Interview: The Science of Success with Matthew Syed

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Matthew Syed again. We chatted not too long ago about his new book Black Box Thinking, which I absolutely loved and highly recommend. So check out the book, the interview, the note, all that good stuff. Today we're going to talk about another one of his great books called Bounce. Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham and the Science of Success. Matthew has a fascinating background. He is a two time Olympian in table tennis for the uk. He's also a graduate of Oxford University and an award winning journalist. I was joking with Matthew before that. I read both Black Box Thinking and Bounce in about a 48 hour period of time. A really compelling writer with powerful big ideas and I'm excited to explore some of my favorites now. Matthew, thanks again for taking the time.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

All right, so let's just talk about Bounce. I like to start at the top. So Bounce, where do we come up with that? We're obviously going to drill into all the details, but how do you come up with Bounce as the title of the book?

Do you know what, that's a very good question. I think we wanted a snappy one worder, so it's probably a marketing angle behind it, but it certainly resonates with table tennis where balls bounce. And although it's a lot of the arguments you'll have noticed are framed around sport, it's much wider than that. It's really about how we become successful and trying to debunk the idea that it is largely or exclusively about talent, that although talent has significance, there is a much bigger picture of how success happens and that people who become very preoccupied with talent, who tend to interpret everything through the prism of talent, tends to create a whole range of destructive behaviors where people don't want to look untalented and so don't admit to their mistakes, are not prepared to put in the necessary practice because I think that it's only the untalented people who have to practice hard. And it's that interaction really between our belief systems and our behaviors very well corroborated by science. Randomized controlled trials with different groups of people, from students to, to chess players to musicians to leaders of companies. And that is that sort of the exploration of that space. But Bounce itself as a title, I think it was, it was marketing as much as anything. El.

Right. I had intuited that it was obviously connected to the table tennis career, etc. And just kind of, you know, the idea of the growth mindset too, involves a lot of bouncing right, of being willing to bounce from challenge to challenge and just get a little bit better. And I'm excited to Talk about Agassiz 1 million balls a year kind of thing. Well, let's actually dance through the. I have some ideas I want to cover, but I just love your storytelling and I'd love to just go through. Let's bounce through Mozart, Federer, Picasso and Beckham because they each have fascinating stories that I think to your point, this is about more than sports. But sports is such a great context in which to see it so obvious. Let's start with Mozart. How is his excellence, elite performance related to bouncing? More than just pure talent?

Yeah. So let's agree that Mozart is a seminal composer and musician and unquestionably is a talented person. But did his success emerge from talent alone? Well, this seems to be clearly debunked by any understanding of his biography. And one of his most eminent biographers tells the story of young Mozart being drilled and trained in music by a very accomplished teacher, his father, Leopold. And I think I'm right in saying that he estimated that by the age of six, young Wolfgang had practiced, practiced three and a half thousand hours on the piano, which is an astonishing amount of practice. And so the idea that we often have that because we see child prodigies, we infer that these children are so young they couldn't have practiced the necessary number of hours and therefore it must have been driven by mystical genius by a particular set of genetic influences, is subverted when you study the child prodigy and not just Mozart. You know, Tiger woods had probably played 5,000 hours of golf by the age of five. And this is an extraordinary finding in all child prodigies that even though it looks as if they've taken a shortcut, they have actually gone through quite arduous amount of practice at a time when most children are doing things other than disciplined practice. So there are, you know, it's probably worth pointing out that there are deep ironies that many child prodigies burn out because they're not practicing, because they enjoy and love the activity. They're doing it to please a parent or a coach or somebody else. What you really want are children who have internalized the motivation, who love the activity and have the growth mindset, which I know we're coming on to. But it's that combination that enable them to clock up practice and not fizzle away. You get that perfect storm and it's very powerful. And as you rightly point out, you know, Mozart is a very good example of a child prodigy who practiced very, very hard indee.

And then let's just go to. We'll come back to those few individuals. But then, is it Polger is how you pronounce the chess produce?

Yes.

