The book makes many references to the 10,000-hour practice rule – it’s what all champions, experts and ‘prodigies’ have in common. But not all practice makes perfect. To hone expertise, practice must be deliberate and purposeful. It has to be specific, targeted and stretching. 2. Belief is powerful Though the book is divided into three sections namely The Talent Myth, Paradoxes of the Mind and Deep Reflections, I felt the book had a singular theme and that was the capacity of any human being to become the best of best if he was able to dedicate the time, effort, money and yes – his own life to one single cause with absolute excellence and commitment.

Compare it to your health, your family, your spouse or your best friends – does it really matter whether you win or lose the Super Bowl?The venue also seamlessly transforms into the perfect conferencing hall for up to 200 delegates with theater style set up. Well-structured and even better written, “Bounce” by Matthew Syed basically reads for itself. True, in terms of theory, there’s nothing new in it. In fact, its basic idea – the now-ubiquitous “10,000 hours of practice” mantra – is much more wittily and fully explained in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers.”

There is an amazing story about Laszlo Polgar, a Hungarian educational psychologist. He was an early advocate of the practice theory of expertise. His central thesis was that areas of expertise can be open to all, and not just to people with special talents. He was not believed, so he devised an experiment with his yet unborn daughters. He would train his children to play chess, a game where he was not an expert. He took care to allow his three daughters to become internally motivated to love the game, and to practice it frequently. Polgar himself was not a good chess player, but he thought that the international rating system would help to objectively quantify the level that his children would ultimately attain. To make a long story short, each of his three daughters became world-class chess players.Mathew Syed - a British Journalist and Broadcaster was, as it turned out was born of a British Pakistani father and a Welsh mother. To his credentials he was a Five times Men’s Single Champion at the Commonwealth Table Tennis Champion and represented Great Britain for two Olympic Games. Most of us can’t find any motivation for well, anything but building Lego castles – when we’re children! When we get older, our success depends on it. This book is a collection of quite a few different things. Syed is a very insightful and informed thinker and the ideas here are stimulating. Talent] cannot be taught in a classroom; it is not something you are born with; it must be lived and learned. To put it another way, it emerges through practice”.