Comments

Great interview Daniel Coyle and Erik Hansen.

1) My son is a work in progress 'talent'... he has the ignition, he does 'deep practice', and he belongs to two hotbeds of talent growth (school and club - the common factor is his coach)... he is 15 years old and loves Volleyball... All his coaches love him. they love him because he is 'focused', 'disciplined', 'ultra-competitive', 'demanding of himself always', and yet 'celebrates his mistakes as he sees them as merely stepping stones to great ability and capability'. He has been exposed to international players/coaches and continues to learn from them but it is his 21 year old coach who he has played under since he was 11 years old who is brilliant - Jason connects the dots in being a mentor, friend, instructor, calming influence as game day coach (yet he gets truly excited when they win a big point!!!), and an intuitive believer in accelerated learning. My son has had so much success at such a young age and yet he does not consider himself really ready to play Volleyball - he continues to experiment everyday so that he can become a better student of the game. How his coach Jason became as good as he is I do not know but he was described to me recently as the best coach (including the national coach) in our country YET he does not coach any international teams. Go figure!

2) Ten years ago I had a client with a problem. He was CEO of an electricity utility. His problem was the maintenance of his assets - mainly poles and lines. His contractors maintained the network with the results being simple. Good contractors = fewer outages and outages that lasted less and less time. PROBLEM. Contractors start off being good. They start off being small. Because they are good they get more work = they become big contractors and they become bad. What to do? I told him we had to grow the contractors. I wish I had had this book because I would have done the job in a fraction of the time and produced much much better results.

Thanks Dan Coyle I get it! I hope and trust you will have a huge success in sending the messages contained in your book around the globe. Growing talent is a seminal project.

Cheers, Richard.

Posted by Richard Lipscombe at April 29, 2009 8:42 PM

Thank you Daniel and erik. I'll pick up the book. There are many wonderful points here. As we have had a rather extensive discussion on talent in another post recently, I shall refrain from expressing myself now which perhaps looks at talent from a slightly different angle. Thanks again both of you--much appreciated.

By the way, in the bookstore today I came across "Buyology," the book with that rather cool cover—part scientific and part style-in a rather prominent place. I immediately thought of the Cool Friend interview with Martin Lindstrom. I was on a mission to buy several books needed today but I'll probably pick this one up too sooner rather than later.

Posted by Judith Ellis at April 29, 2009 11:54 PM

Richard - I appreciate both of your points. Thank you.

Posted by Judith Ellis at April 29, 2009 11:57 PM