Bounce: The of Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice

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It is only an expert performer – someone who has practiced long enough to automate skill – who has the capacity to choke. For a novice – still wielding the explicit system – any additional attention is likely to benefit execution, not hinder it. Matthew Syed is an Olympic athlete. His sport is table tennis. He writes about how he’s realised that his prowess at the sport has nothing whatsoever to do with any innate talent or any quirk of genetics but is entirely due to careful, purposeful practise. For example, when the six-year-old Mozart toured Europe to display his precocious piano skills, he had already undergone 3,500 hours of musical training. If you compare this to other pianists who have practiced for as long, Mozart’s performance wasn’t all that exceptional. Retrieval structure: make sense of numbers and words and put them in a context. 3 4 9 2 can be thought of as 3 minutes and 49,2 seconds, a time for running a marathon.

Bounce: The Myth of Talent and The Power of Practice

The migration from the explicit to the implicit system of the brain has two crucial advantages. First, it enables the expert player to integrate the various parts of a complex skill into one fluent whole, something that would be impossible at a conscious level because there are too many interconnecting variables for the conscious mind to handle. You see, you’re making a terrible mistake when you compare Mozart to other six-year-olds. You should instead compare him to other people who have practiced about 3,500 hours. Because that’s exactly how much time Mozart had spent in front of his piano by the time he was six!Few things in life are more satisfying than beating a rival. We love to win and hate to lose, whether it's on the playing field or at the ballot box, in the office or in the classroom. In this bold new look at human behavior, award-winning journalist and Olympian Matthew Syed explores the truth about our competitive nature: why we win, why we don't, and how we really play the game of life. Edison: if I find 10 000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward. The key point in all this is that knowledge is not used merely to make sense of perceptions; knowledge is embedded in perceptions. Gladwell: most top performers practice for around 10 000 hours per year (it is difficult to sustain the quality of training if you go beyond that).

Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice

Or at least that’s what Matthew Syed arguments so forcefully about in “ Bounce.” Who Should Read “Bounce”? And Why? When we listen to a conversation in our own language, we hear a series of distinct words separated by tiny gap of silence. But no such silence actually exists. It is our knowledge of the grammatical structure of our language that enables us to retouch the acoustic information so that we hear it in a neatly structured form. Syed's exploration of the concept that talent is not an innate gift, but rather a result of purposeful, deliberate practice, is nothing short of revolutionary. He takes us on an exhilarating ride through the stories of individuals who have scaled unimaginable heights, showcasing that even the most exceptional talents are honed through dedicated effort. Different things motivate different people, but the best part of it is – some of them are even trivial. For example, for Mia Hamm, that something was her coach telling her to “switch on.” For South Korean female golfers, it was Se-ri Pak winning the U.S. Open at the age of 20.

Most of us can’t find any motivation for well, anything but building Lego castles – when we’re children! When we get older, our success depends on it.

Bounce Summary of Key Ideas and Review | Matthew Syed - Blinkist Bounce Summary of Key Ideas and Review | Matthew Syed - Blinkist

Believing in something beyond the self can have a hugely beneficial psychological impact, even if the belief is fallacious. Automaticity: When we learn a new task, like driving a car, we concentrate hard to master the skills. At first we are slow and awkward, and our movements are characterized by conscious control, but as we get more familiar, the skills are absorbed in implicit memory, and we no longer give much thought to them. A key aspect of brain transformation is myelin, a substance that wraps around the nerve fibers and that can dramatically increase the speed with which signals pass through the brain. Extensive research has shown that there is a scarcely a single top performer in any complex task who has circumvented the ten years of hard work necessary to reach the top. Over time we have developed the ability to sculpt perceptions using top-down knowledge; it provides immediacy. Instead of having to infer the existence of a face in a pattern of dots or the structure in mammogram, you can see it. It is there. The inference is, as it were, embedded in perception.Take Mozart for example. He may be the archetypal prodigy. After all, he was a brilliant musical performer by the age of 6. And at that age, can’t even differentiate a musical quarter note from a poorly drawn shovel! For those genes that there is variation, the vast majority of that variation – around 85 % – exists between individuals within population groups.

Matthew Syed Collection 3 Books Set (Rebel Ideas, Black Box

Recognition of familiar scenarios and the chunking of perceptual information into meaningful wholes and patterns speed up processes. Well, because, he trained his brain to be perfect for table tennis! Namely, to select only the information relevant to the game; after all, he didn’t need to be able to react fast when someone threw food at him. Douglas mastered something sociologists call deliberate practice. Expert knowledge simply cannot be taught in the classroom over the course of a rainy afternoon. Sure, you can offer pointers of what to look for and what to avoid, and these can be helpful. But relating the entirety of the information is impossible because the cues being processed by experts – in sports or elsewhere – are so subtle and relate to each other in such complex ways that it would take forever to codify them in their mind-boggling totality. This is known as combinatorial explosion. Anders Ericsson: The body and mind can be radically altered with the right kind of practice. When the body is put under exceptional strain, a range of dominant genes in the DNA are expressed and extraordinary psychological processes are activated.The key is to be sensitive to the way the child is thinking and feeling, encouraging training without exerting undue pressure. The example with the slider who got a salt water injection instead of morphine: the solder was not merely comforted by the injection of saltwater; he was able to tolerate the agonies of surgery as well as if he had been injected with real anesthetics. These events are so powerful because they are small and indirect. It is called motivation by association; a small, barely noticed connection searing deep into the subconscious and sparking a motivational response.