I’ve just finished reading a new book I found while browsing my local bookstore. Its called Bounce and its by Matthew Syed. I liked reading it. It was much like another book called the Sports Gene. This book is all about debunking the myth that talent is mysterious and is only open to a gifted few.

Its something I believe in to and it basically goes on to explore what it is about exceptional sports professionals that make them different from everyone else and in short, its because of hard work, lots of it.

So between everything else I’ve been doing this holiday, I’ve found myself reading this book quite occasionally in my local coffee shop with my trusty pen(I like to write in books, oh shock horror) and a cup of tea.

Here are a few notes I took from reading this book.

Path to Excellence:

• Purposeful practise 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 failing short again and again.
• Excellence is about stepping outside of the comfort zone, training with spirit of endeavour, and accepting the inevitability of trials and tribulations.
• Progress is built, in effect, upon the foundations of necessary failure.

Brain transformation:

• When the human body is put under exceptional strain, a range of dominant genes in the DNA are expressed and extraordinary physiological processes are activated. (Anders Ericsson)
• Providing the perfect conditions for feedback is the key to monitoring and noticing effects of changes you employ
• Complete Feedback is, in effect,  the rocket fuel that propels the acquisition of knowledge, and without it no amount of practise is going to get you there.
• Providing the most detailed feedback is important
• Feedback should be embedded in any drill, lading to automatic readjustment
• If you can position yourself in this kind of feedback loop, improvements will escalate in ways that will astonish you.

Applying the lessons:

• Practise cannot be sporadic to benefit from acquiring knowledge during practise
• Feedback can be corrupted by delay and pressure of new concerns
• Specialists, should approach difficulty as a means to grow and expand knowledge over time, getting better and better.
• You should design a practise drill that will allow as much feedback as possible as much of the time as possible. Thereby forcing you to learn and adapt to newly acquisitioned notice of new knowledge during the practise

Zero-Sum Games:

• Tasks that are boring and repetitive and fail to push employees to their creative limits and beyond is not purposeful practise.
• Everyone has the capacity for excellence, with the right opportunities and training.
• Aim for large/wide feedback opportunities (Maximize it) during purposeful practise, designing specialist routines.
• Combat infrequency
• Push limits while honing skills during purposeful practise
• Reduce new concerns that create feedback noise.
• Practise should not be sporadic/infrequent and without wide feedback aka complete feedback.
• Embed feedback into drills and quantify ‘ide’ feedback
• Make feedback detailed so you can spot concerns than can be changed and so that new variations can be explored.
• Acquisition of knowledge is like concentrating on the hips instead of the racket to instinctively(draw on past knowledge) where the tennis ball will go.
• Exceptional strain changes physiology
• Striving for what is just out of reach and trying and failing for feedback is absolutely necessary
• Push beyond, failure is necessary.

Mysterious Sparks and Life-changing mind-sets:

• When you want to, that's when you should.
• Care about the destination, internalize how you are going to get there.
• Care about the reason, know why it is important.

Motivational Jolts:

• Find people like you – motivation by association.

The talent myth revisited

• Have a mind-set focused on growth, not reward
• Design new strategies to overcome issues found during feedback.
• design new challenges to help you grow and learn, not gain rewards
• Embrace failure
• Fail better next time.
• But the path to excellence is steep, gruelling, and arduous. Its in inordinarily lengthy, requiring a minimum of 10,000 hours of lung-busting effort to get to the summit. And most importantly of all, to forces voyages to stumble and fall on every single stretch of the journey.
• Excellence is about  striving for hat is just out of reach and not quite making it. It is about grappling with tasks beyond current limitations and failing short again and again. failure is necessary
• Build up foundations of necessary failure

The power of words

• You can be proud of how hard you work. You should be proud of effort. Praise effort
• Praising intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance.
• Challenges are learning opportunities – design challenges to learn things and receive more feedback.
• I guess that was too easy. I apologize for wasting your time. Lets do something that you can really learn from.
• Repetition provides more opportunity to gain invisible knowledge – deep experience knowledge – that why you should do it.
• hard work is vitally important
• Failure is an opportunity to improve . Improve with Effort not reward.
• Show tremendous discipline and take responsibility for your actions.

The garden shed:

• Identify what you need to grow, design strategies to practise obtaining of striving to obtain this.
• Design feedback mechanisms and study the results.
• Update the strategies to try gain deeper knowledge.

The placebo effect

• Potency: Passion, concentration, belief and will
• believe in something wholeheartedly
• All that matters is what you believe
• If you expect the best, you create the conditions that produce the desired results. Positivity.
• Build a conviction in ones capacity to achieve.
• eliminate doubt with a variety of mental techniques
• 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 .
• use positive imagery: examples are where I have succeeded in the past etc.

Irrational optimism:

• Doubt is poison so is uncertainty.
• Preserver, trust yourself and your reasons.

A physiological conclusion

• Irrational beliefs can boost performance, provided they are held with sufficient conviction

The curse of choking

• let learned automation and experience and knowledge take control in pressure situations.
• If you monitor explicit skills that would otherwise be dealt with automatically by our implicit knowledge base, you choke and focus too much on the one thing.

Baseball rituals and pigeons:

• A state of mind can be brought about positive reinforcement – thing you did that made you do good and feel good – rituals.
• To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive. Robert Louis Stevenson

I will probably be revisiting the themes in this book moving forward to extract details on how to apply these themes to my own life.