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

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And the difference between the best and the good is not only in the amount of time they spend practicing, but also the way they test themselves after they don’t need to anymore! I really enjoyed Syed's description of the difference between a scientist and an athlete. A scientist always is in doubt with a sense of inner skepticism. However, a good athlete should not be in doubt; to an athlete, doubt is poison.

No cutting: I loved it all through and through and couldn't put it down. At long last! Here's the ethos I firmly believe in and try to instil in my own kids being brillantly vindicated! More, the author being an athlete and, most of his examples being taken from the world of sport, 'Bounce' ends with a very relevant questioning of how, now, we might be able to improve on performances using genetic engineering and/or doping. Would it be moral? Would it be that bad? The author's answers are surely light (that's not his main topic, having said that) but, I found such ending a nice way to close it all. For more formal events, the room transforms into a great meeting space, able to accommodate up to 70 guests theater style, 36 cabaret style and 28 in a boardroom setting. Mozart was able to be so good not merely because he spent so much time practicing – but because he found the motivation to do this!

Who Should Read “Bounce”? And Why?

It sounds like a blasphemy, but, according to Matthew Syed – it’s true: Mozart was just a regular child! We think of him as someone extraordinary – that is: a child prodigy – because we compare him to the wrong group of people.

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!

Key features include 7ft wide cinematic screen with HD projector and a state of the art wireless presentation system. One of the most remarkable findings of modern psychology is the extraordinary capacity of human beings to mould the evidence to fit their beliefs rather than the other way around; it is our capacity to believe in spite of the evidence and sometimes in spite of our other deeply held beliefs”.

Different things motivate different people, but the best part of it is – some of them are even trivial. For example, for Mia Hamm, that something was her coach telling her to “switch on.” For South Korean female golfers, it was Se-ri Pak winning the U.S. Open at the age of 20. What happened to Eminem when he finally got his shot to show everyone how good he was at rapping live on stage? He choked. And Matthew Syed was able to learn this best from a direct competitor: Desmond Douglas. Even though tests proved that he was one of the table-tennis players with the slowest reaction times, he was lightning fast on the field!Syed calls this motivation by association. He says if we find even the slightest similarity between someone successful and ourselves, it can motivate us to multiply our work efforts. Lesson 3: You can tell yourself an event is not a big deal to avoid choking under pressure. A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface. If we believe that attaining excellence hinges on talent, we are likely to give up if we show insufficient early promise”.

When people observe youths excelling in some field, they often are biased by the so-called "iceberg illusion": they assume that the youths have special abilities "because they had witnessed only a tiny percentage of the activity that had gone into its making." Onlookers do not see the painfully slow progress made over a period of years, during the training period. But scratch beneath the surface, and you will find that all the successful systems have one thing in common: they institutionalize the principles of purposeful practice”. You see, you’re making a terrible mistake when you compare Mozart to other six-year-olds. You should instead compare him to other people who have practiced about 3,500 hours. Because that’s exactly how much time Mozart had spent in front of his piano by the time he was six! 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 SyedCompare it to your health, your family, your spouse or your best friends – does it really matter whether you win or lose the Super Bowl? But what the crowd see is the present moment, he explains, and not all the falls and hard work in the past. If they could have seen it - Talent was out of the dictionary.