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

Product Information

The caveman: A tendency to perceive causal connections that don’t actually exist can confer huge evolutionary benefits, providing a cocoon of safety in a turbulent and dangerous world. The only proviso is that your superstitions must not impose too much of a burden on those occasions when they are without foundations. OK – that and about constant six-year-long 5-hours a day deliberate practice! Key Lessons from “Bounce” This book seeks to argue that success is down to long and purposeful practice rather than talent. The author seeks to evidence this by showing that champions are those that practice the most rather rather than those that are necessarily more "talented". Although this would be a nice inspirational result (if it were true) I was unconvinced that the author sufficiently proved this point. In particular the author seems to ignore (or miss) the potential correlation/causality ambiguity. 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.

Bounce: The Myth of Talent and The Power of Practice

Essential reading for an astounding summer of sport; If you’ve ever wondered what makes a champion, Bounce has the answer. We do our jobs, but often with our minds absent – partially or wholly – from what we are doing. We go through the motions. This is why length of time in many occupations is only weakly related to performance. Mere experience, if it is not matched by deep concentration, does not translate into excellence. “I have not improved in five years. Why? Because I have been cruising on autopilot”. 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. If you compare him to someone twice his age who has spent the same amount of time practicing – his technique isn’t all exceptional! What is required is ten thousand hours of purposeful practice. And for practice to be truly purposeful, concentration and dedication, although important, are not sufficient. You also need to have access to the right training system, and that sometimes means living in the right town or having the right coach.Ericson’s experiment: purposeful practice was the only factor distinguishing the best from the rest. It is practice, not talent that ultimately matters. 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. 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) 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. 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, The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice by Bounce, The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice by

Ericsson: when most people practice, they focus on the things that they can do effortless. Expert practice is different. It entails considerable, specific and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well – or even at all. It is only by working on what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you 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. 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. 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! 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.

Who Should Read “Bounce”? And Why?

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! Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice" by Matthew Syed is a captivating journey into the world of achievement and excellence. This book has left an indelible mark on my perspective, reshaping the way I view success, practice, and the true potential within each of us. Bounce” can – since it’s neither about music nor about football, neither about tennis nor about art. It’s about talent. 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.

Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of E-book download Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of

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. Anticlimax: we might feel miserable after a triumph. This is so that we are able to disengage from our triumph, enabling us to focus on the next challenge. If goal fulfillment induced indefinite periods of contentment, we would be robbed of all future motivation. For an award-winning writer, it is the melancholy that provides the creative impetus for the next literary adventure. 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. Attention is a resource with severe capacity limitations. Most of us have the same bandwidth available for conscious processing, but experts, by automating perceptual and motor programs, are able to create spare capacity.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. Talent is overrated – and never enough! And if you really want to succeed in anything in life, you’ll have to repeat this truism as if a mantra. And pair it up with another: practice makes perfect, practice makes perfect, practice makes perfect…