Book Summary: Bounce by Matthew Syed

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.

“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”.

“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)”.

“‘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”.

“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”.