BOUNCE: The myth of talent and the power of practice, by Matthew Syed

The book reviewed notable sports men/women achievements and the impacts of training, hard work and focus over every other factor. The true value of the book is found in its dissection of the dangers of the ‘talent myth” rather it re-emphasizes the age long message; success is possible for all of us, but it comes with hard work and self belief rather than innate ability.

The book is divided into three parts namely:

- The talent myth,

-  Paradoxes of the mind

            - Deep reflections.

The talent myth: The author Matthew Syed, used his achievements in table tennis sport to illustrate how success can be achieved through hard works, staying around people of like minds and with a conducive environment. Matthew lived on a street – Silverdale that produced more outstanding table tennis players than the rest of Great Britain. Silverdale road was the well-spring of English table tennis: a ping-pong Mecca that seemed to defy explanations or belief.

The success of Silverdale Road was about the coming together of factors, beguilingly similar to those that have from time to time, elevated other tiny areas on our planet into the sporting ascendancy (Spartak in Moscow for example created more top-twenty women players between 2005 and 2007 than the whole of the US. Silverdale street had the following just to mention a little: Jimmy Stokes (England Junior Championship), Paul Savins (Junior International Championship), Paul Andrew (top national player), Sue Collier (England Schools Champion), The Syeds –Andrew and Matthew (Andrew, Matthews brother became one of the most successful junior players in the history of British table tennis, winning three national titles before retiring due to injury. Karen Witt – She won countless junior titles, the national senior title and prestigious commonwealth championship and dozens of others.

So what is special about the area or street? Success has much to do with where we come from. There are hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. However the abiding presumption of modern society is that natural talents determine success and failures. The metaphor we use to describe outstanding achievers encourage this way of thinking. Roger Federer – for example has been said to have (tennis encoded in his DNA). Tiger Woods is said to have been “born to play golf”. Top performers subscribe to this way of thinking too. Diego Maradona once claimed he was born with football skill in his feet. But after the survey by Ericsson, he discovered a paradigm shift in the way excellence is understood, and that it practice and not talent that makes excellence. The difference between expert and normal adults is the life-long persistence of deliberate effort to improve performance. There is absolutely no evidence of a “fast track” for high achievers. Just like Jack Nicklaus, the most successful golfer of all time succinctly puts it “nobody – but nobody – has ever become really proficient at golf without practice, without doing a lot of thinking and then hitting a lot of shots. It isn’t so much a lack of talents; it’s a lack of being able to repeat good shots consistently that frustrates most players and the only answer to that that is ‘practice’.

The myth of the child prodigy: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a sensation in the 18^th century Europe. At age six, he was enchanting members of the aristocracy with his skills on the piano, at the age of five had produced many works before his tenth birthday. Pretty impressive stuff for a boy in short trousers. He was called the timeless genius of history greatest composers. Surely this man should be born with sublime abilities; he had scarcely even lived ten thousand hours by the time he was getting to grips with piano and his early compositions.

But that is not the whole story. Mozart early life revealed more details. Mozart’s father was of course Leopold Mozart – a famous composer and performer in his own right. He was also a domineering parent who started his son on a programme of intensive training in composition and performance at age three. Leopold was well qualified for his role as little Mozart’s teacher by more than just his own eminence, he was deeply accomplished as a child trainer. His authoritative book on violin instruction, published the same year, Mozart was born remained influential for decades. So from the earliest age, Mozart was receiving heavy instruction from an expert teacher who lived with him.

Mozart had clocked up an eye-watery 3,500 hours of practice even before his sixth birthday. Seen in this context, Mozart’s achievement suddenly seem rather different, he no longer looks like a musician zapped with special powers that enabled him to circumvent practice. He looks like somebody who embodies the rigors of practice. He set out on the road to excellence very early in life, but now we can see why.

Child prodigies amaze us because we compare them not with other performers who have practiced for the same length of time, but with children of the same age who have not dedicated their lives in the same way. Had the six years old Mozart been compared with musician who had clocked up 3,500 hours of practice, rather than with other children of the same age, he would not have seemed exceptional at all.

When Tiger Woods became the youngest ever winner of the US masters golf champion in 1997 he was hailed by many experts as the most naturally gifted golfer to play the game. This was understood given his audacious strokes. But dig down into his past, and an entirely different explanation reveals itself and once again its starts with a highly motivated father. He started his son at what he himself describes as an “unthinkably early age” before he could even walk or talk.

