Kenyans winning marathons and why Asians tend to be
good at math. It’s not just the existence of opportunities that
creates success; it’s the fact that there seem to be some
things we were made to do and some things we were not.
How do we find such things? What makes some little
boys and girls want to be athletes instead of musicians? Or
what causes a painter to want to learn computer
programming, for that matter? We can learn a lot from case
studies of famous athletes and musicians and deepen our
understanding of skill acquisition through research, but what
science can’t prove—what we still don’t know—is what
makes a person want to practice in the first place. What
drives a person to put in those countless hours of practice?
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.”^20
When my son Aiden saw the animated Pixar movie Cars for
the first time, he was transfixed. He had seen films and
cartoons before but none that could hold his attention. Cars
was different. At one year old, he watched the entire movie
from start to finish without stopping, which he had never
done before. Now he has enough merchandise from the
movie to fill two entire bedrooms. He is obsessed. Neither
my wife nor I pushed any of this on him, but the moment he