Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success

Well, it doesn’t work. Lowering standards just leads to poorly educated students who feel entitled to easy work and lavish praise.

Child prodigies amaze us because we compare them not with other performers who have practiced for the same length of time, but with children of the same age who have not dedicated their lives in the same way. We delude ourselves into thinking they possess miraculous talents because we assess their skills in a context that misses the essential point. We see their little bodies and cute faces and forget that, hidden within their skulls, their brains have been sculpted—and their knowledge deepened—by practice that few people accumulate until well into adulthood, if then. Had the six-year-old Mozart been compared with musicians who had clocked up 3,500 hours of practice, rather than with other children of the same age, he would not have seemed exceptional at all.

When most people practice, they focus on the things they can do effortlessly,” Ericsson has said. “Expert practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.” So far the focus in this book has been on the quantity of practice required to reach the top, and we’ve seen that it’s a staggering amount of time, stretching for a period of at least ten years.

Later doesn’t always come to everybody.

If you don’t know what you are doing wrong, you can never know what you are doing right.

The extraordinary dedication of the young Mozart, under the guidance of his father, is perhaps most powerfully articulated by Michael Howe, a psychologist at the University of Exeter, in his book Genius Explained. He estimates that Mozart had clocked up an eye-watering 3,500 hours of practice even before his sixth birthday.

It is only by starting at an unusually young age and by practicing with such ferocious devotion that it is possible to accumulate ten thousand hours while still in adolescence. Far from being an exception to the ten-thousand-hour rule, Mozart is a shining testament to it.

The idea that the Creator is on your side, guiding your footsteps, taking a personal interest in your troubles, deriving pleasure from your victories, providing solace in your defeats, orchestrating the world such that, in the words of Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, ‘All things work together for good to those who love God’ – all this must have a dramatic impact on the efficacy of a sportsman, or indeed anyone else. As Muhammad

The subversive idea at the centre of Ericsson’s work is that excellence is not reserved for the lucky few but can be achieved by almost all of us.

All of which helps to explain a qualification that was made earlier in the chapter: you will remember that the ten-thousand-hour rule was said to apply to any complex task. What is meant by complexity? In effect, it describes those tasks characterized by combinatorial explosion; tasks where success is determined, first and foremost, by superiority in software (pattern recognition and sophisticated motor programs) rather than hardware (simple speed or strength). Most sports are characterized by combinatorial explosion: tennis, table tennis, soccer, hockey, and so on. Just

a study of the 120 most important scientists and 123 most famous poets and authors of the nineteenth century, it was found that ten years elapsed between their first work and their best work. Ten years, then, is the magic number for the attainment of excellence. In

Seen in this context, Mozart’s achievements seem suddenly rather different. He no longer looks like a musician zapped with special powers that enabled him to circumvent practice; rather, he looks like somebody who embodies the rigors of practice. He set out on the road to excellence very early in life, but now we can see why.

. It is often said that in elite sport the margins of victory and defeat are measured in milliseconds: the reality is that they are measured in variables that are far more elusive.

It’s noteworthy that many of the contemporaries of Galileo (inventor of the modern telescope) really did think there was something morally dubious about the telescope; that it was taking humanity beyond the powers expressly sanctioned by God. They were the moral conservatives of their day. It is not difficult to imagine that those currently opposing genetic enhancement may one day be seen in the same light.

That is partly why the stories are so compelling: they are individual, inimitable, highly specific to a given person at a given point in time. The sparks are, in a very real sense, mysterious, sometimes even to the people ignited by them.

The findings of population genetics over the course of the last four decades prove beyond doubt that the notion of race held for most of the last two and a half centuries – that humanity can be divided into a set of subspecies with crisp genetic boundaries – is entirely without foundation.

is all too easy to assume that racial patterns of success and failure are grounded in genetics, but the point of this chapter is to suggest that subtler and more elusive forces are at work. The tendency to see black and white as genetic types (which, to a large extent, underpins racial stereotyping) has long been contradicted by the findings of population genetics. If we could only ditch our race-tinted spectacles, the world would not only look very different, it would soon become very different, too.

So the question is: How long do you need to practice in order to achieve excellence? Extensive research, it turns out, has come up with a very specific answer to that question: from art to science and from board games to tennis, it has been found that a minimum of ten years is required to reach world-class status in any complex task.

nothing new, nothing unusual, nothing of any great importance.

As Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford University, perhaps the most influential population geneticist of modern times, explains, ‘Classification into races has proved to be a futile exercise ... All populations or population clusters overlap when single genes are considered, and in almost all populations, all alleles [gene types] are present but in different frequencies. No single gene is therefore sufficient for classifying human populations into systematic categories.