Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice

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This was really interesting. I basically believed in the central premise before I read it, but the amount of evidence he presents seems pretty conclusive. My favourite 'study' was a Hungarian guy who announced to the world he would make a chess grand champion to prove the hypothesis, found a woman willing to give him kids as test subjects, and did it. His three daughters were (according to Syed) the best female players ever, the eldest was the first ever female grand master, and the youngest was the youngest grandmaster ever, of either gender. The middle daughter had to settle for a mere 4 chess olympiad medals. Remarkably, people didn't believe his theory about practice, instead saying he must have 'good chess genes' essentially :lol: The talent theory is not merely flawed in theory; it is insidious in practice, robbing individuals and institutions of the motivation to change themselves and the society. Expertise is ultimately about the quality and quantity of practice. These results are not limited to youngsters; they have been replicated with university students, sportsmen, business leaders, and even systems engineers at Nasa. The growth mindset not only predicts motivation and performance highlights but other key indicators, too. Two-time Olympian and sports writer and broadcaster Matthew Syed draws on the latest in neuroscience and psychology to uncover the secrets of our top athletes and introduces us to an extraordinary cast of characters, including the East German athlete who became a man, and her husband – and the three Hungarian sisters who are all chess grandmasters. Bounce is crammed with fascinating stories and statistics.

Instead, the gap in performance was opened up by their respective mindsets. Those who held the belief that abilities are transformable through effort not only persevered but actually improved when confronted with difficulties; those labouring under the talent myth, on the other hand, regressed into a state of psychological enfeeblement. As an example, my eldest son used to take part in weekly football coaching at a local sports centre. He was one of the younger players (being a late August baby) but was always willing to learn, and paid attention to what the coach was trying to get across. There were apparently more talented players there, but few of them were willing to learn. The coach pointed out that over time the abilities of the players would tend to average out - those who were willing to learn catching up and indeed over taking those who had a head start.However, this requires so much effort that only those with proper motivation will ever be able to succeed. Believing in something beyond the self can have a hugely beneficial psychological impact, even if the belief is fallacious. If you think that you’re not talented about something – chances are you won’t become anyone important in that something. But not because you couldn’t have – merely because you have missed the point and spend too little time practicing. Mozart is considered by many to have been the greatest composer who ever lived. Traditionally, most people would assume outstanding achievements like his are due to natural abilities, or even divine inspiration or fate. This assumption holds especially true for child prodigies like Mozart who already had the world mesmerized with his musical talent at the age of six.

The most important differences are not at the lowest levels of cells or muscle groups, but at the athlete’s superior control over the integrated and coordinated actions of their bodies. Expert performance is mediated by acquired mental representations that allow the experts to anticipate, plan and reason alternatives courses of action. (p.35) However, it’s one thing to be good at something, and a completely different thing to be the best one! Expert-induced amnesia: James has automated his stroke-making. Many hours of practice have enabled him to encode the stroke in implicit rather than explicit memory. 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. 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.

Our Critical Review

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. I think my only criticism of the book would be that it reads a bit like a series of separate articles, with the latter chapters appearing to be less integrated than the earlier, and I would have liked a final chapter to sum up the whole.

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! Syed, sportswriter and columnist for the London Times, takes a hard look at performance psychology, heavily influenced by his own ego-damaging but fruitful epiphany. At the age of 24, Syed became the #1 British table tennis player, an achievement he initially attributed to his superior speed and agility. But in retrospect, he realizes that a combination of advantages—a mentor, good facilities nearby, and lots of time to hone his skills—set him up perfectly to become a star performer. Recognition of familiar scenarios and the chunking of perceptual information into meaningful wholes and patterns speed up processes. Purposeful practice s about striving what’s just out of reach and not quite making it; it is about grappling with tasks beyond the current limitations and falling short again and again. Excellence is about stepping outside the comfort zone, training with a spirit of endeavor, and accepting the inevitability of trials and tribulations. Progress is built, in effect, upon the foundations of necessary failure. That is the essential paradox of expert performance.When I first read the title ‘Bounce’ by Matthew Syed, I was more intrigued with the name of the author than on what the book was about. No cutting: I loved it all through and through and couldn't put it down. At long last! Here's the ethos I firmly believe in and try to instil in my own kids being brillantly vindicated! More, the author being an athlete and, most of his examples being taken from the world of sport, 'Bounce' ends with a very relevant questioning of how, now, we might be able to improve on performances using genetic engineering and/or doping. Would it be moral? Would it be that bad? The author's answers are surely light (that's not his main topic, having said that) but, I found such ending a nice way to close it all. 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. This is illustrated by a study of young violinists’ concerts, where the only factor directly linked to the students’ level of achievement was the amount of time they had spent practicing seriously: while the star performers had practiced for an average of 10,000 hours, the least skilled students only had 4,000 hours under their belts. What’s even more telling is that there were no exceptions: all of the best-performing students had devoted great efforts to practicing, and all of the students who had practiced for 10,000 hours belonged to the best-performing group.

After Part I, Syed's largely anecdotal structure becomes tired. Too many flowery descriptions about athletes' lives and I wasn't nearly as intrigued by the conclusions. They were mostly just a spinning out of the points he made in the first part. I would've restructured the book to fit the theses of parts II and III into part I. There's another very interesting chapter which has some new ways to think about performance enhancing substances and methods. When is enhancement a good thing, when and why in other circumstances is it not? The Kenyan runners from the region Nandi: The biological theory of Nandi athletic superiority is pretty simple to understand. Distinctive body types are the consequence of population isolation, enabling the gene pool to drift apart from neighboring populations, aided an abetted by the forces of natural and sexual selection.

Key Lessons from “Bounce”

The need to belong, to associate, is among the most important human motives. We are almost certainly hardwired with a fundamental motivation to maintain these associations. His book Bounce thus turned out to be a book that focused on excellence in sports. It is always a great literally contribution when you have an expert with hands-on experience share their insights in a manner that is clear, easy to understand