Coyle Quotes

This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.

To see the ocean once is to learn how to miss it. ~Mistress Coyle

The sweet spot: that productive, uncomfortable terrain located just beyond our current abilities, where our reach exceeds our grasp. Deep practice is not simply about struggling; it's about seeking a particular struggle, which involves a cycle of distinct actions.

You went up a girl and came down a woman.

Vulnerability doesn’t come after trust—it precedes it. Leaping into the unknown, when done alongside others, causes the solid ground of trust to materialize beneath our feet.

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.

You will become clever through your mistakes. —German proverb

As Dave Cooper says, I screwed that up are the most important words any leader can say.

repetition. “Don't look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That's the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts,” he wrote in The Wisdom of Wooden.

The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled.

...it is certain that we must learn the value of being women committed to our prayers and faithful to our calling.

I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.

Carol Dweck, the psychologist who studies motivation, likes to say that all the world's parenting advice can be distilled to two simple rules: pay attention to what your children are fascinated by, and praise them for their effort.

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 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.

Dedication to God gives women strength, no matter what others do.

Read with joy!

A woman of strength knows to take the time to prepare herself...she goes into seclusion for a season if necessary, to gather the strength of God's power to perform what he requires.

Try again. Fail again. Fail better. —Samuel Beckett

Hire people smarter than you. Fail early, fail often. Listen to everyone’s ideas. Face toward the problems. B-level work is bad for your soul. It’s more important to invest in good people than in good ideas.

Don't be the kind of person who sees groups instead of people.

There comes an age in life when you realize that blaming and regretting are a waste of precious time.

Struggle is not an option: it's a biological requirement.

Belonging cues are behaviors that create safe connection in groups. They include, among others, proximity, eye contact, energy, mimicry, turn taking, attention, body language, vocal pitch, consistency of emphasis, and whether everyone talks to everyone else in the group.

The perfectly measured burr of a dispassionate detective had suddenly changed into the explosive boom of a take-no-shit street cop. Suffice it to say, I froze.

Studies show that even a brief connection with a role model can vastly increase unconscious motivation.

Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect.

the number-one job is to take care of each other. I didn’t always know that, but I know it now.

Feeling stupid is no fun. But being willing to be stupid—in other words, being willing to risk the emotional pain of making mistakes—is absolutely essential, because reaching, failing, and reaching again is the way your brain grows and forms new connections.

Don't look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time.

TO LEARN IT MORE DEEPLY, TEACH IT

A tank and its crew has but one reason to exist. To maneuver the tank’s cannon to a position where it could do the most damage and feed it once it was there.

Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they’ll find a way to screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a good team, and they’ll find a way to make it better. The goal needs to be to get the team right, get them moving in the right direction, and get them to see where they are making mistakes and where they are succeeding.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. —W. B. Yeats

Real gold doesn't start its journey in a display window at Tiffany. It's dug out of the dirty earth. Sometimes true gold doesn't glitter. It may need a little polishing, but don't let that bit of needed patience or effort trick you into discarding what could be the greatest treasure of your life.

One misconception about highly successful cultures is that they are happy, lighthearted places. This is mostly not the case. They are energized and engaged, but at their core their members are oriented less around achieving happiness than around solving hard problems together. This task involves many moments of high-candor feedback, uncomfortable truth-telling, when they confront the gap between where the group is, and where it ought to be.

Where does motivation come from? “It starts with a spark,” Daniel Coyle told me in an interview. “You get a vision of your future self. You see someone you want to become. . . . It’s a very mysterious process.

In wishing to know ourselves fully, we must forget our quest for gain and seek only completion. At a certain point in our development, we no longer even seek to become Mystic, Magister, Sorcerer, or Witch: we seek only our own perfection in the wholeness of our Will, in the joining of light with dark and strength with love. We are varied and gorgeous yet pure of heart. Our aim is this: to know ourselves and to know the world.

ignore the bad habit and put your energy toward building a new habit that will override the old one.

