If you can accept the fact that our muscles have no memory, that all memory resides in the brain, and that everything that we do relies on the brain to time the firing of the neurotransmitters to create the action desired through muscle contraction and expansion, then everything we do is timing.
Talent or skill is an insulated neural circuit. The more it fires correctly, the more it becomes insulated. Eventually, the circuit is insulated so much that the brain forgets about the complete circuit and it fires on its own when the action is needed. We call this action subconscious.
When you were a toddler before you could walk there was no balance circuit in your brain. You got up and tried to balance and fell and fell and fell, until one day you balanced if, only for a short time. And then you fell again. This process went on, over and over, until one day you could stand up and then you tried to walk. Again, you fell, but you got up and tried again and fell again, until one day you walked and then fell. You got up, walked, and fell, each time walking a longer way and standing up longer.
This cycle continued until one day you walked without even thinking about what you were doing. At that time, the neural circuit was insulated to the point that the brain could forget about it. Every time you walked from then until now, that walking circuit has continued to insulate and fires without thought – in other words, subconsciously.
It sounds hard to believe, but everything we do is a well-timed myelinated neural circuit (“myelin” is the stuff that insulates the circuit). And how well we do it is not dependent upon how well we understand what is going on, but how many times we have fired the circuit successfully, and each time we have fired it, the circuit has gotten better and better. The brain’s job is to fire the circuit enough times (consciously) to understand what the circuit is, then insulate it (make it subconscious) and then forget about it.
There was a time when four diagonal lines meant nothing to you. Now you recognize them as a “W”. Throughout your life, your brain has been creating and firing these complex neural circuits. The people who are the most skilled or talented are the ones who have fired their circuits the most and have the most myelin on their circuits.
According to the research, it’s not genetics, nutrition, or environment that creates skill or talent. Science defines skill or talent as an insulated neural circuit, and the insulation grows based not on how much it is visualized or thought about, but how many times it has fired correctly. This is why the current research says that it takes 10,000 hours of doing something to become world-class at anything – because, at the end of the day, it’s all timing. We know it’s hard to believe that everything we do is a timed circuit in the brain, but it is. Try learning to eat with chopsticks!
What does this say about the input/output question we posed earlier? This is one of the main reasons that we spend so much time talking about and getting people to implement and commit to breakpoints. It’s also why when a person commits to breaking a target in a chosen breakpoint, that they become so successful and can do it so quickly and consistently.
Without a committed breakpoint, you have no timing. And it is all timing. Without a committed breakpoint, you will check the lead, and then the lead is part of the input. When lead is part of the input, you cannot have timing, because it involves a conscious thought process.
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