When the brain switch occurs, neither courage nor cowardice makes the least bit difference. Choking is a problem of psychological reversion: the flipping from a brain system used by experts to one used by novices. Seeing is not believing: only a tiny fraction of a person’s genes have effects that the human eye can see. No single gene is sufficient for classifying human populations into systematic categories. Matthew Syed is an Olympic athlete. His sport is table tennis. He writes about how he’s realised that his prowess at the sport has nothing whatsoever to do with any innate talent or any quirk of genetics but is entirely due to careful, purposeful practise.

Mozart was able to be so good not merely because he spent so much time practicing – but because he found the motivation to do this! The book is really very good. I've long had the opinion that genius is developed rather than born, in spite of being preached the 'talent' myth by my parents.

“Bounce Summary”

I very much enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in both sport and education. Syad provides a very persuasive case for the vital role of purposeful practice and experience in developing talent - something which can be applied not just to sport but to most areas of life. He fills the book with a whole variety of real life examples, both from his own career as a top table tennis player, and from other sporting and non-sporting greats.

The only difference is that the author makes a foray into the topic of sports more than his predecessors but I found it to be interesting but impractical.Knowledge-free computing, however sophisticated, is impotent. The most important ingredient in an expert system is knowledge. Programs that are rich in general inference methods – some of which may even have some of the power of mathematical logic – but poor in domain-specific knowledge can behave expertly on almost no tasks. The book also inspired me, if anyone can succeed in what they do as long as they put in plenty of hard work, than I can definitely do so to play better in capoeira. :) It's not about talent. Talent comes from those invisible hours of practice that you didn't see the individual do. People say, Oh, Tiger Woods was born to play golf. No, he mastered golf because his father started training him at an early age, and he repeatedly did the same difficult shots over and over, hours on end. Over time we have developed the ability to sculpt perceptions using top-down knowledge; it provides immediacy. Instead of having to infer the existence of a face in a pattern of dots or the structure in mammogram, you can see it. It is there. The inference is, as it were, embedded in perception. For such a short & fast read, I have a lot to say about this book. Not because the book demands or merits superabundance of personal thought, but because it touched on a few topics which I spend a great deal of thought on anyways. 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.

To be successful, a chess player must cut down on the computational load by ignoring moves unlikely to result in a favorable outcome and concentrating on those with greater promise. Kasparov is able to do this by understanding the meaning of game situations. Deep Blue (the chess computer) is not.It focuses on the topic of sports without delving deep into the fascinating topic of deliberate practice and its applications in wider areas.