Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success

by Matthew Syed

For a period in the 1980s, this one street, and the surrounding vicinity, produced more outstanding table tennis players than the rest of the

nation combined. One road among tens of thousands of roads; one tiny cohort of schoolkids against millions up and down the country. Silverdale Road was the wellspring of English table tennis: a Ping-Pong mecca that seemed to defy explanation or belief. Had some genetic mutation spread throughout the local vicinity without touching the surrounding roads or villages? Of course not: the success of

Silverdale Road was about the coming together of factors of a beguilingly similar...

(Spartak, an impoverished tennis club in Moscow, for example, created more top-twenty women players between 2005 and 2007 th...

This is merely a slightly different twist on what I call the autobiographical bias. My point is not that I was a bad table tennis player; rather, it is that I had powerful advantages not available to hundreds of thousands of youngsters. I was, in effect, the best of a very small bunch.

What is certain is that if a big enough group of youngsters had been given a table at eight, had a brilliant older brother to practice with, had been trained by one of the top coaches in the country, had joined the only twenty-four-hour club in the county, and had practiced for thousands of hours by their early teens, I would not have been number one in England.

Think of the thousands of potential Wimbledon champions who have never

been fortunate enough to own a tennis racket or receive specialized coaching. Think of the millions of potential major-winning golfers who have never had access to a golf club.

The delusion lies in focusing on the individuality of their triumph without perceiving—or bothering to look for—the powerful opportunities stacked in their favor.

Whenever I am inclined to think I am unique and special, I remind myself that had I lived one door farther down the road, I would have been in a different school district, which would have meant that I would not have attended Aldryngton, would never have met Peter Charters, and would never have joined Omega.

Top performers had devoted thousands of additional hours to the task of becoming master performers.

Purposeful practice was the only factor distinguishing the best from the rest.

The aim of the first part of this book is to convince you that Ericsson is right; that talent is not what you think it is; that you can accomplish all manner of things that seem so far beyond your current capabilities as to occupy a different universe. But this will not be a wishy-washy exercise in the power of positive thinking. Rather, the arguments will be grounded in recent findings in cognitive neuroscience that attest to the way the body and mind can be transformed with specialized practice.

child prodigies may look as if they have reached the top in double-quick time, but the reality is that they have compressed astronomical quantities of practice into the short period between birth and adolescence.

The same conclusion—about the primacy of practice—is arrived at by widening the perspective, as Ericsson has shown. Just consider the way in which standards have risen dramatically in just about every area of human endeavor.

The fastest time for the marathon in the 1896 Olympics was just a few minutes faster than the entry time for the Boston Marathon, which is met by thousands of amateurs.

What the science is telling us is that many thousands of hours of practice are necessary to break into the realm of excellence.

It shows that those who make it to the top, at least in certain sports, are not necessarily more talented or dedicated than those left behind: it may just be that they

are a little older. An arbitrary difference in birth date sets in train a cascade of consequences that, within a matter of a few years, has created an unbridgeable chasm between those who, in the beginning, were equally well equipped for sporting stardom.

Once the opportunity for practice is in place, the prospects of high achievement take off. And if practice is denied or diminished, no amount of talent is going to get you there.

This is what Ericsson calls 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 ma...

You were able to recall the entire series of letters by, as it were, encoding them in a higher-order construct (i.e., a word). This is what psychologists call “chunking.”

When Roger Federer returns 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 action of his opponent and other visual clues, enabling him to move into position earlier and more efficiently than the rest of us, which in turn allows him to make the return—in his case a forehand cross-court winner rather than a queen to checkmate. This revolutionary analysis extends across the sporting domain, from badminton to baseball and from fencing to football. Top performers are not born with sharper instincts (in the same way that chess masters do not possess superior memories); instead, they possess enhanced awareness and anticipation.

Speed in sport is not based on innate reaction speed, but derived from highly specific practice.

myelin is not the only theme in the brain change story. Purposeful practice also builds new neural connections, increases the size of specific sections of the brain, and enables the expert to co-opt new areas of gray matter in the quest to improve.

