If You Wish To Make An Astronomer From Scratch, You Must First Ignite The Child Daniel

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Coyle argues in his book The Talent Code that ignition is the result of primal cues: subtle motivational prompts that an individual must consistently receive that encourage their work ethic and general interest in particular fields. Coyle stresses specifically that these primal cues must be continuous to guarantee sustained stimulation, as he writes, “[Talent hotbeds] contain complex collections of signals—people, images, and ideas—that keep ignition going for the weeks, months, and years that skill-growing requires”. Coyle's description of primal cues and “skill-growing” could be directly compared with the relationship between gas and car engines. A car can’t run forever on a single gallon or two of gas; it must be repeatedly filled to travel longer distances. Thus Coyle argues that an individual requires “collections of signals”, or primal cues, throughout their life to maintain their interest and motivation to pursue that interest. Without these cues, the individual, much like a car without fuel, will hardly scrape the surface of their skills. However, these cues aren’t very simple. The process of being ignited appears as a simple ‘if, then’ statement, however, the then quotient must always convey the idea of better get busy . Thus the primal cue must be exciting— it must convince an average individual that there is an area worth becoming extraordinary in. It must introduce a stellar idea or open a door to a secret club of elite information that tempts its audience beyond any other non-committal, manageable club. Daniel Coyle thereby asserts that ignition relies on the constancy and force of primal cues. 

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Carl Sagan’s door to the secret club of astronomy was unlocked primarily by books. Naturally, Sagan was not born with an astronomer’s mind, nor did he always have an interest in science beyond what his standard school classes taught him. However, in William Poundstone’s biography, Sagan manages to recall how the stars had always both appealed to and maddened him in his childhood, as he could not decipher their reason for existence beyond being glowing baubles for young Brooklyn boys to admire. Poundstone writes, “The uselessness of these [stars], way up in the lovely night air, invoked a sense of melancholy. Carl went to the Eighty-fifth Street library and demanded a book on stars … It opened a world of enchantment”. One of the first primal cues in Sagan’s life was evidently that specific experience. There was the original cue of “The stars don’t make sense to me, better get busy.” Which eventually led into the “Astronomy’s nuances are fascinating, better get busy.” One primal cue naturally led to the other—which is an observation of Coyle’s concept of continuous ignition in practice. This experience not only expanded his world of knowledge but also expanded his general enthusiasm towards learning. However, this ignition was continued much later in his education, once again by an enlightening book, as Poundstone writes, “Sagan credited the book [Interplanetary Flight] as being a ‘turning point’ for him. It reinforced the still-novel idea that rockets to the planets would revolutionize the science of astronomy … Carl now realized that calculus was good for something … Fired by the Clarke book, he discovered the then-flourishing British school of scientist-popularizers”. After first realizing his initial interest in astronomy, Sagan still likely required another push to fully immerse himself in that area. And it’s also likely that he required a primal cue that was almost larger than life, that transcended his previous understanding of astronomy and introduced him to the wider breadth of information that science and math had to offer. Thus, Sagan found an exciting and convincing primal cue in Interplanetary Flight, as it not only gave his motivation to study stars a second wind, but it excited him by absolutely exceeding expectations. As Coyle states, a person must experience a variety of primal cues throughout their education and career. Naturally, it’d be difficult for any primal cues to have a lasting effect on a person if they are not stimulated accordingly. Sagan, however, was constantly witnessing revolutionary science throughout his life. During a broadcast entitled “A Celebration of Carl Sagan”, James H. Billington remarks, “Carl was born at the ideal time, he was a person for his time because he was there to be our guide through the initial exploration of our solar system. As he said and wrote many times, ‘There is only one generation that could begin when the planets and their moons were simply faint points of life and could watch each of them emerge as a true place with its geology and perhaps biology as well’”. Sagan’s luck at being “born at the ideal time” proves that he grew up and developed his career and interest in astronomy in a very stimulating environment. Had Sagan’s ignition been sparked just a generation before, or a generation after, he wouldn’t have felt as invigorated to hone his mind towards the singular subject of space travel. However, because he experienced a transformative period in astronomy, in which books such as Interplanetary Flight and especially detailed books on stars were most relevant and popular, his ambition only grew with humanity’s understanding of space. He could have turned on the television or strolled through the library, and encountered multitudes of primal cues. It would have been more difficult to avoid being ignited. It’s therefore apparent that Carl Sagan experienced constant primal cues in his life, exemplifying Coyle’s argument for ignition.

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However, a master coach's duties extend beyond lesson plan adaptability. It is equally for the coach to have their own successes and failures in their career they intend to instruct their student, in a feature Coyle defines as  "a matrix".

