These events are so powerful because they are small and indirect. It is called motivation by association; a small, barely noticed connection searing deep into the subconscious and sparking a motivational response. A young performer has a sizeable head start on anybody who commences their training a few years later. Federer has practiced for so long that the movement have been encoded in implicit rather than explicit memory. This is what psychologists call expert-induced amnesia. And Matthew Syed was able to learn this best from a direct competitor: Desmond Douglas. Even though tests proved that he was one of the table-tennis players with the slowest reaction times, he was lightning fast on the field!

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The very process of building knowledge transforms the hardware in which the knowledge is stored and operated. The Kenyan runners from the region Nandi: The biological theory of Nandi athletic superiority is pretty simple to understand. Distinctive body types are the consequence of population isolation, enabling the gene pool to drift apart from neighboring populations, aided an abetted by the forces of natural and sexual selection. Because once you reach a certain level – say, the level of your peers – you usually stop challenging yourself. High-level performers know better: they keep inventing new obstacles and beat them. They’re in a league of their own from the start! The Summary of Bounce | Chapter 7: Baseball rituals, pigeons, and why great sportsmen feel miserable after winningWhen creativity manifests itself not in artistic expression but in technical innovation, a subtle but immensely powerful interaction is created: purposeful practice changing individuals, and also changing the means of changing individuals. In stage one, experts engage in purposeful practice and, as a consequence, develop new techniques. In stage two, other individuals corral these innovations to increase the efficacy of practice, leading to new innovations in stage three, and so on. What is required is ten thousand hours of purposeful practice. And for practice to be truly purposeful, concentration and dedication, although important, are not sufficient. You also need to have access to the right training system, and that sometimes means living in the right town or having the right coach. The iceberg illusion by Ericsson: 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 for us – the submerged evidence, as it were – is the countless hours of practice that have gone into

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When we listen to a conversation in our own language, we hear a series of distinct words separated by tiny gap of silence. But no such silence actually exists. It is our knowledge of the grammatical structure of our language that enables us to retouch the acoustic information so that we hear it in a neatly structured form.Creative innovation follows a very précis 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 blue, but tidal waves that erupt following deep immersion in an area of expertise. Onlookers took the performance to be the consequence of special abilities because they had witnessed only a tiny percentage of the activity that had gone into its making. The difference between world-class performers and mediocre performers are that they take these mental manipulations to greater extremes. They have taught themselves to ratchet up their optimism at the point of performance; to mould the evidence to fit their beliefs rather than the other way around; to activate doublethink. Automaticity: When we learn a new task, like driving a car, we concentrate hard to master the skills. At first we are slow and awkward, and our movements are characterized by conscious control, but as we get more familiar, the skills are absorbed in implicit memory, and we no longer give much thought to them. Well, because, he trained his brain to be perfect for table tennis! Namely, to select only the information relevant to the game; after all, he didn’t need to be able to react fast when someone threw food at him. Douglas mastered something sociologists call deliberate practice.

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This cookie, set by YouTube, registers a unique ID to store data on what videos from YouTube the user has seen. If you think that you’re not talented about something – chances are you won’t become anyone important in that something. But not because you couldn’t have – merely because you have missed the point and spend too little time practicing. But think if an expert were to find himself using the wrong brain system. No matter how great he is, he would strive because he is using his explicit rather than internal system. The highly sophisticated skills encoded in the implicit part of his brain would count for nothing. It sounds like a blasphemy, but, according to Matthew Syed – it’s true: Mozart was just a regular child! We think of him as someone extraordinary – that is: a child prodigy – because we compare him to the wrong group of people.Edison: if I find 10 000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.

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If you expect the best, you are given some strange kind of power to create the conditions that produce the desired results. But looking more closely at the phenomenon of child prodigies, we find that in fact they had to practice for thousands of hours before showing their so-called prodigious talent. In fact, scientists studying the phenomenon have found that typically a prodigy’s training begins at a very early age and that they compress endless hours of practice into their young lives. Anticlimax: we might feel miserable after a triumph. This is so that we are able to disengage from our triumph, enabling us to focus on the next challenge. If goal fulfillment induced indefinite periods of contentment, we would be robbed of all future motivation. For an award-winning writer, it is the melancholy that provides the creative impetus for the next literary adventure. A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface. And for undergraduates in a simple experiment – it was sharing the birthday with someone who had successfully solved the assignment they were about to!The caveman: A tendency to perceive causal connections that don’t actually exist can confer huge evolutionary benefits, providing a cocoon of safety in a turbulent and dangerous world. The only proviso is that your superstitions must not impose too much of a burden on those occasions when they are without foundations.