www.33voices.

com

THE TALENT CODE (Unplugged)

A conversation between Daniel Coyle & Moe Abdou
www.33voices.com
The Talent Code (Unplugged) Daniel Coyle !"#$%&'(%)*+',%

About Daniel Coyle & Moe Abdou

Daniel Coyle

Daniel Coyle is a contributing editor for Outside magazine and the author
of three books, Hardball: A Season in the Projects and the novel Waking
Samuel including the New York Times bestseller Lance Armstrong’s War.
A two-time National Magazine Award finalist, he has written for Sports
Illustrated, The New York Times Magazine, and Play (including this March
2007 cover story which sparked The Talent Code).

Moe Abdou

Moe Abdou is the creator of 33voices — a global conversation about things

that matter in business and in life. moe@33voices.com

33voices.com 1
www.33voices.com
The Talent Code (Unplugged) Daniel Coyle !"#$%&'(%)*+',%

It kind of leads into a lot of the work that you’re doing with this talent
stuff. I got to tell you, it’s really, really fascinating to me because as I
mentioned to you last time, my 25-year career in the finance business was
really about recruiting talent. There is so much misnotion about it and now
you come up with your research that you’ve done which is really incredibly
eye opening.

This is an exciting moment. We’re actually at the point that we can get an x-
ray into this world. It’s been really mysterious. Now, we’re actually getting a
sense of what it’s made of, how you get more of it, how you get less of it. That
it is a thing. There is a ‘there’ there. So, yes, to be able to kind of be conduit
effect has been really exciting.

I know you’ve got other interests that you’re dealing with now; the
creativity and the innovation stuff. What insights, since the book has been
out, since kind of the world, specifically here domestically has really
started to understand what you’re talking about, since the release of the
book, what insights have you gained? I’m sure you’re observing people and
continuing to observe this particular topic.

What is really interesting is the connections. Everybody connects to this in

their own way. I’ve gotten a lot of sort of a real web of connections that have
come out as a result of this from the music world, from the sports world. But
the ones that are really interesting I think are from the business world. From
people who are taking some of these ideas about training, about motivation,
about coaching and apply it, grafting them on to their lives and their businesses.

And how effective that can be when you think about say, making a sales pitch
in the same way that you would think about hitting a five iron. That there is a
sequence of moves which is a circuit you have to build in your brain, a set of
skills that you are not in front of it but that you grow literally piece by piece,
wrap by wrap, connection by connection in your brain to do that skill. That is a
very powerful notion that a lot of people have been able to grab right away and
apply.

The one area that I really didn’t expect a lot of connection because it’s a bit
foreign to me – was traders, stock - stock traders, bond traders. Those guys
who really are split second reflexes. I mean, you talk about the reflexes of a
hockey goalie or of Rajon Rondo. I mean, that’s what these guys want to be
able to do. They want to be able to see the court. They want to be able to see
the landscape. They want to be able to react instantly, slightly before the guy
standing next to them; to opportunities in that landscape. Just like Rondo can
react toward a pass or just like Roger Federer can react, to just like Yoyo Ma

33voices.com 2
www.33voices.com
The Talent Code (Unplugged) Daniel Coyle !"#$%&'(%)*+',%

can react and play a note before anybody else can and play it better than
anyone else can.

Traders have really locked on to this as a way of improving their games, of

constructing practice routines for themselves, of trying to define precisely
what it is they would like to get better at. What circuit they want to build. In
creating, in the same way that I saw in the talent hot beds in sort of creating
these practice environments where you can get real high velocity learning.
Where you can make these practice sessions unbelievably productive because
of the way you approach them. That was a real surprise to me to realize that it
could be put into that particular world.

I have to tell you, I mean, that is the biggest attraction to me from my

perspective and in my work with entrepreneurs and certainly, in my work
with people in financial services. That’s the thing that really stood out for
me. I’m going to digress for a moment and kind of jump down to this area
that you mentioned, practice. Give me some examples Dan, of how do you
create this environment in a setting like a trading room or the training
room of a sales organization in financial services or in pharmaceutical
sales because that’s the thing that I think is mysterious out there.

Right. We have this idea that you have it or you don’t, you’re born with it. I
guess the best way to answer that question is to back way up and try to get a
sense of what’s actually happening when we practice well. We just got a sense
in our culture that practice is practice is practice. That when it comes time to
practice you put in the time and something will happen or it won’t happen.