You described something called the iceberg illusion, and I think they were such a fascinating part of this book. Can you give us a quick sketch on the chess prodigies and their father?

Yeah. So I'll start with the iceberg illusion and then use the pole guards to illustrate it. The iceberg illusion is very, very important in that when you see Tiger woods hit a golf ball or Roger Federer hit a tennis ball, or David Beckham take a free kick, or a memory champion regurgitate 200 random digits, we see the performance. We see the performance and we compare it to ourselves and think, well, I could never kick a ball like that, and I could never remember that many random digits. What we haven't seen is what went into its construction. The hours of practice, the discipline, the willingness to learn from mistakes, often very high level coaching. And because we miss all of that, we tend to think that it's effortless and easy for these people because they've got the right genes, the right talents. Whereas when we know that they've been on a long journey, it changes the way we interpret what they are doing and whether we have the capacity to go on a similar journey. We may not win the Masters at golf, but we can definitely reduce our handicap with disciplined practice to single figures. We can remember 100 random digits, which seems extraordinary, but most ordinary people can do that. And that's really the point, if you like, that our cultural expectations of where an ordinary person can get to a far too low because of the iceberg illusion, we don't see this body of work that goes into the construction of great performances. And in the case of the Polgar sisters, a Hungarian, a chap called Laslo Polgar, bought into the idea that practice is a very significant determinant of success, one that is underrated by most people in contemporary Western culture. And he said, right, I'm going to try and demonstrate this with my as yet unborn children. So he wrote to a newspaper and advertised that he wanted to have some children who would become chess grandmasters. And one very courageous woman replied and said, I'd like to start a family with you. And they had three daughters, one of whom, after long practice with a very disciplined and dedicated father who taught and Trained them. And also who loved chess. That's the other interesting thing. The girls love chess. You know, the practice wasn't repetitive and mechanistic. It was inspiring and had variety and inspiration. You know, the practice doesn't need to be mechanistic. In fact, it helps when it has the playfulness that Polgar introduced into his children's practice. His, his eldest daughter became the first ever female grandmaster. His middle daughter, I think I'm right in remembering, has the highest single score of any human being in history, except two or three. She had a particular period where she was nailing everything. And his youngest daughter became the greatest female player of all time. So it's a remarkable thing. And he had predicted this in advance of their birth.

Yeah, that's just such a fascinating demonstration of what's possible. And hooray to the courageous mom involved as well.

Yes. Who I met when I went over to interview Let Slow and the girls, she was a long. You know, funnily enough at the time that I went to interview them, the three girls had grown up. I think a couple of them are married. One I think is over living in the States. And Latzloe was. Well, what I would like to do now is adopt three new children and go through the same process with a completely different activity. And it was his wife who said, no, no, no, no, no, I don't want to do that.

That's really funny. We'll move on. And I love the, you know, the internalization. It was fun for them. It wasn't something that they felt imposed on them and they really flourished with that autonomous desire to excel and all that.

It's worth picking up on that, you know, because I think that is terribly important that this capacity to. I mean, we should never underestimate the deep psychological significance of what's sometimes called passion or intrinsic motivation. When that desire becomes part of the person clocking up this fascinating practice that it isn't felt to be imposed upon them. And it's interesting when you interview so called child prodigies later in life, those who have never really become passionate tend to be rather resentful of the parent or coach. Why on earth did you keep taking me to the damn piano? I hated it. Those who have internalized the motivation tend to look with great gratitude on the parent or coach who was helping them. Thank you for taking me to the thing that I really wanted to do. And I think it is worth. You're contemplating the context to try and position the activity, whatever it happens to be, as something that is fun and Rewarding rather than something that is being done to please an external person.

Yeah, let's go into that a little bit more. How would you describe that for both the parents and then for ourselves? Because obviously we can burn ourselves out just as easily with that level of pressure. Can you give us any insights that you've gained on how to do that?

