Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice

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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. When we listen to a conversation in our own language, we hear a series of distinct words separated by tiny gap of silence. But no such silence actually exists. It is our knowledge of the grammatical structure of our language that enables us to retouch the acoustic information so that we hear it in a neatly structured form. 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. Though the book is divided into three sections namely The Talent Myth, Paradoxes of the Mind and Deep Reflections, I felt the book had a singular theme and that was the capacity of any human being to become the best of best if he was able to dedicate the time, effort, money and yes – his own life to one single cause with absolute excellence and commitment. The Summary of Bounce | Chapter 7: Baseball rituals, pigeons, and why great sportsmen feel miserable after winning

In the end and despite its strengths (which are numerous), ‘Bounce’ exhibits many of the ‘PC’ sophisms prevalent in the present era and our discomfort with exceptionalism; the notion that, by definition, only a very small percentage of people will traverse the upper echelons of achievement, the road to which requires phenomenal levels of hard work and, yes, intrinsic ability. 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. Why such a striking difference? Consider for a moment what was going on in the minds of the two groups. Both groups understood that the test was measuring their intelligence or talent. So far, so good. But those in the fixed mindset had a further belief: that their intelligence is set in stone and there is little room for personal development.When the brain switch occurs, neither courage nor cowardice makes the least bit difference. Choking is a problem of psychological reversion: the flipping from a brain system used by experts to one used by novices. Child prodigies amaze us because we compare them not with other performers who have practiced for the same length of time, but with children of the same age who have not dedicated their lives in the same way. 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

Or that “Klein found that for chess experts the move quality hardly changed at all in blitz conditions”. Laughable, truly, for anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of high level chess. 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 into 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. What set great achievers and successful people apart from the rest? Simple: hard work and practice.

“Bounce Summary”

Perhaps the key task of any institution is to encourage the adoption of a growth mindset. When that kind of philosophy becomes embedded in the culture, the consequences can be dramatic." Most of us can’t find any motivation for well, anything but building Lego castles – when we’re children! When we get older, our success depends on it. Wimbledon articulates this essential truth with rare eloquence. The small few vying for glory, the stars we cheer on Centre Court, represent the shattered dreams of thousands. And this is as it should be. It is brutal, but it is also, in its way, beautiful.”