We are all paid to solve problems. Make sure to pick fun people to solve problems with.

She regards me quietly and then she quotes something Mistress Coyle once said to me. “We are the choices we make.” It takes me a second to realize she's just said goodbye.

A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary. —Thomas Carruthers

As the martial artist and actor Bruce Lee said, “I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick ten thousand times.

Inspiration is for amateurs.

As Pablo Picasso (no slouch at theft himself) put it, “Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.

War makes monsters of men," I say, quoting Ben from that night in the weird place where New World buried its dead. "And women," Mistress Coyle says.

Create Safe, Collision-Rich Spaces:

Deep practice feels a bit like exploring a dark and unfamiliar room. You start slowly, you bump into furniture, stop, think, and start again. Slowly, and a little painfully, you explore the space over and over, attending to errors, extending your reach into the room a bit farther each time, building a mental map until you can move through it quickly and intuitively.

While successful culture can look and feel like magic, the truth is that it’s not. Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do.

When we hear a fact, a few isolated areas of our brain light up, translating words and meanings. When we hear a story, however, our brain lights up like Las Vegas, tracing the chains of cause, effect, and meaning. Stories are not just stories; they are the best invention ever created for delivering mental models that drive behavior.

Even the most creative skills—especially the most creative skills—require long periods of clumsiness.

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

Excellence is a habit. —Aristotle

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

You can’t prevent mistakes, but you can solve problems graciously.

The revolution is built on three simple facts. (1) Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons—a circuit of nerve fibers. (2) Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy. (3) The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become.

Studies show that even a brief connection with a role model can vastly increase unconscious motivation. For example, being told that you share a birthday with a mathematician can improve the amount of effort you’re willing to put into difficult math tasks by 62 percent.

No shortcuts,” “Work hard, be nice,” “Don’t eat the marshmallow,” “Team and family,” “If there’s a problem, we look for the solution,” “Read, baby, read,” “All of us will learn,” “KIPPsters do the right thing when no one is watching,” “Everything is earned,” “Be the constant, not the variable,” “If a teammate needs help, we give; if we need help, we ask,” “No robots,” and “Prove the doubters wrong.

Super-slow practice works like a magnifying glass: It lets us sense our errors more clearly, and thus fix them.

I have always maintained that excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work. —Charles Darwin

to get good, it's helpful to be willing, or even enthusiastic, about being bad. Baby steps are the royal road to skill.

Master teachers and coaches don’t stand in front; they stand alongside the individuals they’re helping. They don’t give long speeches; they deliver useful information in small, vivid chunks.

A method of schooling founded by the Italian educator Maria Montessori that emphasizes collaborative, explorative learning, and whose alumni include Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page; Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales; video-game designer Will Wright; Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos; chef Julia Child; and rap impresario Sean Combs.

Things may need to stay in the darkness for some time. There is power in darkness: the power of gestation, deep dreaming, and the sweetness of night. However, sometimes darkness obscures our vision, making it difficult to see some of our very important parts. And sometimes darkness is a messy closet into which we shove things we can't quite get rid of, but don't know how to use anymore.

Mistress Coyle agreed, and Simone set to work, planning the whole thing with the absolute focus on capturing a Spackle and sending it back with a message of peace. Which seems strange after we’ve killed so many of them to do it, but it’s been obvious since the beginning that wars make no sense. You kill people to tell them you want to stop killing them.

Life is long and dumb and devastating. People should believe whatever they need to believe to get by.

It's not events, but our opinions about them, which cause us suffering.

The solution is to ignore the bad habit and put your energy toward building a new habit that will override the old one.

Survive everything. And do it with style.

Deep practice, however, doesn't obey the same math. Spending more time is effective—but only if you're still in the sweet spot at the edge of your capabilities, attentively building and honing circuits. What's more, there seems to be a universal limit for how much deep practice human beings can do in a day. Ericsson's research shows that most world-class experts—including pianists, chess players, novelists, and athletes—practice between three and five hours a day, no matter what skill they pursue.

