Matthew Syed Quotes

Michael Jordan, the basketball great, is a case in point. In a famous Nike commercial, he said: 'I've missed more than nine thousand shots. I've lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed.' For many the ad was perplexing. Why boast about your mistakes? But to Jordan it made perfect sense. 'Mental toughness and heart are a lot stronger than some of the physical advantages you might have,' he said. 'I've always said that and I've always believed that.' James

Overcoming the blame tendency is a defining issue in the corporate world. Ben Dattner, a psychologist and organizational consultant, tells of an experience when he was working at the Republic National Bank of New York. He noticed a piece of paper that a co-worker had stapled to his cubicle wall. It read:

'The six phases of a project:
1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the guilty
5. Punishment of the innocent
6. Rewards for the uninvolved'

Dattner writes: 'I have yet to come across a more accurate description of how most dramas play out in our working lives.

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.

It is partly because we are so willing to blame others for their mistakes that we are so keen to conceal our own. We

Creativity is, in many respects, a response.

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.

Mere experience, if it is not matched by deep concentration, does not translate into excellence.

World-class performance comes by striving for a target just out of reach, but with a vivid awareness of how the gap might be breached. Over time, through constant repetition and deep concentration, the gap will disappear, only for a new target to be created, just out of reach once again.

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.

Psychologists often make a distinction between mistakes where we already know the right answer and mistakes where we don't. A medication error, for example, is a mistake of the former kind: the nurse knew she should have administered Medicine A but inadvertently administered Medicine B, perhaps because of confusing labeling combined with pressure of time. But sometimes mistakes are consciously made as part of a process of discovery. Drug companies test lots of different combinations of chemicals to see which have efficacy and which don't. Nobody knows in advance which will work and which won't, but this is precisely why they test extensively, and fail often. It is integral to progress.

Marginal gains is not about making small changes and hoping they fly. Rather, it is about breaking down a big problem into small parts in order to rigorously establish what works and what doesn't.

Failure is rich in learning opportunities for a simple reason: in many of its guises, it represents a violation of expectation.6 It is showing us that the world is in some sense different from the way we imagined it to be.

The only way to be sure is to go out and test your ideas and programmes, and to realise that you will often be wrong. But that is not a bad thing. It leads to progress. This

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.

The practice sessions of aspiring champions have a specific and never-changing purpose: Progress. Every second of every minute of every hour, the goal is to extend one's mind and body, to push oneself beyond the outer limits of one's capacities, to engage so deeply in the task that one leaves the training session, literally, a changed person.

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.

Progress is built, in effect, upon the foundations of necessary failure. That is the essential paradox of expert performance.