could be skating, it could be whatever. The circuit in your brain 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 and becoming a genius in any field follows the same fundamental principles.

Number three: myelin wraps; it doesn't unwrap. This is why 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. 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.

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 learning a new language or how to bike, they do it so quickly. They almost just absorb that information, 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 oligodendrocyte cells that produce myelin that remain immature for your entire life. So even if you're over the age of 30 or 50, you still are able to create more myelin and 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 being produced, just wrapping around the circuits for violin playing. Now, for the normal practice one, the circuit is still activating; it's still going off every time that the song is being played, but it's not really activating any myelin 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 myelin, 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 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 myelin on the road to genius. The first thing you do is that you want to do the whole skill, as in a complete "how to," to kind of get an understanding of what it feels like. So let's actually use that violin example. When you first see a new violin piece that you've never played before, the first thing that you do is try to play the whole thing through, probably pretty terribly.

What you do after this initial chunk is 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—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 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 slowly or doing it really quickly, experimenting and getting a 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 or 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 use, and 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.

This is actually pretty surprising to me because it's kind of like this thing where people are like, "Oh, how do I work for 4 hours, 8 hours, 10 hours, you know, 12 hours plus a day?" It's kind of touted as a badge of honor in terms of the number of hours that they can put in towards working on 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. 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, very frustrating, and 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.

Ignition is a tricky thing because if you ask geniuses or geniuses in training why they feel so compelled, motivated, and passionate towards their craft, they'll probably just say something like, "Oh, I don't know; I've just always felt this way. I just, I don't know; 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, they received this primal cue on May 18th, 1998. This is when a 21-year-old Se Ri Pak won the McDonald's LPGA Championship and became a national icon all across television. There were some little girls at that time who saw her and thought to themselves, "Wow, she is so cool, and she looks just like me. I want to be like her."

Ten years later, with lots of deep practice, some of those girls actually made it onto the LPGA tour and dominated the event. Forty-five players collectively won one-third 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, "Meh," and 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. 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. What that does is send the primal cue into that kid: "You are not safe in this world." That's something that could ignite a passion and motivation in someone because they want to get better and 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 something just clicks in you. The practical advice from the book is to try your best to submerge yourself in places that have a lot of primal cues. If you're potentially interested in golf, then you should join golf clubs and tournaments, take some golf lessons, and be around people who are also aspiring to become a certain type of genius.

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 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 do stuff with?

Also, in addition to that, maybe I'm just too socially awkward to be able to make those connections, if that makes sense. So it was a little bit discouraging, and maybe some of you guys watching this video feel like that as well. 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 the right surroundings for you to do that.

After thinking about this, I realized that actually, that's not exactly true because there are things I can do to get access to other people. 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 that.

Now we know the first two ingredients for creating genius: deep practice and ignition. 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 repeating the cycle, and 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. For most skills, you can't just do deep practice 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 it into a habit.

There's something else I do now after reading this book and understanding how myelin works and things like that. It sounds kind of dumb, but I don't know, maybe it will help you as well. When I'm practicing a skill like scriptwriting or reading papers, you know, doing deep practice, it can be 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 imagining the myelin wrapping around very, very slowly, like every time I put in a lot of deep practice and effort into building that skill.

Ignition, on the other hand, is different. There are 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, art, or sports. The reason for that is that they weren't able to sustain that ignition; they weren't able to internalize that as a habit.

So how do you make it into a habit? 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 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 in any sport.

He's an amazing coach because he knows how to press 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 in the right direction. He's also able to keep the engine of ignition going to keep his players motivated. He knows when to give out a compliment or encouragement or when he needs to say something to trigger his players—whatever it is that they need, he's able to give them so they continuously feel the drive to practice more and 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.

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 to get access to master coaching. It would level you up a lot.

But if, unfortunately, you don't have access to that, it can be a little bit discouraging. That's really how I felt when I was especially reading this chapter of the book. I'm like, "Damn, 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 thousands of dollars to do that.

After thinking about it a little bit more, I realized that it's not true that I'm just doomed because I can't find a master coach. You know, that's kind of like a cop-out. What I need to do and what I can do is immerse myself more in a community and try to not get the most expert teachers but try to hire someone or get into a class where I would be able to practice these skills more.

So that's number one, right? I realized that I was making excuses for myself because I'm just socially awkward and don't want to interact with people for whatever reason. I'm really resistant to the idea of working with other people. I honestly don't know why I have this resistance to working with other people to build certain skills, but I realized I was just coping out on that.

I could, in fact, join more communities in order to learn a skill. I can join Discord communities of other people also making YouTube videos or scriptwriting 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 and online communities. But that is something that, especially now with the Internet, is a lot more accessible.

I knew for a fact that I need to try harder to put myself into that situation and try to reach out to more people, join classes, and communities. The second thing that wasn't mentioned in this book is AI. AI is actually a great tool 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 provide feedback for certain parts of your skills is definitely better than nothing. It's actually pretty good.

I've used AI for feedback for interviews, public speaking, scriptwriting, and Japanese. I'm not going to go into too much more detail about this in this video because this video is already really long, but I'll link a video up over here where I go through some learning techniques and how you can use AI to do them.

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 given me a much better idea about why it is that I'm not progressing as fast as I want to be, and 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, can get boring and feel really difficult sometimes.

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You can join millions of people already learning on Brilliant by heading over to this link to get started for free. It's 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 you want to develop—what do you want to be an expert at? What do you want to be a genius at? I will see you guys in the next video or live stream.