When in fact, what science is showing us is that practice is not like that at all.
There is a velocity with which we learn. That velocity can vary hugely
according to the type of practice we do. I gave an example of it early in the
book with a girl named Clarissa who is practicing the clarinet and she plays two
songs. In one song, she plays a song, she makes a few mistakes. She goes right
past the mistakes. In the next song, she is really tuned in, super tuned in to the
sound she’s making and the mistakes she’s making. Whenever she makes a
mistake, she stops and she really attends to it. She goes back and repeats
really intensively.

The people who did that experiment, the scientists have calculated that her
learning velocity skyrockets in those 5 minutes. In 5 minutes, she does a
month’s worth of practice. It’s sort of like what happens with your muscles. I
mean, you can go in the gym and start lifting 5 pound weights and nothing will
happen. But, if you go in the gym and work at weights that are just beyond

33voices.com 3
www.33voices.com
The Talent Code (Unplugged) Daniel Coyle !"#$%&'(%)*+',%

your ability, where you’re barely able to lift them, you’ll get pretty strong in a
hurry.

What Clarissa is doing is getting into that zone, that very, very fruitful zone on
the edge of her ability where she’s making mistakes and fixing those mistakes
and reaching past what she can do. It’s an uncomfortable place to be in. It
feels weird. It feels frustrating to be there. Your fingertips are grazing what
you want to grab. But, when we are in that position, we learn 10 times faster
than when we’re simply going to the motions.

So to have this idea of high velocity practice in the way that you could — and
what’s actually happening, let’s x-ray that moment for a second. When we look
closely at that moment, what’s happening in our brain is we are firing
electricity through wires of our brain and we’re detecting mistakes and we’re
using those mistakes as a map. Mistakes feel like verdicts. Mistakes feel like
sort of a judgment on whether we are able to do something or not. But what
you see in really productive practice sessions is mistakes treated as information,
as points on a map that you use to navigate toward a solution.

That insight where to say, look, if I got to the edge of my abilities, I push
myself to make mistakes, fix mistakes and repeat intensively, I can build. I’m
actually building these fast fluent circuits in my brain. I’m hooking up these
wires and when I repeat very intensively, I’m making those wires function a lot
better. I’m actually wrapping them with insulation. That’s what’s happening in
your brain.

When you go to apply this to a business world, it’s exactly the same as if you
are applying it to a sporting world or a music world. You’re trying to build a
circuit of a certain shape. You’re trying to realize when you make a mistake,
fix that mistake and repeat very intensively. When you approach, let’s say, we
gave the traders as an example. What they do for instance some of the more
successful things that I’ve heard — they’ll do trading simulations where they
will literally cram a month’s worth of trading into a single day. They’ll
compress the speed.

That’s one thing we see a lot in the talent hotbeds that I visited. They
compress everything into these small areas where you can make many
repetitions. It’s very similar to what I saw in Brazil, looking at soccer training in
Brazil. They’ve invented a game down there that is basically like soccer played
in phone booth called Futebol de Salao. The kids touch the ball 600% more
often. The game is very fast. There is a lot of touching. You get many more
chances to make mistakes, many more chances to operate at the edge of your
ability.

33voices.com 4
www.33voices.com
The Talent Code (Unplugged) Daniel Coyle !"#$%&'(%)*+',%

So these traders, they’ll go in and they create basically their version of Futebol
de Salao. They will create these programs where they can intensively go
through a month’s worth of trading and then most important, they’ll go back.
They’ll see, “What should I have done at this point?” They’ll keep a journal.
They’ll slowly construct a map of their circuitry and they’ll slowly build that
circuitry. This is not sort of your classic quick fix. What it is is highly efficient
concentrated work that grows our brain circuitry quickly.

As much has been said, as you know and as you reference a lot, the 10
thousand hours, when people hear that, Dan it’s like, “Oh my gosh, 10,000
hours.” Either, it’s not relevant for me or there is an element of
understanding in that. So when you’re referencing these traders or people
in business in general. Is this the type of thing that people just do
everyday even though they do it for a short period of time? Or is there an
optimal schedule where this practice becomes part of their daily lives?

It depends on the person. It depends on their life. But what I saw on the talent
hotbeds and I’ve visited a lot of these around the world. Looking at the science
of how these places succeed, there seem to be a sort of peak, a limited
amount that the brain could grow in any given one day; a limited amount of
sort of practice that our brains can usefully use. That seems to be about three
hours a day. If you went much beyond that, it wasn’t that useful. People were
not in these talent hotbeds practicing 12 hours a day. They were practicing
about three to four hours a day.