Early practice is vital so that performances became totally ingrained and flow from the subconscious. Tiger was given a golf club at charismas – five days before his first birthday – and at eighteen months had his first golf outing. He couldn’t yet count to five, but little Tiger already knew a par 5 from par 4. By the age of two years and eight months Woods was familiar with bunker play and by his third year, he has developed his pre-shot routine. At two years Woods entered his first pitch and putt tournament at the Navy Golf Course in Cypress, California. He could already hit the ball eighty yards with his 2.5Woods and pitched accurately from 40yards. At 4years Tiger began training under a professional. Tiger won his first national major tournament at age 13. By his mid-teens, Woods had clocked ten thousand hours of dedicated practice like Mozart and the rest is history.

The Williams sisters; both multiple grand slam winners in tennis also held up the testaments of excellence through training and practice.  The same story goes for David Beckham; he would take a football to the local park in east London as a young child and kick it from precisely same spot for hours upon hours and the result is evident.

The arduous logic of sporting success has perhaps been most eloquently articulated by Andre Agassi. Reliving his early years in tennis in his autobiography, he wrote “my father says that if I hit 2,500 balls each day, I will hit 17,500 balls each week and at the end of one year, I will have hit nearly one million balls. He believes in math. Numbers, he says don’t lie. A child who hits one million balls each year will be unbeatable.

The Hungarian Sisters

 

 Laszlo Polgar believes that gifted or talented child does not have unusual genes, but rather, unusual upbringings. They have compressed thousands of hours of practice into small period between birth and adolescence, and that is why they have become world class. Polgar tried hard to sell his ideas in but could not in Hungary at the time cold war was at its height. Realizing that the only way to vindicate his theory was to test it on his own future children. Polgar spent hours trying to decide on the specific area in which he would groom his children for excellence and he settled for Chess game. Why Chess? Because it’s objective, and based on performance.

 

Polgar gave birth to three girls - Susan, Sofia and Judit. Polgar read so much about Chess and he devoted many hours a day to chess even before their fourth birthday, he did so jovially, making great play of the drama of the game, and over time the children became hooked. All his girls entered the local competition at age 5 and all became grandmasters!

 Susan

At age twelve, Susan won the world title for girls under sixteen, less than two years later, she became the top-rated female player in the world. She later became the first woman player in history to reach the status of grandmaster. By the end of her career she had won the world championship for women on four occasions and five chess Olympiads and remains the only person in history male or female to win the chess triple crown (the rapid, blitz, and classical world championships.

 

Sofia

She won the under-eleven Hungarian championship for girls at age five. She would go on to win the gold medal for girls at the world under fourteen championships in 1986 and numerous gold medals in chess Olympiads and other prestigious championships. But her most extraordinary achievement was the "miracle in Rome" where she won eight straight games in the magistrate in Roma against many of the greatest male players, including the grandmasters Alexander Chernin, Semon Palatnik, and Yuri Razuvaev. One chess expert wrote, "the odds against such occurrence must be billions to one”.

 

Judit

After succession of record-breaking victories in her early teens, Judit won the world under - twelve championships in Romania. It was the first time in history a girl won an overall (open to both men and women) world championship.

Three years later at the age of fifteen years and four months, she became the youngest-ever grandmaster - male or female in history. She has been number one chess player in the world for well over a decade, excluding a brief period when she was taken off the list due to inactivity when she gave birth to her first son in 2004 (to be replaced at the top of the list by her older sister, Susan).

Over the course of her career, she has had victories over almost every top player in the world, including Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, and Viswananathan Anand (combined).

 

What do all these tell us? It tells us that if you want to bend it like Beckham or fade it like Tiger, you have to work like crazy regardless of your genes, background, creed or colour. There is no short cut. 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 and trying again and again until excellence is attained. 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 performer.

The difference between Brazil and the rest of the world in football does not lay in economics and certainly not in genetics but in turbo-charged learning - in the thousands of Futsal pitches that pepper the nation like gold dust. What is futsal? Futsal is soccer played in a very closed or tiny space that compels you to perfect the artistry of football because of the smaller space and honing of skills which makes playing in a bigger space a child's play, according to Ronaldo De Lima, 3- time World Footballer of the year.

 

As officers, we should be inspired to be the best in our chosen fields, as no one is born with any innate skill or knowledge.  We can all become experts in whatever we do if we hunger for knowledge through reading, training, mentoring, hard work, personal self developments, and passion for whatever we do.