Anders Ericsson: The body and mind can be radically altered with the right kind of practice. When the body is put under exceptional strain, a range of dominant genes in the DNA are expressed and extraordinary psychological processes are activated.

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Finally, you’ll also come to understand that most dreaded of occurrences: choking when the stakes are highest, despite thorough preparation. Thankfully, you’ll also learn about tools to avoid it happening to you. Choking is a species of failure so absolute that it looks as if there is an entirely different player out on view. Or at least that’s what Matthew Syed arguments so forcefully about in “ Bounce.” Who Should Read “Bounce”? And Why?For those genes that there is variation, the vast majority of that variation – around 85 % – exists between individuals within population groups. Our servers are getting hit pretty hard right now. To continue shopping, enter the characters as they are shown 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. The experiment with the pigeons: the pigeons witnessed a random connection between a particular kind of behavior and a desired connection, and wrongly inferred that the relationship was causal.

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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! 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. And for undergraduates in a simple experiment – it was sharing the birthday with someone who had successfully solved the assignment they were about to! Seeing is not believing: only a tiny fraction of a person’s genes have effects that the human eye can see. No single gene is sufficient for classifying human populations into systematic categories. Because once you reach a certain level – say, the level of your peers – you usually stop challenging yourself. High-level performers know better: they keep inventing new obstacles and beat them. They’re in a league of their own from the start!Over time we have developed the ability to sculpt perceptions using top-down knowledge; it provides immediacy. Instead of having to infer the existence of a face in a pattern of dots or the structure in mammogram, you can see it. It is there. The inference is, as it were, embedded in perception. 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). 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. Purposeful practice: the practice sessions of aspiring champions have a specific and never-changing purpose: progress. Every second of every minute of every hour, the goal is to extend one´s mind and body, to push oneself beyond the outer limits of ones capacities, to engage so deeply in the task that one leaves the training session, literally, a changed person. The answer lies in the two changes that intensive practice brings about in the way your brain handles a specific task.

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The pattern of success is not genetic despite being specific to certain populations. Social and economic factors are the primary factors driving the success of Kenyan distance running. The top Kenyan athletes are predominantly from areas of high altitude, even relative to the rest of Africa. 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.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. We should praise effort, not talent we should emphasize how abilities can be transformed through application; we should teach others and ourselves to see challenges as learning opportunities rather than threats; we should interpret failure not as an indictment but as an opportunity. Onlookers took the performance to be the consequence of special abilities because they had witnessed only a tiny percentage of the activity that had gone into its making. 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.

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If the performer doesn’t feel any pressure, there is no pressure – and the conscious mind will not attempt to wrestle control from the implicit system. OK – that and about constant six-year-long 5-hours a day deliberate practice! Key Lessons from “Bounce” 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.Bounce” can – since it’s neither about music nor about football, neither about tennis nor about art. It’s about talent. Transformational 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.