Well, I mean, the evidence on that, I mean, I think the literature on intrinsic motivation is growing. I mean, it is a very important topic in contemporary psychology. I mean, a couple of themes that come out are that people who feel that they have a degree of autonomy, that it's not completely didactic, they tend to think, well, I've got a bit of ownership of this, you know, I'm having some element of control over how I do my practice, how I develop my skills. That tends to be quite important. If they can see this as somehow creative, that can be important. It's also vital. This is terribly important. And it relates to growth mindset that they can track how their mastery is growing over time. So they can say, oh, I've improved and I've improved a bit more. That's a lovely thing. In certain areas, you know, it's very ambiguous and people can never really feel, I mean, not in sport, but in other activities. I think it is important to build in this idea of growing mastery over time, that one is marginally improving, they're taking steps, all of those are important, important. And it's interesting that external rewards can have paradoxical effects. So, you know, you might say to somebody who's doing a crossword, you know, I'm going to incentivize you to do more crosswords and you give them an incentive to do them. Money, for example, which is how we often think of the best way to motivate people. And then it has very odd effects because as soon as you withdraw the incentive, they think, well, why on earth would I want to do a crossword if I'm not being paid for it anymore? It often can obscure the intrinsic interest in the activity. Same with paying children to do their homework. Much better to get them to see the inherent fascination in the academic subjects, in the music, in the sport. That's when it tends to pay off. And I think when it comes to corporate institutions, of course people want to be paid a fair amount for the job they're doing. But trying to buy more and more motivation by paying more and more money can lead to short termism. It can crowd out the meaning and purpose in the job and so on. And I think corporates Many of them are already thinking creatively about how to recruit the deeper emotions and instincts that are so important in terms of passion and these other human feelings.

That's awesome. Yeah. And I want to pull that thread because you just connected to something else. I'm really excited to hear you reflect on. We've talked a lot about practice, of course, Erickson described it as deliberate practice in the 10,000 hours, 10 years, etc. I love your purposeful practice. And you know that purpose on progress. Can you talk to us about that?

Yeah. And so one can clock up thousands and thousands of hours without improving at all. So let me give you one metaphor. Imagine one is practicing a golf, and one hits the ball, sees that it's landed to the right of the target, and one thinks, okay, I need to vary my technique in the light of that in order to improve my accuracy. That's how practice happens. We're systematically leveraging the feedback that we get in order to improve what we are doing. That's true of all areas of improvement, not just sporting ones. But imagine if one played golf in the dark, Someone hits the ball and doesn't know where the ball has landed. Right, left, long, short. Well, you could practice in the dark indefinitely without improving at all. So one needs meaningful feedback to drive the process of improvement. So to take it away from golf, imagine a radiologist. I don't know if that's the word you use for people who diagnose tumors and they make an error of, for example, failing to diagnose a tumor that is actually there, and the patient goes home reassured. What the radiologist needs to know is that they've made a mistake. They need to track that person so that they can. When they realize they've made a mistake, it challenges the intuitive judgment they've made, and they slowly build up diagnostic sophistication. But unless they get that feedback, they can't improve at all. It's like playing golf in the dark. So purposeful practice of whatever kind is about building in as objective a feedback loop as possible as rapidly as possible, which builds the additional sophistication in whatever we're doing. And it helps also, of course, if one is engaged mentally with what one is doing, rather than being switched off the whole time. So purposeful practice, good data, good feedback, being engaged, that psychological thing, I suppose the other thing, it helps to be stretched. If one's doing something very much within one's comfort zone, then one isn't ever building additional new skill and sophistication. So finding that zone where One is being stretched and challenged and so on. That's very important too.

That's awesome. And then I again love all of that and love the connection to combinatorial explosion. So, you know, the whole mindset thing, we're gradually getting to growth mindset per se, Dweck style. But you share that, the kind of metaphor of folding the paper in half. And you know what that leads to, which I think is such a beautiful demonstration of the power of this type of practice to see, wow, we really are capable of more than we think. Can you tell us about combinatorial explosion?