You know the phrase ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’?” Edmondson says. “In fact, it’s not enough to not shoot them. You have to hug the messenger and let them know how much you need that feedback. That way you can be sure that they feel safe enough to tell you the truth next time.

Actually, when you look more closely at the sentence, it contains three separate cues: 1. You are part of this group. 2. This group is special; we have high standards here. 3. I believe you can reach those standards. These signals provide a clear message that lights up the unconscious brain: Here is a safe place to give effort.

Thinking about your ancestors makes you smarter. A research team led by Peter Fischer found that spending a few minutes contemplating your family tree (as opposed to contemplating a friend, or a shopping list, or nothing at all) significantly boosted performance on tests of cognitive intelligence. Their hypothesis is that thinking about our connections to the group increases our feelings of autonomy and control.

Struggle is not optional—it's neurologically required: in order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit suboptimally; you must make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes; you must slowly teach your circuit. You must also keep firing that circuit—i.e., practicing—in order to keep myelin functioning properly. After all, myelin is living tissue.

In the interest of clarity, we'll define talent in its strictest sense: the possession of repeatable skills that don't depend on physical size (sorry, jockeys and NFL linemen).

If you were to visit a dozen talent hotbeds tomorrow, you would be struck by how much time the learners spend observing top performers.

Annabelle, I'm going to kill you!" I cried, frowning at the mess. Then I glanced down the stairway and gasped. It looked like someone had beaten me to it.

According to a 1995 study, a sample of Japanese eighth graders spent 44 percent of their class time inventing, thinking, and actively struggling with underlying concepts. The study's sample of American students, on the other hand, spent less than 1 percent of their time in that state. “The Japanese want their kids to struggle,” said Jim Stigler, the UCLA professor who oversaw the study and who cowrote The Teaching Gap with James Hiebert. “Sometimes the [Japanese] teacher will purposely give the wrong answer so the kids can grapple with the theory. American teachers, though, worked like waiters. Whenever there was a struggle, they wanted to move past it, make sure the class kept gliding along. But you don't learn by gliding.

— Yuv fucked this one up, ya daft cunt, the man said to him, raising a pint of eighty shillings to his lips. — Eh? What? Boab was surprised again. — You, Boab Coyle. Nae hoose, nae joab, nae burd, nae mates, polis record, sair face, aw in the space ay a few ooirs. Nice one, he winked and toasted Boab with his pint. This angered, but intrigued Boab. — How the fuck dae you ken? Whae the fuckin hell ur you? The man shook his head, — It's ma fuckin buisness tae ken. Ah'm God.

The way we live our lives is not sustainable. I don’t just mean recycling and turning off the faucet while brushing your teeth. I mean the way we treat each other. The way we pick and choose whose lives are important – who we actually treat as human. There is nobody on this earth whose life is not of value. And that includes those of us who have been left behind. Maybe they did go to some Christian heaven. But what I’m saying is, we’re good people too. We’re worthwhile people. I’d vouch for every last one of you.

After all, you aren’t built to be transformed in a single day. You are built to improve little by little, connection by connection, rep by rep. As Wooden also said, “Don’t look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.

[Building purpose is...] not as simple as carving a mission statement in granite or encouraging everyone to recite a hymnal of catchphrases. It's a never-ending process of trying, failing, reflecting and above all learning. High-purpose environments don't descend on groups from on high; they are dug out of the ground, over and over, as a group navigates it's problems together and evolves to meet the challenges of a fast-changing world.

Our own God Soul, our Holy Guardian Angel, whispers to us, “Be not afraid.” Can we breathe in some courage and breathe out some compassion, and take up the task at hand? Can we live fully, despite our fears? Can we use the energy of fear to propel us forward instead of using it as an excuse to keep us in place? Can we move ever toward the Work of This God?

