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

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Bounce: The Myth of Talent and The Power of Practice

Study on decision-making in the real world: The curious thing was not that top-decision makers like firefighters and doctors were making choices based on unexpected favors; it was that they did not seem to be making choices at all.

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. 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. When creativity manifests itself not in artistic expression but in technical innovation, a subtle but immensely powerful interaction is created: purposeful practice changing individuals, and also changing the means of changing individuals. In stage one, experts engage in purposeful practice and, as a consequence, develop new techniques. In stage two, other individuals corral these innovations to increase the efficacy of practice, leading to new innovations in stage three, and so on. 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.

Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of

To an external observer, this kind of conviction may seem irrational. But in fact the point of this conviction is not its veracity. 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. Thousands of hours of training and practice has prepared these experts to perform complex tasks. In fact, the tasks have long since been handled by their implicit brain system, so they are done automatically and can be performed simultaneously. A key difference between experts and novices is that experts are better at extracting information from what’s going on around them. Federer can anticipate the movements of a tennis ball more efficiently that the rest of us, not because he has better eyesight but because he know where to look and how to interpret the movement pattern of his opponent.

China and Ping-Pong, Brazil and soccer; all the successful systems have one thing in common: they institutionalize the principles of purposeful practice. Imagine a child pianist practicing to play her favorite songs by ear. She may spend many afternoons practicing at the piano, but it’s likely that as soon as she gets close to the original, she’ll work less and less hard to improve further as her performance is already good enough. 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 limiting factor in making a world-class stroke isn’t strength or brute force, but the executive control of fine motor movement to create perfect timing.

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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. 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. 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. 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.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 very much enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in both sport and education. Syad provides a very persuasive case for the vital role of purposeful practice and experience in developing talent - something which can be applied not just to sport but to most areas of life. He fills the book with a whole variety of real life examples, both from his own career as a top table tennis player, and from other sporting and non-sporting greats.