So there is no evidence that you need to devote your life to this stuff to do it.
Ten thousand hours is a great number. You play your finger on it. I mean there
are a lot of different ways to sort of look at it. You can look at it and say, “Oh
my God, that sounds like Mount Everest. That seems utterly impossible and
these people are already way ahead of me getting their 10,000 hours. So if I’m
going to start tomorrow, I’m basically starting at the bottom of Mount Everest
and taking those steps.”

The other way to look at it which I think is sort of simpler is, a lot of us if we’re
in a certain line of work particularly in the business world, we’ve already built
up a certain number of those hours. Nobody is starting from zero. There are
certain hours of social skills and analytical skills. None of us is starting from
zero.

What the 10,000 hours tells us is that we all share a path forward. Really, the
fact that that is a common thing that all world class performers share tell us
that it’s not as genetic maybe as we’ve suspect. That all these people have got
different cultures, they have different genes, but the 10,000 hours they share

33voices.com 5
www.33voices.com
The Talent Code (Unplugged) Daniel Coyle !"#$%&'(%)*+',%

is construction time. They’re putting time into building that fast fluent
beautiful circuitry that we see when they do that skill.

It’s not saying that everybody who puts in those 10,000 hours can become
Michelangelo or Michael Jordan. But it is saying that it’s a shared path forward
just as it would be for physical bodies. Nobody can expect to run a marathon
unless you put in a certain amount of training in it. Our brains are built
essentially the same way.

I’m going to give you a specific example. I passed your book on. I gave 10
copies away in the last month to leaders in financial service industry in
particular primarily because that’s where I’ve spent my life. For one
particular reason, I went into that industry in the mid-80’s, ’86 I think.
When I went in, I’ll never forget my recruiting pitch where the general
manager at the time, walked in and there was about 15 of us I guess in an
introductory class in the room. He said, look around because only 1 out of
10 of you will be here.

I was this kid out of college. I looked at it and said, “Wow, is this what the
real world is all about?” The ironic thing is when I left in 2005 retention in
that industry was still between 8% and 10%. So less than one person that
gets into that industry survives 18 months. When I came across the book, it
validated a core belief that I have that, you know what, there is hope that
perhaps if the right conditions are set, that there is an opportunity for
people to make it. When I start to see the kind of stuff that you do, and I
think about the money wasted with the 90% of the people who don’t make
it, it really starts to trigger, how relevant your work is to business.

It’s interesting. A lot of times, these beliefs that we have about talent are very
deep seated. We hear them all through our lives. We hear them from our
parents. We hear them from our teachers. We see them in books and in novels,
this idea that you were born with a magical gift. You either have the gift or you
don’t. It’s a beautiful story.

But the fact that science is now letting us slip beneath that story and see that.
You know, in fact, when you look at these top performers, they’ve all got a
certain set of habits. They’ve all got a certain level of attention. They’ve all
got a certain way of treating their mistakes. They’ve all got a way of pushing
themselves to the edge of their ability. They’ve all got certain signals that are
motivating them to have that kind of energy because it’s really unusual to want
to work that hard. To want to work that hard to get your 10,000 hours is — not
everybody has got that. Not everybody has got that sort of passion.

33voices.com 6
www.33voices.com
The Talent Code (Unplugged) Daniel Coyle !"#$%&'(%)*+',%

But when we see these patterns, we can realize that the big story here is that
the human brain is a learning machine. Those wires in your brain don’t really
know if they’re hitting a golf ball or doing a sales pitch or analyzing a stock
trade. They don’t know. What they are built to do is go faster, better, stronger.
If we can tap into those basic techniques that make that wiring work faster,
better, more accurately, then we can get better at whatever we have the
passion, energy, and good coaching to do.

It seems that in the book and in a lot of these hotbeds, it seems that a lot
of these people that are involved in those particular organizations or
outfits tend to be younger. So from that perspective, obviously, you’ve got
young kids. This is the kind of thing that when it’s ingrained into a young 9
year old who is going to become a professional tennis player, it changes
everything in their life. So for somebody that’s 35 or 40 years old, that’s
stuck in business or personally, do they still have the same opportunity to
be able to enhance their skills or their ability and the passion that they’re
trying to pursue as these younger kids?

Let me give you the neurological answer to that. That is it’s different. Young
brains are different than older brains. Young brains are built to learn very, very
quickly. It is in fact harder. The good news is that we all have the same path
forward. The good news is that that process, that essential process of attentive
repetition, of passionate re-changes never changes no matter how old you are.
But there are some really interesting examples particularly in the business
world of organizations and cultures that are able to kind of align themselves
with these ideas, to create a culture where you can really have talent blossom
in older people.