Building habits of group vulnerability is like building a muscle. It takes time, repetition, and the willingness to feel pain in order to achieve gains.

Practice on the days that you eat.

I feel at ease and, in an indefinable way, at home, when dolphins are around. I now know when they are nearby before they appear. I dream after they leave.

Build a Wall Between Performance Review and Professional Development:

This is a different way of thinking about human beings," Pentland says. "Individuals aren't really individuals. They're more like musicians in a jazz quartet, forming a web of unconscious actions and reactions to complement others in the group. You don't look at the informational content of the messages; you look at patterns that show how the message is being sent. Those patterns contain many signals that tell us about the relationship and what's really going on beneath the surface.

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.

...all the world's parenting advice can be distilled to two simple rules: pay attention to what your children are fascinated by, and praise them for their effort." [Paraphrasing Carol Dweck, a psychologist who studies motivation]

What ignited the progress wasn't any innate skill or gene. It was a small, ephemeral, yet powerful idea: a vision of their ideal future selves, a vision that oriented, energized, and accelerated progress, and that originated in the outside world.

Building purpose in a creative group is not about generating a brilliant moment of breakthrough but rather about building systems that can churn through lots of ideas in order to help unearth the right choices. This is why Catmull has learned to focus less on the ideas than on people—specifically, on providing teams with tools and support to locate paths, make hard choices, and navigate the arduous process together.

The best I can hope for is the occasional moment of loose happy freedom—found usually with Harp but once or twice on this trip with Peter—that tells me it’s okay. That if I was put on this earth for any particular reason, it was to experience love and joy, just like anybody else.

Think of your windshield as an energy source for your brain. Use pictures (the walls of many talent hotbeds are cluttered with photos and posters of their stars) or, better, video. One idea: Bookmark a few YouTube videos, and watch them before you practice, or at night before you go to bed.

Thank you," he said. "Welcome. Welcome especially to Mr. Coyle Mathis and the other men and women of Forster Hollow who are going to be employed at this rather strikingly energy-inefficient plant. It's a long way from Forster Hollow, isn't it?" "So, yes, welcome," he said. "Welcome to the middle class! That's what I want to say. Although, quickly, before I go any further, I also want to say to Mr. Mathis here in the front row: I know you don't like me. And I don't like you. But, you know, back when you were refusing to have anything to do with us, I respected that. I didn't like it, but I had respect for your position. For your independence. You see, because I actually came from a place a little bit like Forster Hollow myself, before I joined the middle class. And, now you're middle-class, too, and I want to welcome you all, because it's a wonderful thing, our American middle class. It's the mainstay of economies all around the globe!" "And now that you've got these jobs at this body-armor plant," he continued, "You're going to be able to participate in those economies. You, too, can help denude every last scrap of native habitat in Asia, Africa, and South America! You, too, can buy six-foot-wide plasma TV screens that consume unbelievable amounts of energy, even when they're not turned on! But that's OK, because that's why we threw you out of your homes in the first places, so we could strip-mine your ancestral hills and feed the coal-fired generators that are the number-one cause of global warming and other excellent things like acid rain. It's a perfect world, isn't it? It's a perfect system, because as long as you've got your six-foot-wide plasma TV, and the electricity to run it, you don't have to think about any of the ugly consequences. You can watch Survivor: Indonesia till there's no more Indonesia!" "Just quickly, here," he continued, "because I want to keep my remarks brief. Just a few more remarks about this perfect world. I want to mention those big new eight-miles-per-gallon vehicles you're going to be able to buy and drive as much as you want, now that you've joined me as a member of the middle class. The reason this country needs so much body armor is that certain people in certain parts of the world don't want us stealing all their oil to run your vehicles. And so the more you drive your vehicles, the more secure your jobs at this body-armor plant are going to be! Isn't that perfect?" "Just a couple more things!" Walter cried, wresting the mike from its holder and dancing away with it. "I want to welcome you all to working for one of the most corrupt and savage corporations in the world! Do you hear me? LBI doesn't give a shit about your sons and daughters bleeding in Iraq, as long as they get their thousand-percent profit! I know this for a fact! I have the facts to prove it! That's part of the perfect middle-class world you're joining! Now that you're working for LBI, you can finally make enough money to keep your kids from joining the Army and dying in LBI's broken-down trucks and shoddy body armor!" The mike had gone dead, and Walter skittered backwards, away from the mob that was forming. "And MEANWHILE," he shouted, "WE ARE ADDING THIRTEEN MILLION HUMAN BEINGS TO THE POPULATION EVERY MONTH! THIRTEEN MILLION MORE PEOPLE TO KILL EACH OTHER IN COMPETITION OVER FINITE RESOURCES! AND WIPE OUT EVERY OTHER LIVING THING ALONG THE WAY! IT IS A PERFECT FUCKING WORLD AS LONG AS YOU DON'T COUNT EVERY OTHER SPECIES IN IT! WE ARE A CANCER ON THE PLANT! A CANCER ON THE PLANET!