Okay, so combinatorial explosion. So I wrote about this in the context of chess, where one might think that when one is a really talented person deciding how to complete a chess move will think, well, if I move this piece here and my opponent moves his piece there in response, then I'm going to move this in response to that response. And one, as it were, searches deeply into all of the relevant combinations of what could happen in order to explore the relevant parameter space in coming up with the optimum move. But that doesn't happen if you have a grandmaster, and instead of giving that grandmaster 30 seconds to make the move, you squeeze it to only five seconds. There's almost no diminishment in their capacity to find the right moves. In fact, they generate the right moves as the first ones they think of, not because they're conducting deep searches, but because by looking at the pattern of pieces, they instantly recognize its meaning and make a move according. And that's very important because it's not just chess where the number of variables increase rapidly in a combinatorial way. It's most areas of life. You know that it's highly complex and it's often a pattern recognition facility that is built up through practice rather than our capacity to conduct deep searches, which is much more related to iq. So it's this deep domain experience, a firefighter going into a burning building, and instead of reasoning it through what do we need to do next and thinking theoretically, they just make a judgment based on years of seeing lots of fires and knowing what it looks like. And most experts in most domains have that deep context rich experience that enables them to generate the optimal solutions. And that's important because no computer even is likely to be able to solve the problem just by looking at it in terms of reasoning. It needs that, that storage of patterns to come up with the right thing.

Which is only gained through this purposeful practice over an extended period of time, stretching out of the comfort zone. Then you make the great point too that with the chess guys and gals, it isn't just pure raw talent memory, because if you move the pieces around in a manner that isn't consistent with how they'd show up, they lose their memory strength. And the average person has as good of a recall of those pieces as the chess expert. And I think that brings us back to Federer because I think it was in this book where you talked about you and Federer in a promotional little deal or something. You're a champion ping pong player, he's a champion tennis player, and you figured that you could go up and take care of that. But the domain specificity of the combinatorial explosion. Can you talk to us about that?

Yes. So this is me returning. So I'm there to interview. Actually it was a guy called Michael Stieg, a Wimbledon champion, great tennis player, you know, not, not far off Federer, you know, decent player. And we're, I'm there to interviewing him for my newspaper and my editor said, you take along your racket, have a game, have a chat. And during this I'm thinking to myself, you know what, Instead of knocking it back and forth and having a chat, I want to feel his full force. You know, he can. So I said, Michael, if you serve as fast, you know, he was thinking, this guy won't cope if I play at full speed. I said, look, Mich, you can serve as fast as you like. I'll be able to return the ball. Knowing that in table tennis the reaction time is like one seventh of. You have to be much faster in table tennis because you're so close to your opponent. So in tennis you've got, you know, over half a second to return a ball. In table tennis, it's a lot, it's a lot shorter than that. So. But then stick goes down the other end of the court and serves and the ball bounces and goes past my ear. And I just heard this little clap of air and this thud as it hit the curtains and I didn't move a muscle. And the reason, of course, is that reaction speed in sport is largely, not exclusively, but largely about the capacity to anticipate. So one, a good tennis player is looking at the pattern of movement in the upper body and the lower arm and is already moving into the future path of the ball. About a tenth of a second it's been struck and it's an anticipation recognizing the pattern. I have it in table tennis because I've practiced a long time. I don't have it in tennis because I haven't done the necessary practice.

That's so cool. Another example again the domain specific of where you've put in that time where you're going to see the games. This is great. Let's bounce back up then to Picasso. So any fun story on Picasso.

So Picasso for memory. It's the idea that creativity emerges from the mind of a genius without any, you know, long track record of really studying. And I think it's one of Picasso's great paintings, Guernica, where they have the preliminary sketches and all of these show deep domain experience, the knowledge of Goya. And it's a systematic attempt to build what looks like a creative leap but is constructed upon a real long term tenacious process. I mean another very good example of that in creativity is James Dyson's dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner where he went through 5,126 fails prototypes before creating this wonderful device. In fact, I think it's probably fair to say that you look at any technological change, any insight, it is the end point of an iterative long term process of trying different combinations of ideas before coming out with the solution. It never has got there in a. It's never got there in a single leap. And that's true also at the level of the brain. The brain is trying combination. The circuitry of the brain is trying out combinations before one comes up with the insight. It never happens without that long term process.

