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”. For such a short & fast read, I have a lot to say about this book. Not because the book demands or merits superabundance of personal thought, but because it touched on a few topics which I spend a great deal of thought on anyways. 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. This book is a collection of quite a few different things. Syed is a very insightful and informed thinker and the ideas here are stimulating.

Basically, for thousands of years humans believed it was not possible to run a mile in less than 4 minutes.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”. 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.

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! 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… What happened to Eminem when he finally got his shot to show everyone how good he was at rapping live on stage? He choked. When I first read the title ‘Bounce’ by Matthew Syed, I was more intrigued with the name of the author than on what the book was about.

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”. However, it’s one thing to be good at something, and a completely different thing to be the best one! This cookie, set by YouTube, registers a unique ID to store data on what videos from YouTube the user has seen. Talent and innate ability vs. hard work and ‘deliberative practice’. Which is the greater and more determinative force? A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface.

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.Though the book is divided into three sections namely The Talent Myth, Paradoxes of the Mind and Deep Reflections, I felt the book had a singular theme and that was the capacity of any human being to become the best of best if he was able to dedicate the time, effort, money and yes – his own life to one single cause with absolute excellence and commitment.

In the end and despite its strengths (which are numerous), ‘Bounce’ exhibits many of the ‘PC’ sophisms prevalent in the present era and our discomfort with exceptionalism; the notion that, by definition, only a very small percentage of people will traverse the upper echelons of achievement, the road to which requires phenomenal levels of hard work and, yes, intrinsic ability. And for undergraduates in a simple experiment – it was sharing the birthday with someone who had successfully solved the assignment they were about to! What set great achievers and successful people apart from the rest? Simple: hard work and practice.Through his experience as an international tennis table champion, Matthew Syed looks at what it takes to become the best; and debunks some cherished myths of innate talent along the way. Bounce is a compelling argument that champions are not born, they are made – and their success is down to two important things: opportunity and practice. Who is it for? 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! 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. A stand out difference between novices and experts is that experts can extract information from what is going on around them. Through their extensive experience they are able to see things that are simply invisible to the rest of us. Would you like to read Bounce by Matthew Syed?