That is the thing about purposeful practice: it is transformative. And that is true whether you’re into table tennis, tennis, soccer, basketball, football, typing, medicine, mathematics, music, journalism, public speaking, you name it.

But careful study has shown that creative innovation follows a very precise pattern: like excellence itself, it emerges from the rigors 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.

one inexorable conclusion: human performance in complex tasks will continue on an upward trajectory into the distant future, punctuated by innovations that are not merely unforeseen but unforeseeable.

central irony. It is only in sport that the benefits of purposeful practice are accrued by

individuals at the expense of other individuals, and never by society as a whole. But this is precisely the area in which purposeful practice is pursued with a vengeance, while it is all but neglected in the areas where we all stand to benefit.

“In the growth mind-set, you don’t feel the need to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. The hand you’re dealt is just the starting point…. Although people may differ in every which way—in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments—everyone can change and grow through application and experience.”

Dweck’s research hands us the answer: it is because she did not interpret falling down as failure. Armed with a growth mind-set, she 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.

This may seem odd, but it is central to the belief system of most top performers. Remember that famous Nike commercial where Michael Jordan says: “I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots. I’ve lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed

The paradox of excellence is that it is built upon the foundations of necessary failure.

“Once you start asking yourself questions like, ‘How do I really know there is a God?’ you are already on the path to unbelief.

chapter is about the psychology of performance. We will dig down into the minds of top performers and explore the relationship between mind and body under pressure. And we will arrive at the paradoxical conclusion that 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.

The power of the placebo has nothing to do, by definition, with the pharmacological properties of the drug; rather, its effect derives from the entirely false belief that the drug is effective. But this belief is not created out of nowhere; it is manufactured within a cultural context. Anything that imbues the treatment with greater authenticity, that creates an illusion of credibility, will play on the mind of the patient, strengthening his misguided belief in the drug and, by implication, its efficacy.

The key point in all this is that the power of the mind is exercised through the medium of belief, and it doesn’t matter whether the belief is true or false or how the delusion is created—so long as it is created successfully. It doesn’t matter if it is created by a reassuring doctor, slick packaging, price, advertising, color, invasiveness, ritual, or any of countless other possibilities. It does not matter if it is supported by fabricated evidence or no evidence at all. All that matters is that the patient believes.

Indeed, it could be argued that religion is the ultimate placebo. Instead of the authority of a doctor, belief is based on the authority of God, who is both infallible and omnipotent. Where belief in the medical placebo is based on slick advertising and snazzy packaging, belief in the healing power of God is derived from Holy Scripture. And it does not matter if your particular God is real or not (in the same way that it does not matter if a sugar pill has genuine pharmacological properties or not), so long as your belief is sincere.

We saw there that Muhammad Ali and Jonathan Edwards, according to their own testimony, benefited from their religious beliefs. They believed in different Gods and contradictory theologies, but the placebo effect is indifferent to such things. All that matters is that both men, in their different ways, were totally committed to their respective truths.

doubt is a perilous thing when walking onto a tennis court.

“The power of doubt lies in its self-fulfilling nature. When we entertain a lack of faith that we can sink a short putt, for example, we usually tighten, increasing the likelihood of missing the putt. When we fail, our self-doubt is confirmed…. Next time the doubt is stronger and its inhibiting influence on our true capabilities more pronounced.

The true professional in every field performs from a base of solid faith in his potential to act successfully. He doesn’t listen to self-doubt.”

The great irony of performance psychology is that it teaches each sportsman to believe, as far as he is able, that he will win. No man doubts. No man indulges his inner skepticism. That is the logic of sports psychology. But only one man can win. That is the logic of sport.

Because, to win, one

must proportion one’s belief, not to the evidence, but to whatever the mind can usefully get away with. To win, one must surgically remove doubt—rational and irrational—from the mind.

“To perform to your maximum you have to teach yourself to believe with an intensity that goes way beyond logical justification. No top performer has lacked this capacity for irrational optimism; no sportsman has played to his potential without the ability to remove doubt from his mind.”

Tiger watchers have gotten used to how his talk sounds strangely stilted, at least until one realizes that what he