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Daniel Coyle regards the concept of deep practice as meaningful, stimulating efforts to consistently improve specific weaknesses. To illustrate this, he references a study done to catalog the intellectual development of rats. Bill Greenough from the University of Illinois had created three groups of rats, each in varying conditions. The first group of rats was completely isolated from one another, inside empty shoeboxes. The rats in the second group were raised alongside each other, again in empty shoeboxes. And the third group was surrounded by other rats, while also given piles of toys to play with. After a few months, Greenough measured the synapses, or neuron pathways, in the rats’ brains, and found that the third group’s number of synapses had increased by 25% compared to the rats from lesser environments. From this, Coyle understood that an enriching environment breeds individuals of exceptional intellectual prowess. If a person is given the chance to exercise basic intellectual skills, they will have a better handle on certain critical thinking skills than a person who hasn’t. This is because they’ve devoted a ridiculous amount of time on certain subjects, which has allowed them to hone their minds toward those subjects, grooming themselves extraordinarily in that direction. However, Coyle also argues that simply practicing for a considerable amount of time is not sufficient in this endeavor; it’s necessary that the individual deliberately learns from their mistakes. Coyle writes, “Deep practice is not simply about struggling; it’s about seeking out a particular struggle”. In this quote, Coyle highlights that thoughtful failure allows a person to identify and target weak points to improve upon them. For example, if a baker attempts to make the fluffiest sponge cake, however the result is a flat and dense mass of batter, they have two options. They could either shy away from the failure and vow off sponge cakes for the rest of their career, or they could analyze their shortcomings: revise and try again. From this, they’d eventually recognize that they had failed to mix out the air bubbles in their egg whites. And once they’d corrected this error, they’d be at least one step closer to creating the fluffiest sponge cake in existence. This idea of deliberate failure and stimulating efforts to improve is highlighted by Coyle in his definition of deep practice. Carl Sagan was raised with a mindset that prompted him to not avoid failure and correction. In his biography of the astronomer, William Poundstone provides an anecdote in which young Sagan’s experiment did not at all result as intended. Poundstone writes, “Following instructions in the [chemistry] set’s manual, Carl and Lu performed an experiment involving the ‘chlorine ring.’ It blew up, making a mess of the room. Lu’s sister narrowly escaped injury. Rachel refused to punish Carl. She surveyed the devastation and then announced simply, ‘These things happen when scientists do experiments’”. It’s important to note that Rachel, Sagan’s mother, encouraged this type of failure in her son. She accepted it as an occupational hazard when you’re a genius, and thus never dissuaded him from risking failure to develop an experiment. Consequently, Sagan naturally understood there was no shame in failing plenty of times as long as you manage to grow and learn from your mistakes. These lessons would carry on with him late into his career, as Sagan comments in his book The Demon-Haunted World, “science has a built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science”. Sagan’s idea of "error-correcting machinery" implies that failure is expected in the scientific process. He encourages scientists to embrace failure, because all failure provides a natural path to improvement. Thereby it’s evident Sagan had a strict mindset that recognizing and addressing mistakes are fundamental to intellectual development, and no one should ever renounce their mistakes and shun their failed ideas. When someone refuses to grow from their failure, they force themselves to start over from square one, building up completely new ideas from scratch— ideas that will naturally fail as well. However, Sagan, as he was unafraid of correction, refused to start over, and instead took his failed experiments as necessary research that would lead him to the correct answer. So he constantly built himself up and ultimately rose far above his peers. From this, one could easily gather that Sagan consistently practiced deliberate failure to improve upon his potential weaknesses. 

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Carl Sagan, much like the rats in Greenough’s experiment, surrounded himself in a constantly stimulating environment during his education, taking every opportunity to develop his understanding of astronomy, albeit at the expense of basic human necessities. Coyle details that deep practice solely occurs in intellectually gratifying circumstances. Sagan evidently was subject to such circumstances during his time at university. Abrahamson, his roommate, comments in William Poundstone’s biography, “‘He never cleaned up; he expected us to cook for him; he was just a brat’ … Unencumbered by trivialities, Sagan could devote extra time to his more speculative interests. One of them was UFOs … All summer long, Abrahamson would drag himself into the apartment after a long day’s work and Sagan would bug him to go out and look for UFOs”. Sagan prolonged his studies, to his roommate's dismay, by turning any and all of his spare attention towards scientific essays and field research. While this may seem an excuse to avoid his chores, it may also be interpreted as Sagan’s habit to disassociate from normalcy and triviality to absolutely captivate himself in larger concepts. He focused on one thing alone, sacrificing the development of many other skills, and thus became extremely skilled at doing that one thing. There was not a moment of his life that was not occupied with astronomy, and as a result he became a brilliant astronomer, among the best of his generation.

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However, a master coach’s duties extend beyond lesson plan adaptability. It is equally necessary for the coach to have their own successes and failures in the career they intend to instruct their student in, a feature Coyle defines as “a matrix.”​​​​​