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

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Creative innovation follows a very précis pattern: like excellence itself, it emerges from the rigors of purposeful practice. It is the consequence of experts absorbing themselves for so long in their chosen field that they become, as it were, pregnant with creative energy. To put it another way, eureka moments are not lightning bolts from blue, but tidal waves that erupt following deep immersion in an area of expertise. The key point is that the power of the mind is exercised through the medium of belief, and it doesn’t matter whether the belief is true or false, or how the delusion is created, so long as it is created successfully. Purposeful practice also builds new neural connections, increase the size of specific sections of the brain, and enables the expert to co-opt new areas of grey matter in the quest to improve.

Bounce PDF Summary - Matthew Syed | 12min Blog Bounce PDF Summary - Matthew Syed | 12min Blog

In a nutshell, when chess masters look at the positions of the pieces on a board, they see the equivalent of a word. Their long experience of playing chess enables them to “chunk” the pattern with a limited number of visual fixations in the same way that our familiarity with language enables us to chunk the letters constituting a familiar word. It is a skill derived from years of familiarity with the right “language”, not talent. (p. 24)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). 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. Syed is clearly a fan of Malcolm Gladwell and references Gladwell’s book Outliers several times. Having read Gladwell’s David and Goliath, but not Outliers, I’m tempted to assume that most of Gladwell’s books are pretty same-y. There’s definitely a certain amount of overlap between Bounce and David and Goliath.

Bounce: The Myth of Talent and The Power of Practice

And, sometimes, motivation is a strange thing. For example, there are many Brazilian soccer greats, mainly because there were always many before them! If you don’t believe that, take for example the phenomenon of female K-golfers dominating the sport. Until 1998, when Se-ri Pak became the first South Korean golfer to win the U.S. Women’s Open – there was basically none!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! The dangers of starting out to hard, too young, often outweigh the benefits. One of the skills of a good coach is to tailor a training program to the mindset of the individual. Believing in something beyond the self can have a hugely beneficial psychological impact, even if the belief is fallacious. 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. An arbitrary difference in birth date sets in train a cascade of consequences that, within a matter of a few years, has created an unbridgeable chasm between those who, in the beginning, were equally well equipped for sporting stardom.

Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice

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. It’s uplifting because if you’re good at something it’s because you earned it. If you’re not good at something yet it’s because you haven’t yet practised enough but you know that you can be one day if you keep trying. That’s great for motivation. It’s great for reminding you that you might not be perfect, but you’re better than you were six months ago. It stops you from wanting to give up when things get tough. World class performance comes by striving for a target just out of reach, but with a vivid awareness of how the gap might be breached. Over time, through constant repetition and deep concentration, the gap will disappear, only for a new target to be created, just out of reach again. From the author of You Are Awesome: Find Your Confidence and Dare to be Brilliant at (Almost) Anything

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. The figure skater champion fell and fell. Why did she not give up? Because she did not interpret falling down as failure. Armed with a growth mindset, she interpreted falling down not merely as a means of improving, but as evidence that she was improving. Failing provided her with an opportunity to learn, develop and adapt. Example of the transition between brain systems: when you learn to drive a car. Starting out, you have to focus on all the separate things; gears, brake etc. After you have been driving for a while, things have changed. Your skills have moved from the explicit to the implicit, from the conscious to the unconscious, and your ability has graduated from novice level to proficiency. Well, your brain constantly works on two levels: implicitly and explicitly. The former is the automated way of doing things, the latter the conscious effort. Deliberate practice makes mental processes move from your explicit to your implicit brain. But think if an expert were to find himself using the wrong brain system. No matter how great he is, he would strive because he is using his explicit rather than internal system. The highly sophisticated skills encoded in the implicit part of his brain would count for nothing.

Bounce by Matthew Syed | Waterstones

Federer has practiced for so long that the movement have been encoded in implicit rather than explicit memory. This is what psychologists call expert-induced amnesia. 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. 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. What are the real secrets of sporting success, and what lessons do they offer about life? Why doesn’t Tiger Woods “choke”? Why are the best figure skaters those that have fallen over the most and why has one small street in Reading produced more top table tennis players than the rest of the country put together. And for undergraduates in a simple experiment – it was sharing the birthday with someone who had successfully solved the assignment they were about to!Bounce reveals how competition - the most vivid, primal, and dramatic of human pursuits - provides vital insight into many of the most controversial issues of our time, from biology and economics, to psychology and culture, to genetics and race, to sports and politics. He admits his argument owes a debt to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, but he aims to move one step beyond it, drawing on cognitive neuroscience research to explain how the body and mind are transformed by specialized practice. He takes on the myth of the child prodigy, emphasizing that Mozart, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, and Susan Polgar, the first female grandmaster, all had live-in coaches in the form of supportive parents who put them through a ton of early practice. 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. As you probably already know, the main message/goal of Matthew Syed's book Bounce is to discredit the established notion that success in highly complex tasks (athletics in this case) is entirely due to innate ability. Instead, he argues, it is thousands of hours of purposeful, challenging practice and determination to improve that create the superior skill observed in top athletes, chess players and professionals in other fields.