Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice. Matthew Syed
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Название: Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice
Автор: Matthew Syed
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Спорт, фитнес
isbn: 9780007350537
isbn:
Bounce
How Champions Are Made
Matthew Syed
First published in Great Britain in 2010
Fourth Estate
A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thestate.co.uk
Copyright © Matthew Syed 2010
The right of Matthew Syed to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007350520
Ebook Edition: 9780007350537
Version: 2018-08-02
For Dilys
Table of Contents
4 Mysterious Sparks and Life-Changing Mindsets
6 The Curse of Choking and How to Avoid It
7 Baseball Rituals, Pigeons, and Why Great Sportsmen Feel Miserable after Winning
8 Optical Illusions and X-ray Vision
9 Drugs in Sport, Schwarzenegger Mice, and the Future of Mankind
10 Are Blacks Superior Runners?
The Autobiographical Bias
In January 1995, I became the British number-one table tennis player for the very first time which, I am sure you will agree, is a heck of an achievement. At twenty-four years of age, I suddenly found myself on the receiving end of regular invitations to speak to school audiences about my rise to international glory, and would often take my gold medals along to dazzle the youngsters.
Table tennis is a pretty big sport in the UK, with 2.4 million participants, 30,000 paid-up members of the governing body, thousands of teams, and serious riches for those who excel. But what made me special? What had marked me out for sporting greatness? I came up with a number of attributes: speed, guile, gutsiness, mental strength, adaptability, agility, and reflexes.
Sometimes I would marvel at the fact that I had these skills in such abundance that they were capable of elevating me – little me! – beyond hundreds of thousands of others aspiring to that precious top spot. And all this was doubly amazing, considering I had been born into a family in an ordinary suburb of an ordinary town in south-east England. There was no silver spoon. No advantages. No nepotism. Mine was a triumph of individuality; a personal odyssey of success, a triumph against the odds.
This, of course, is the way that many who have reached the top in sport, or indeed in any other field, choose to tell their stories. We live in a culture that encourages this kind of soaring individualism. Hollywood is full of such narratives, often sugarcoated in that well-known American Dream sentimentality. But while these stories are inspirational, rousing, and compulsively entertaining, are they true? Here is my story in table tennis, retold with the bits that I chose to ignore the first time around, as they diminished the romance and the individuality of my triumph.
1. Table СКАЧАТЬ