Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success (P.S.) Review

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Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success (P.S.) ReviewMatthew Syed's Bounce has an interesting thesis. In the vain of Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success and Colvin's Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, Syed attempts to argue against the idea or 'raw talent.' A former table-tennis champion, Syed wants to show us that excellence - particularly of the sporting and artistic variety - is a better predictor of success than innate talent.
Syed presents three lines of data to bolster his argument: personal anecdote from his sporting days, knowledge he has gained about athelets and their backgrounds he has gained from being a sports writer, and summaries of studies done by psychologists (many of the same ones appearing in the two above-cited books). The first chapter is largely Syed's retelling of his own ascent to the top of table-tennis, where he points out that the fact that his town produced quite a few table-tennis stars is enough to at least call into question the 'talent myth.' Later, he goes into some histories of great artists and sports stars - Mozart, Federer, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, the chess champion Polgar sisters - to show that it was not so much raw talent, but extraordinary dedication and deep practice that helped them succeed. By way of studies, Syed cites several by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson whose work suggests that the difference between 'good' and 'great' is better predicted by practice than most any other factor.
As a former high-school teacher, the second section of the book was equally interesting and encouraging: the thesis here is that belief in oneself and desire to keep practicing is is a key contribution to success at a domain. Natural talent, in other words, goes only a small way: it is whether that talent leads one to practice voraciously or sit on one's laurels that really matters. Syed discusses an oft cited study by Carol Dweck (and colleagues): Dweck and company gave two groups of elementary students the same (fairly easy) test. One group got their tests back with praise of their talent ("You are so talented at this,") and the other group got the tests back with praise of their effort ("You must have studied and practiced a lot,"). Students were offered to take either a test of the same ease or a harder test. Unequivocally, students in the first group chose the easy test while those in the latter group chose the hard test. Message: effort gets us way farther than talent because it pushes us.
Two things I did not like about Syed's book. First, much of the information is the same info in the two above-cited books, and Syed even cites those books to excess. Truth be told: the three books are quite interchangeable and it is a bit disappointing to see the same data repackaged like this.
Next, I don't think Syed really dealt with counter-evidence much. There is a decent amount of studies and books demonstrating that genetics may be more important than Syed's work implies. Born Entrepreneurs, Born Leaders: How Your Genes Affect Your Work Life, Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality and others describe interesting research into genetics' effect on our interests, innate talents, and - here's the kicker - work ethic. So, Syed's thesis can be complexified a bit: it is very strongly possible that one's ethic toward practice, and one's interest in certain subjects to the degree that one would practice obsessively, have a strong correlation with genetics. Certainly, it is not all "nature," but it is not really all "nurture" as Syed seems to imply either.
All in all, though, this is a really well-written and quite interesting book. I simply wish that Syed would have (a) come up with a bit more original data that hasn't been discussed in popular literature before, and (b) devoted a piece of the book to objections and challenges to the thesis.Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success (P.S.) Overview

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