There is sort of case study at UPS (United Parcel Service) recently where
they’re having a tremendous amount of time retaining employees who are in
their 20s and 30s. They weren’t really catching on to the training. There were
more accidents. What UPS did was took kind of an expensive gamble. Originally,
they have a lot of lecture based training and what they did is they went out.
They built something sort of like a movie set with a whole town basically where
they could literally do the deliveries.

They could literally train the drivers to — they weren’t just talking about this
anymore, they were actually doing it. When it came to slip and fall, teaching
them about slipping and falling, they would harness them up to sort of like a
climbing harness and secretly throw some soap underneath their feet so that
they would wipe out and experience that. Everything became experiential,
everything became pushing someone — they called it perturbing them, pushing

33voices.com 7
www.33voices.com
The Talent Code (Unplugged) Daniel Coyle !"#$%&'(%)*+',%

them to the edge of their ability. This training design has been a huge success.
Accident rates have plummeted. Retention rates have gone way up.

You can find ways in your own life of creating those kinds of experiential
learning, of those kinds of learning situations. So it is harder. I mean, I’m not
going to say it’s easy for a 35 year old as it is for a 12 year old to pick up a new
skill and to, with some intense repetition, get really good at it. But, that
essential process never changes.

Did you come across this whole issue of myelin as you’re doing your
research or was that something that neurologically, you were aware of
prior to engaging in this work?

It was while I was doing the research. I was attracted to this club outside of
Moscow that had produced more top 20 women players than the entire United
States, a club that just had one indoor court. So I was doing a lot of reading
about performance and came across several references to myelin and several
studies that showed myelin growing with practice, proportional to the hours.
The more hours you practice, the more myelin you earned. There were studies
in reading, there were in pianists, in piano players.

And then I called up some neurologist, a fellow at the National Institute of

Health by the name of Douglas Fields who was doing some study in this area. I
think we’re talking about Tiger Woods and I said, “What makes him different?”
He said, “It’s the myelin.” That’s essentially what he has that other people
don’t.

The thing that was sort of a revelation to me too was the idea that all these
beautiful skills that we see, all the talent that we see is really essentially
electrical circuitry. We talk about muscle memory. Muscles don’t really have
memory. There is no memory inside of a muscle. It’s all beautiful fast
electrical circuits that are causing that swing, that sales pitch, that leadership.
Human beings are electrical beings and so to realize that myelin which is such a
core part of building fast beautiful circuits was built through practice, through
certain kinds of practice. That these talent hotbeds essentially were
succeeding because they were really, really good at building fast brains, very
well myelinated brains.

Do you have a leadership deep practice by just doing it or by staging it or

imitating what you want to do — from a leadership perspective. How does
that apply to young leaders who want to develop into something more than
they are right now in terms of leadership?

33voices.com 8
www.33voices.com
The Talent Code (Unplugged) Daniel Coyle !"#$%&'(%)*+',%

There are several ways to sort of approach that and that’s a very deep and big
question that’s worthy of some much more serious investigation. But essentially
leadership comes down to circuits, two types of neuro-circuits. One is seeing,
seeing a pattern in the landscape before other people do. Detection, this is a
certain kind of a circuit. The other kind of circuit that happens in leadership is
communication. If you boil down all leadership skills into two acts, it’s sensing
and signaling.

How do you get good at those two things? I see some pretty good leaders; it’s a
nice habit. I’m trying to think of who started it. I think it was someone at GE.
They had a habit to practice their vision. They would write predictions down in
an envelope of what they thought was going to happen and they would seal up
the envelope for some months. And then they would go back and check it to
see how accurate their predictions were. A very simple method but in a world
where we’re constantly trying to predict the future, here’s a guy who has a
way of measuring his ability to see what was going to happen. When you think
about leadership in those sorts of ways, that’s one way to think about
developing good leadership.

We also learn through mimicry. We often see good leaders come from other
good leaders. The NFL is a beautiful example of this where you constantly have
these family trees of coaches. Lombardi produces Shula and Purcell. Bill Walsh
produces 10 modern coaches, Holmgren and all those other guys. How do you
do that? Those are great leaders. Those are very smart leaders who are
essentially apprenticing themselves to other leaders.

