Bounce shows you that training trumps talent every time, by explaining the science of deliberate practice, the mindset of high performers and how you can use those tools to become a master of whichever skill you choose.
I remember Tai Lopez kept raving about this book back in 2014. Matthew Syed is a former table tennis professional, who was the number one English player for several years and went to the Olympics twice. Since 1999, he writes for The Times. Bounce was his first book about how high performers like himself achieve their success.
Here are my takeaways:
With intense practice, 2 changes will occur in your brain to make it more effective.
Even minor details can inspire you to work hard for your success.
You can avoid choking under pressure by telling yourself that it’s not a big deal.
Let’s look at what it takes to be successful in detail!
Lesson 1: When you practice a lot, 2 changes will make your brain more effective.
Table tennis players often seem to have lightning fast reaction times, right?
But when scientists ran a bunch of tests on the English national team’s players, they found the best player, Desmond Douglas, to have the slowest reaction times.
How does this go together?
Douglas’s brain has been trained to quickly assess situations in a table tennis match, through years of practice, but only when he’s playing.
Because he’s seen so many balls fly towards him in so many different ways, his brain can easily estimate even the most complex trajectories and give him more time to react than other players with less practice.
However, that doesn’t make him a better driver. In an everyday car crash, he wouldn’t hit the brakes any faster than you or me.
The second thing that happens is that his brain uses other areas to perform than the brain of a beginner. Since a lot of his actions happen on autopilot, the subconscious parts of his brain are really in charge here.
Instead of wasting the resources of his prefrontal cortex on trying to get the ball spin right, he can use his brain to think about tactics, because the movements of his hand are taken care of.
Lesson 2: You can be inspired to work hard by the most trivial details.
Do you know the story of the 4 minute mile?
Basically, for thousands of years humans believed it was not possible to run a mile in less than 4 minutes.
It seemed like the human body just wasn’t capable of doing it.
The record stalled in the 1940’s, for 9 years no one could get past 4:01.
Then, in 1954, Roger Bannister finally broke the mark.
Within a month, another guy did it. Over the next 4 years, 20 more people broke the barrier, bringing the record all the way down to 3:56.
When the hell did it become so easy for so many people?
The moment someone did it, that had even the slightest relation to them.
11 of those 20 people come from UK-related countries (Ireland, NZ, AUS). Roger Bannister was British.
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.
What happened to Eminem when he finally got his shot to show everyone how good he was at rapping live on stage? He choked.
Looking into hundreds of faces, knowing they were all expecting him to fail, the pressure to perform became so enormous, that all his hardly trained rhyming skills seemed to vanish.
What can happen to all performers in such a high pressure situation, is that their conscious brain takes over, because it usually allows them to take extra caution and be very alert of every movement, so they don’t make a mistake.
However, when it’s all on the line, that’s not exactly what you want. It’s right in those moments that you want your subconscious to be in charge, so you can actually reap the benefits of all your hard training.
You can combat this performance anxiety by telling yourself that it’s really not such a big deal and that the event doesn’t matter to you.
Compare it to your health, your family, your spouse or your best friends – does it really matter whether you win or lose the Super Bowl?
This will allow you to stress less and unleash your hard earned skills.
And sure enough, once he stopped giving a damn about the whole event or what everyone thinks of him, Eminem went back and crushed it.
My personal take-aways
I’m big on deliberate practice and so is Bounce. Naturally, we got along quite well. Syed also touches on related topics, such as having a fixed mindset and building confidence. Combine this with the reminder that you need incredible focus on one area from Zero To One yesterday, and you have a great recipe for success.
I like the many examples this summary used and am sure there are many more in the book plus links to some of the studies Syed quotes, which are hard to find otherwise. Look at whether the summary on Blinkist strikes you and if it does, grab a copy of Bounce!
What else can you learn from the blinks?
How many hours of work child “prodigy” Mozart already had under his belt before stunning the public
Why most people never make it to the ranks of high performers
The 2 ways in which a fixed mindset will ruin you either way and why you should praise your children for their efforts, not their talent
What happened after a South Korean won the LPGA tour for the first time
3 things that happen when you doubt yourself
When your brain switches into “pay attention mode” and why
Who would I recommend the Bounce summary to?
The 13 year old who is about to give up playing the piano, the 22 year old who loves his college football team, but is not quite sure he can make it into the NFL, and anyone who ever choked at an important event.
The Book in Three Sentences
Talent is a result of thousand of hours of purposeful practice, not inate talent.
