Bounce

An excellent book that changes your perspective on achievement and talent.

Item delivered as advertised...

Very informative...lots of useful ideas.

If you want to become an Elite Performer in any life performing arena.....here it is! All you now need to do for yourself is exercise your will power! Your success is an "an act of your will." Priceless contribution. Matthew Syed.....THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

Great read. Fantastic on how it breaks down athletes reaching world class abilities through repetition and certain environment exposure.

In the first few chapters I thought the author simply wrote his first book as a summary of "Outlier", "Talent is overrated" and "Talent Code". I had been completely wrong. Being UK's No.1 Ping Pong player, he could and had much more to say "first hand" than anybody else. I can tell you he made it remarkably with more detailed yet readable research done on relevant topics, including placebo effect, harm of praising talent instead of hard work, choke, doublethink etc., that even laymen can easily understand, communicate and apply. I am sure this book will be a classic in the field. Read it, and you may find the direction of your future effort in order to achieve your personal dreams or goals you set for your others, particularly your children and students. Highly recommended!p.s. Below please find some of my favorite passages for your reference.Nobody who had reached the elite group without copious practice, and nobody who had worked their socks off but failed to excel. Purposeful practice was the only factor distinguishing the best from the rest. pg13It is not as simple as just looking where to look; it is also about grasping the meaning of what you are looking at. It is about looking at the subtle patterns of movement and postural clues and extracting information. Top tennis players make a small number of visual fixations and "chunk" the key information...When Roger Federer is returning a service, he is not demonstrating sharper reactions than you and I; what he is showing is that he can extract more information from the service of his opponent and other visual clues, enabling him to move into positions earlier and more efficiently than the rest of us. pg30-31Expert performance is mediated by acquired mental representations that allow the experts to anticipate, plan, and reason alternative courses of action. These mental representations provide experts with increased control of the aspects that are relevant to generating their superior performance. pg37The most important ingredient in any expert system is knowledge. Programs that are rich in general inference methods but poor in domain specific knowledge can behave expertly on almost no tasks. pg44Good decision making is about compressing the informational load by decoding the meaning of patterns derived from experience. pg45Mozart had clocked up an eye-watering 3500 hours of practice even before his sixth birthday. pg57Mere experience, if it is not matched by deep concentration, does not translate into excellence. pg78When most people practice, they focus on the things they can do effortlessly. Expert practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can do well - or even at all. pg80If you dont know what you are doing wrong, you can never know what you are doing right. pg102The advantage of a coach is that he has a perspective - being able to look from the outside in - that the player lacks. pg104Armed with a growth mindset, Shizuka Arakawa interpreted falling down not merely as a means of improving, but as evidence that she was improving. Failure was not something that sapped her energy and vitality, but something that provided her with an opportunity to learn, develop and adapt. pg127I had learnt the art of playing as if it means nothing when it means everything. - Steve Davis, six time World Snooker Champion pg200

In Bounce, Matthew Syed provides an explanation as to why people succeed, especially in sports. Syed was a champion table tennis player in the UK and much of the book relates to sports participation. His basic premise is that success in life comes from dedicated practice not from natural talent. He provides a number of examples of athletes and others who worked hard to achieve success, using the standard of 10,000 hours (1,000 hours per year) that Malcolm Gladwell mentions in his book Outliers, which covers the same general topic. Syed also refers to the work of Stanford professor Carol Dweck on fixed and growth mind-sets and other authors on this basic topic.In general this book is quite interesting reading, but much of the ground has been covered by Gladwell and others mentioned in the book. The last chapter, on whether or not sports success is genetic or not is particularly interesting and for that reason I rate the book at four stars. Athletes and would-be athletes will especially find it useful.

Author manages very well to take the myth out of the successes of the famous, and zooms in on other factors involved in the creation and coming about of success, such as support, timing, background/parenting, culture, commitment, etc.. The book mostly covers sports related examples, as well as education, and shares some very personal insights. In reading, it has the effect of changing a paradigm (or two) that we might have, blocking us from seeing a more complete picture. The material echoes in ones mind for a long time, with the take-away being that talent is over-rated. This book is a must read and inspirational, as it allows one to understand better what ways, tools are available/open on the way to success, whether in sports, school, or any other endeavor we undertake. It perfectly complements 'The Outliers' and has some overlap in material (i.e. the 10,000 hours generally assumed necessary in order to master something, i.e. an instrument), as well as approach. Personally, I find both equally exhilarating and surprising in exposing lesser known principles, facts, etc, behind the success story, and both are very well researched and referenced. Must read, an eyeopener.