I think often in our corporate culture in particular, there is not a structure

there that enables that kind of apprenticeship to take place. And that kind of
apprenticeship is really at the center of learning how to be a good leader. You
don’t do it on your own. You may be lucky to be borne into a family situation
where you’re getting a lot of leadership opportunities. You may have through
either karma of your own life, bump into a lot of opportunities to be a good
leader. But good leaders, most of the good ones have made a study of it
working on their circuitry all the time and apprenticeship is a beautiful way to
do that.

As you probably know and has referenced, the majority of aspiring leaders
aren’t in that type of environment. So did they go out and create it? I for
one have been part of mastermind study groups and organizations like
that whether it’s YPO or EO. Literally since the first day that I entered
that industry because of what you’ve just referenced, the opportunity to

33voices.com 9
www.33voices.com
The Talent Code (Unplugged) Daniel Coyle !"#$%&'(%)*+',%

be around that energy. So for people who aren’t in those environments

who have those aspirations, is that at least their first option?

I think those kinds of organizations are terrific. I think there is a lot of different
ways to lead. I know in my own life, coaching a little league team has been a
great sort of a seminar and a safe place in a way for me to practice those skills.
I think if we all look at our lives and our community, there is always going to be
places where we can sort of work those things out.

The other thing we have which is an advantage over I think previous

generations are there are so many useful books, websites, you name it from
that give detailed accounts of what these leaders are doing. We can employ a
lot of that material as well. It’s hard to beat experiential learning in this case.
So finding ways to sort of stand next to and be close to and make a study of
those things that make good leaders effective.

There is a great book out right now called, “Teach Like a Champion”. It’s
actually targeted at elementary school teachers who are kind of
unconventional, not who would you think about in a corporate leadership
context. But in fact, what an elementary school teacher does is, with a
tremendous amount of control and vision, a great school teacher controls a
group of people and tries to set agendas. The most virtuoso teachers are
people we can really learn from when it comes to leadership.

This book is called, “Teach Like a Champion” gives 47 techniques for teaching
in a classroom but they’re essentially leadership techniques. They’re
essentially communications techniques. They’re essentially vision techniques.
That’s another place where it’s sort of unlikely but we still see this process of
sensing and signaling, of the core values of being leader. We see it in parents,
we see it in teachers we see it in our some of politicians, not enough of them.
We see it in sports coaches. In our culture, we have a lot of examples that we
can make a study in and go to school on.

When you discuss Spartak, you talk about the three things they do of
teaching people to slow down, to imitate. Their comment that games can
wait. How applicable is that in business? Can you see the same type of
thing if we go back to the trading floor or the sales organization for
people to maybe be taught these fundamentals a little differently and to
imitate the great ones and perhaps before you get out there and play the
game, go through the motions?

I think they’re all applicable especially slowing down enough to detect where
you’re making mistakes. That speed is a magnifying glass. When you slow down

33voices.com 10
www.33voices.com
The Talent Code (Unplugged) Daniel Coyle !"#$%&'(%)*+',%

you get to see your circuitry and see your mistakes much more clearly. It’s key.
Imitation, I mean, we are born to imitate whether it’s imitating a great
salesperson or imitating a great trader; the way they move, the way they think,
the way they act. That is a beautiful way to learn.

I think of those three, it’s a business. The most important one is don’t play the
game right away. By that I mean, don’t do it live. Do not do it for real money.
Construct a way of doing it where you can take the emotion and the
nervousness and the fear out of it and just work on your circuitry. The problem
with a lot of these things in business is that in business we play with live
ammunition. You are constantly on the edge of losing potentially reputation,
potentially money, and status.

So in order to really get to the zone where you can make mistakes and figure
out where you need to improve, you need to create sort of a foam pit, if you
will. A place where you can safely make mistakes and fall like a snowboarder
might without getting injured. It doesn’t mean that you can’t take risks
because that’s what this is all about in some ways. You need to get yourself to
the point where you are sort of making mistakes and being on the edge. But it
doesn’t mean that you don’t need to play live at first.

At Spartak that was one of the intriguing rules. That a lot of the players had to
wait — the rule was to wait three years before you played a tournament. It was
an American family that said they wouldn’t do that. They think the tournament
is the point. You should win the trophy. Just as in business, build the good
techniques. Figure out how to sell, how to do what you can do and then make
it live.

Your writing style as I shared with you is fabulous and your first book was
just as great and just as intriguing about Lance. As you kind of see him
preparing to get going here over the weekend, has the work you’ve done
with The Talent Code got you to think any differently about how he has
achieved or continues to achieve what he’s doing personally?

