Bounce

Over the latter part of the summer, and with a nice coincidence with watching the London 2012 Olympic Games, I read Matthew Syed’s book “Bounce” about how elite performance (in sport and elsewhere) comes about. Syed was a former international standard table-tennis player and now works as a journalist, so the book is an obvious amalgamation of those two strands of his activity. The book was given to me as a thank-you from one of my recently-completed students who had previously read it and thought it was something I would find interesting. I find it quite encouraging that at least one of my students read a non-fiction book that was nothing to do with their course last year and also that they were able to identify it as being up my street.

Bounce is an interesting read – the basic message is that elite performance arises mostly as a result of a lot of hard work. Genetic and other traits can act as thresholds to an area of development (e.g. a very tall person has one basic attribute to become a top basketball player) but they are not the factor(s) that define success in that area (not all tall people can become top basket-ball players obviously). It’s all about hard work – practice – but not just any old practice, rather it has to be meaningful, targetted practice designed to stretch skill levels and, importantly, to render much of the decision making required for top performance automatic. For example, a top tennis player does not wait for their opponent to serve, then process what they see, decide how to react and then carry out the movements required to return the ball. Rather, they respond automatically to the smallest nuances of the movements of their opponent prior to and during the process of the serve to put in place a response which their mind/body has learned is an appropriate one. So, the hard work makes the response natural.

I had read a lot of the material (or similar) in the book before – for example, in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s “Flow” – and Syed actually quotes from Gladwell quite a bit, which is surprising in a book of this type. But the “story” is still well told. I found the section on “choking” particularly interesting – this seems to occur when the performer loses the automatic/subconscious level of response and ends up trying to respond by reacting to the available cues. In effect, they become a beginner again even though they know how they should be performing, and are usually capable of doing so. Once the subconscious level of response is lost (for a spell), their game, or whatever, goes to pot and there is little that they can do to combat this.

Thanks for the book Kerry.