Expert knowledge comes from experience.
If you want to be world-class, you have to embrace failure.
The Five Big Ideas
“If we believe that attaining excellence hinges on talent, we are likely to give up if we show insufficient early promise”.
“Speed in sport is not based on innate reaction speed, but derived from highly specific practice”.
“[Talent] cannot be taught in a classroom; it is not something you are born with; it must be lived and learned. To put it another way, it emerges through practice”.
“Child prodigies do not have unusual genes; they have unusual upbringings”.
“Purposeful practice is about striving for what is just out of reach and not quite making it; it is about grappling with tasks beyond current limitations and falling short again and again”.
Bounce Book Summary
“If we believe that attaining excellence hinges on talent, we are likely to give up if we show insufficient early promise”.
The iceberg illusion: “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 to us – the submerged evidence, as it were – is the countless hours of practice that have gone into the making of the virtuoso performance: the relentless drills, the mastery of technique and form, the solitary concentration that have, literally, altered the anatomical and neurological structures of the master performer. What we do not see is what we might call the hidden logic of success”.
“Speed in sport is not based on innate reaction speed, but derived from highly specific practice”.
“It is also worth noting that the development of motor expertise (skilled movement) is inseparable from the development of perceptual expertise (chunking patterns)”.
“The essential problem regarding the attainment of excellence is that expert knowledge simply cannot be taught in the classroom over the course of a rainy afternoon, or indeed a thousand rainy afternoons”.
“Good decision-making is about compressing the informational load by decoding the meaning of patterns derived from experience”.
“[Talent] cannot be taught in a classroom; it is not something you are born with; it must be lived and learned. To put it another way, it emerges through practice”.
“[Complexity] describes those tasks characterized by combinatorial explosion; tasks where success is determined, first and foremost, by superiority in software (pattern recognition and sophisticated motor programmes) rather than hardware (simple speed or strength)”.
“Child prodigies do not have unusual genes; they have unusual upbringings”.
“‘When most people practise, they focus on the things they can do effortlessly’, Ericsson has said. ‘Expert practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well – or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become’.”
“Every second of every minute of every hour, the goal [of purposeful practice] is to extend one’s mind and body, to push oneself beyond the outer limits of one’s capacities, to engage so deeply in the task that one leaves the training session, literally, a changed person”.
“Purposeful practice is about striving for what is just out of reach and not quite making it; it is about grappling with tasks beyond current limitations and falling short again and again”.
“Progress is built, in effect, upon the foundations of necessary failure. That is the essential paradox of expert performance”.
“Futsal is a perfect example of how well-designed training can accelerate learning; how the knowledge that mediates any complex skill can be expanded and deepened at breathtaking speed with the right kind of practice”.
“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”.
“Sometimes learning can be accelerated by something as simple as training with superior players”.
“The ten-thousand-hour rule, then, is inadequate as a predictor of excellence. What is required is ten thousand hours of purposeful practice”.
“Purposeful practice may not be easy, but it is breathtakingly effective”.
“But careful study has shown that creative innovation follows a very precise pattern: like excellence itself, it emerges from the rigours of purposeful practice. It is the consequence of experts absorbing themselves for so long in their chosen field that they become, as it were, pregnant with creative energy. To put it another way, eureka moments are not lightning bolts from the blue, but tidal waves that erupt following deep immersion in an area of expertise”.
“In a study of sixty-six poets by N. Wishbow of Carnegie Mellon University, more than 80 per cent needed ten years or more of sustained preparation before they started writing their most creative pieces”.
“Feedback is, in effect, the rocket fuel that propels the acquisition of knowledge, and without it no amount of practice is going to get you there”.
“In order to become the greatest basketball player of all time, you have to embrace failure”.
“Excellence is about striving for what is just out of reach and not quite making it; it is about grappling with tasks beyond current limitations and falling short again and again”.
“Intelligence-based praise orientates its receivers towards the fixed mindset; it suggests to them that intelligence is of primary importance rather than the effort through which intelligence can be transformed; and it teaches them to pursue easy challenges at the expense of real learning”.
“The thing that often separates the best from the rest is a capacity to believe things that are not true but which are incredibly effective”.
“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”.
“Irrational beliefs can boost performance, provided they are held with sufficient conviction”.
“Choking, then, is a kind of neural glitch that occurs when the brain switches to a system of explicit monitoring”.
Other Books by Matthew Syed
Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success
Buy this book– https://amzn.to/2SFJjxU
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