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

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Expert firefighters are able to confront a burning building and almost instantly place it within the context of a rich, detailed, and elaborate conceptual scheme derived from years of experience. They can chunk the visual properties of the scene and comprehend its complex dynamics, often without understanding how. This is extrasensory perception, a sixth sense.

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

However, Mozart was a child only in terms of age. In terms of musical proficiency – he was an adult. That is – someone who has practiced playing the piano for more than 3,500 hours! 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.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.

Bounce: The Myth of Talent and The Power of Practice

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… Ericson’s experiment: purposeful practice was the only factor distinguishing the best from the rest. It is practice, not talent that ultimately matters.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! And for undergraduates in a simple experiment – it was sharing the birthday with someone who had successfully solved the assignment they were about to! 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. 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. 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

Bounce : The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice

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. 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.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. 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) 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! But looking more closely at the phenomenon of child prodigies, we find that in fact they had to practice for thousands of hours before showing their so-called prodigious talent. In fact, scientists studying the phenomenon have found that typically a prodigy’s training begins at a very early age and that they compress endless hours of practice into their young lives. Extensive research has shown that there is a scarcely a single top performer in any complex task who has circumvented the ten years of hard work necessary to reach the top.