The book is highly inspiring and its message deeply affirming of human potential to achieve almost anything one desires if only one has the determination to put in the requisite amount of deep practice. It's filled with thought-provoking information, and its insights have important implications for other aspects of the human experience beyond talent and skill. The processes described by Coyle, for example, also apply to problems such as depression, anxiety, OCD and many other disorders of the brain, suggesting that overcoming these problems is a matter of developing new circuitry in the brain by practicing having different thoughts.
One of the thought-provoking aspects is the idea that once we learn skills to the point where they become second nature, they pass into the unconscious mind, a storehouse of all such skills, through something called automaticity. But skills and talent are not the only circuits that become part of the unconscious, as anyone who ever heard of Freud will no doubt know; maladaptive circuits hide there, too. Which, in turn, makes one think about who and what we really are. Circuits, deeply insulated by meylin, our personalities, seem to be just patterns in the gray matter. But if this seems depressing, it also has a silver lining: we can change, no matter who we are and how afflicted we seem to be. We just need that spark of ignition, the faith in the ultimate success, the fire to start deep practice of new thoughts, behaviors and new selves.
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