Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice

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The book also inspired me, if anyone can succeed in what they do as long as they put in plenty of hard work, than I can definitely do so to play better in capoeira. :) It's not about talent. Talent comes from those invisible hours of practice that you didn't see the individual do. People say, Oh, Tiger Woods was born to play golf. No, he mastered golf because his father started training him at an early age, and he repeatedly did the same difficult shots over and over, hours on end. And for undergraduates in a simple experiment – it was sharing the birthday with someone who had successfully solved the assignment they were about to! 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. Talent and innate ability vs. hard work and ‘deliberative practice’. Which is the greater and more determinative force?

The first half of the book consists of direct quotes from and regurgitation of Colvin and Coyle's books and says nothing new about the alleged main subject of the book. Bounce” is a book specifically written for – and about – you. It analyzes genius performances in fields as different as sports, music and math, so as to prove to you that talent is a myth. And that you need to start practicing right away! About Matthew Syed However, don’t go overboard: too much confidence results in less practice and a bigger chance for a failure at a later stage. That’s what happens to many of the overexposed Mozarts of today! Nominated for William Hill's Sports Book of the Year in 2010, this examines the case for the hypothesis that natural talent is bunk, and practice is what makes you great. Syed is an ex table tennis player, and focuses on sport, but covers examples from anywhere he can find them, including the collapse of Enron. 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 understandTransformational moment: Shaq O’Neill was about to quite basket, telling his mom that he could do it later. His mom responded: Later doesn’t always come to everybody. 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) 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! For such a short & fast read, I have a lot to say about this book. Not because the book demands or merits superabundance of personal thought, but because it touched on a few topics which I spend a great deal of thought on anyways. 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.

Businesses often suppose that financial incentives are the primary driver of motivation, but this is not supported by the evidence. Monetary inducements can, indeed, make a significant difference, but mindset is more important. It seems then, that outstanding abilities come from vast amounts of rigorous practice rather than natural talents. 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. You are so brilliant; you got an A without really studying I´d better quit studying or they won’t think I’m brilliant! The iceberg illusion by Ericsson: when we witness extraordinary feats of memory (or of sporting or artistic prowess) we are witnessing the end product of a process measured in years. What is invisible for us – the submerged evidence, as it were – is the countless hours of practice that have gone intoBut what the crowd see is the present moment, he explains, and not all the falls and hard work in the past. If they could have seen it - Talent was out of the dictionary. 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. Matthew Syed is a British journalist and fairly successful former table tennis player, becoming English champion on four separate occasions and being its top ranked player for nearly ten years. By comparing the outcome of the shot with the color movie of his intention, he was able to learn and adapt in the most efficient way on every single stroke he ever played. 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.