People think doping is for lazy people who want to avoid hard work. That might be true in some cases, but in mine, as with many riders I knew, it was precisely the opposite. EPO granted the ability to suffer more; to push yourself farther and harder than you'd ever imagined, in both training and racing.

In Conversation, Resist the Temptation to Reflexively Add Value: The most important part of creating vulnerability often resides not in what you say but in what you do not say. This means having the willpower to forgo easy opportunities to offer solutions and make suggestions. Skilled listeners do not interrupt with phrases like Hey, here’s an idea or Let me tell you what worked for me in a similar situation because they understand that it’s not about them. They use a repertoire of gestures and phrases that keep the other person talking. “One of the things I say most often is probably the simplest thing I say,” says Givechi. “ ‘Say more about that.

There’s a tendency in our business, as in all businesses, to value the idea as opposed to the person or a team of people,” he says. “But that’s not accurate. Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they’ll find a way to screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a good team, and they’ll find a way to make it better. The goal needs to be to get the team right, get them moving in the right direction, and get them to see where they are making mistakes and where they are succeeding.

The good Lord, in his infinite wisdom, did not make us all the same. Goodness gracious, if he had, this would be a boring world, don't you think? You are different from each other in height, weight, background, intelligence, talent, and many other ways. For that reason, each one of you deserves individual treatment that is best for you. I will decide what that treatment will be.

Martin had a period of relishing the Boston thug-writer George V. Higgins, author of The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Higgins’s characters had an infectious way of saying ‘inna’ and ‘onna,’ so Martin would say, for example, ‘I think this lunch should be onna Hitch’ or ‘I heard he wasn’t that useful inna sack.’ Simple pleasures you may say, but linguistic sinew is acquired in this fashion and he would not dump a trope until he had chewed all the flesh and pulp of it and was left only with pith and pips. Thus there arrived a day when Park Lane played host to a fancy new American hotel with the no less fancy name of ‘The Inn on The Park’ and he suggested a high-priced cocktail there for no better reason than that he could instruct the cab driver to ‘park inna Inn onna Park.’ This near-palindrome (as I now think of it) gave us much innocent pleasure.

But Viv, if I've learned anything at all in the last eight years of my life? It's that people just like to tell themselves stories about where they came from. They can't help themselves. They don't trust the world around them--it's too good for them, or not good enough--so they tell themselves stories about it. They tell themselves an old magician who lives up in the sky made them out of clay and put them here until whenever he makes up his mind to take them out again. Your parents didn't like their creation myth, that's all--it had pain in it, and chaos, and their own parents were ashamed. So they told themselves a story that was at least partially true: about two good people who deserved happy lives. And probably at some point they started to believe that story. But the thing is, really, that it doesn't matter. For your parents or anyone else. It doesn't actually matter where we came from, or where we're going, or when. The only thing that matters is what we have to do while we're here and how well we do it.