That’s a great question. It has in a way. Particularly in the way, I guess as a

leader, he’s a good leader. But mostly in the way he’s able to push himself past
into his discomfort zone. He is able to constantly, with himself and with those
around him, nudge them forward to where they are taking risks, to where
they’re stretching themselves beyond the normal rules. That is an incredibly
effective, not essentially deep practice of building the circuitry of his
organization. You talk about a ruthless focus on errors, you know, a guy whose
nickname is Mr. Millimeter. Out of that kind of a focus is really, really powerful

33voices.com 11
www.33voices.com
The Talent Code (Unplugged) Daniel Coyle !"#$%&'(%)*+',%

neuro tools. I’m impressed with his legs but after doing this project, I’m more
impressed with his brain.

One of the intriguing things for me is that one of my partners is involved in

— I don’t know if you ever heard of the drink FRS that he promotes.

Sure, yeah.

My friend Glenn has been one of the founders of that. So I’ve been kind of
watching the involvement of Lance from the beginning when he told me
they approached him to know his involvement in the company. He brings
the same approach to that as he does to his racing. I mean, it’s remarkable
to see not only the commitment towards the product and the company but
the commitment towards making sure that his contribution counts.

It sounds like they’re really on to something there.

Yeah, they are on to something. My last question to you is this whole issue
of pushing yourself to the edge. How often did these people do that? Are
you starting to be more conscious of that kind of stuff for yourself because
you’re doing some fabulous stuff yourself?

It’s kind of like getting sea legs. It feels very sort of strange I think when you
get in that zone of making mistakes and falling on your face every once in
awhile. But after awhile, I guess take the athletic sort of model and the old no
pain, no gain. When you think of your brain as a muscle and think of those
feelings of making mistakes and picturing them and making that repetition sort
of thrilling just like it would be thrilling if you could count the number of bench
presses you can do and realize that the more you do the better you get. It’s the
exact thing when you can repeat intensively any act. It becomes sort of
liberating and exciting.

I’ve felt sort of a change in my approach to certain things where I could

become a little bit more the master of my time. I can realize that look I can
get a lot done in a short period and I don’t have to kind of sit and spend 14
hours at my desk in order to get my work done. I need to figure out exactly
what circuit I want to build to do the job and then go about building that
circuit.

How about your kids Dan, has your approach towards their development
intellectually and certainly I know from an athletic perspective but
intellectually much is being said and continues to be said about school

33voices.com 12
www.33voices.com
The Talent Code (Unplugged) Daniel Coyle !"#$%&'(%)*+',%

systems. Has your approach to their intellectual development altered,

changed at all since this research?

Yeah, it really has. When you get to sense that you really should celebrate
those moments when your kid is right on the edge of their ability. When that
section of piano practice where they are having to go back and pick out the
notes slowly one by one. As a parent, you really need to celebrate those
moments of struggle and not avoid them. You need to really create effort in a
really big way. It’s funny it sort of tripled into the culture of our family to
where the kids are now echoing some of the stuff back to us. It’s fun to see
them be able to look at a task and be able to say, if they can sort of do it, I can
do it, kind of approach. It’s fun. Being a parent is a very anxious thing in many
ways. This has been one area where it feels like we’re standing on more solid
ground.

That’s fabulous because you know that GPA is still the same. When the
push themselves to the edge and they take whether it’s AP classes or
whatever they’re still, hey you’ve got to get the 4.5 or the 5.0 if you want
to have a chance at a decent school. So they’re getting pooled from all
angles when just the mere fact of taking 5 or 6 AP classes in my opinion is
a huge cause for celebration.

That’s right. We over value grades a lot. It’s fun to say, you know, what we’re
really doing in your involvement in a long project is building something here.
We can sort of build it together. We can know what we’re building. It’s a
construction project. It’s not a magic show.

I have to be one of the people to hope that you continue this journey with
this whole issue that you’ve uncovered. I know you’ve got a lot of other
cool things that you’re exploring. This whole issue of creativity and so
forth but I really believe that you’ve unlocked something that I wish during
my days of trying to develop the talent that I had that I had these
resources. So hopefully there are some good things to come but regardless
of what happens, you’ve at least got people engaged enough that it is
possible. Your work is continuing to provide tremendous amount of hope
for people.

I appreciate that. That makes my day.

33voices.com 13
 www.33voices.com
FeedBack

We believe that the best version of yourself is when you don’t have to
choose between doing what you love and making a living. So if you’re stuck
or simply want an extra spark of inspiration, please tell us how we can help.

What Are You Struggling With?

ASK A QUESTION THINK WITH DANIEL