Bounce summary

Imagine a child pianist practicing to play her favorite songs by ear. She may spend many afternoons practicing at the piano, but it’s likely that as soon as she gets close to the original, she’ll work less and less hard to improve further as her performance is already good enough.

This is actually typical for most people: they don’t practice purposefully after a certain point. When we try to pick up a new skill, we only work on improving our performance until a certain point. That point could be the level of our peers, a requirement set by a piano teacher or simply the level where we’re good enough to derive pleasure from our performance.

One of the most convincing manifestations of the power of practice can be seen in table tennis player Desmond Douglas. For a long time, he was the top player in the UK, famous for his lightning-fast reactions. Yet, when scientists ran tests on the reaction speeds of all the English national team players, Douglas turned out to be the slowest. So how can someone with long reaction times in general react quickly when it comes to ping-pong?

The answer lies in the two changes that intensive practice brings about in the way your brain handles a specific task.

Imagine a top-notch marathon runner, who always finishes her races in the top ten. If you had to explain her success, would you say it was due to her being a natural runner? Or is it because she has practiced unwaveringly for years?

If you’d opt for the first explanation, psychologists would say you probably have a fixed mindset, meaning you believe success depends on something you can’t change, like genetics. This kind of mindset is very harmful.

When it comes to the world of professional golf, for a long time South Korea was not really on the map. However, after South Korean golfer Se Ri Pak won the LPGA Championship in 1998, the number of South Koreans on the LPGA tour multiplied. This is not a coincidence.

When people find a similarity – even a trivial one – to a successful person, it increases their confidence in their own chances of success and motivates them to try harder. In this case, South Korean golfers were inspired by their compatriot’s success. This phenomenon is called motivation by association.

Right before a competition, top athletes go to great lengths to convince themselves that they will win. This is true even if the athlete in question has just suffered a string of defeats.

To an external observer, this kind of conviction may seem irrational. But in fact the point of this conviction is not its veracity.

Imagine you’re at a party, holding a glass of red wine filled to the brim. To your horror, you realize that to greet the host you have to cross an extremely expensive white carpet. So what do you do? Probably, you’ll slow down and focus on each and every step. But why?

It’s important to understand that the brain is made up of two systems:

Many top athletes have been in this nightmare scenario: They are facing a career-defining contest or competition, and are extremely well-prepared, but at some point in the event, their performance deteriorates to that of a beginner. But why does this occur?

Thousands of hours of training and practice has prepared these experts to perform complex tasks. In fact, the tasks have long since been handled by their implicit brain system, so they are done automatically and can be performed simultaneously.