That's awesome. So that's the perfect way to connect it to Carol Dweck's mindset theories. You talk about spark and you might have an inspiration, but sustaining that in the growth versus fixed mindset. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Yeah, that's terribly important. So the spark, you know, so we talked earlier about passion. Very important. You know, you're sparked into an interest in something but even if you're very passionate, if you fail early on and you draw the conclusion, well, I'm obviously rubbish at this and suddenly you think, you know what? I can't do it anymore. How often do you see young children be desperately interested in something, then get intimidated by the challenges, difficulties and failures that are an inevitable part of learning. What you need really is passion fused with a growth mindset, that capacity to see one's development as a journey. And just to pin down the meaning of a growth mindset. Give a questionnaire to young people and those who associate intelligence and high performance with learning, with something that can change depending on how much one is prepared to put into it, creates a whole set of behaviors which are conducive to people fulfilling their potential. Not just true of individuals. It's true of institutions like science, which has learned from its mistakes. A resilient institution or aviation, same kind of thing. So that's a terribly important concept and it's worth noting. I think that growth mindset has got a long evidence base now. You know, it's a replicable part of social science.

Yeah. You inspired me after reading. Because you referenced it in both Black Box and in Bounce. You know, you inspired me to go deeper. I had read Mindset but then read Self Theories and it's, you know, as a father of a three year old, there's nothing more important for us. And I have goosebumps as I say that, you know, as parents and as human beings aspiring to optimize and actualize our potential and to help the next generation. And it changed me of rewarding smartness and innate talent to rewarding effort. Wow. You tried so hard. And I've joked that you ask, my son's name is Emerson. You ask him how you get good at anything from hitting Bobby the balloon we play with at night, to climbing something at the park. And he'll immediately answer, practice. And to have that fun, that there's something fun about challenges. And as parents rubbing our hands together when things are hard, rather than complaining about them and. And modeling what we want to see. So I just want to underscore that because. And also, thank you. Drove me deeper into that. Really meaningful and impactful for me.

Thank you. And I couldn't agree more. I think that's absolutely spot on. You say to a young person, I love that drawing. You worked. We must have worked really hard. What do they think if. Or well done. You worked really hard. What do they think if they want to do a better drawing, I need to work harder or I love the way the colors fit together. Well, I have to make the colors fit together in a more sophisticated way. One is aligning the young mind with the journey they need to go on. You say, wow, you're a genius. You're a Picasso early on. And as soon as they have a difficulty, as soon as they draw something that is critiqued, the walls of their world come crumbling down. Oh, I'm not a genius after all. I'm rubbish. You know, people whose self esteem is fragile, that's no good because it is not robust to the challenges that they're going to face in their journeys. And you're absolutely right. It's great to hear you say that.

Yeah. And to your point, the empirical research behind this is staggering. You know, the research to basically take what you just said about the artwork as Dweck did. And I know you know this, but to say it out loud for our community listening, when they're given that type of praise of you're a genius or you must have worked really hard, right? Then they're given a challenge. Then they're really measured on, well, how do they perform afterwards? Because they were identical before the challenge. And the feedback, the performance goes down by 25% because suddenly they're wondering, well, maybe I'm not so smart, maybe I'm not so good. Whereas the performance in the group that was told they worked hard goes up 25%. And that difference, and I have goosebumps again, just blows me away. That's almost twofold from a handful of words. In a simple experiment, you do the combinatorial explosion on that, right? Over a lifetime.

Well, let's leave you. What about. This is a good way to wrap up. Think of the history of science where simplifying a little. Between the time of the ancient Greeks and, let's say, the 16th century, science has hardly improved at all. Hardly improved at all. I would argue that the reason is it was in a fixed mindset, found it very difficult to engage with the data that contradicted the religious truths of the earth being the center of the universe and 6,000 years old. And so people were very threatened by that. The scientific revolution happened because people said, you know what? We can learn from this stuff. We've got not just the responsibility, but we've got the capacity to learn. And science and technology's revolution, our lives, because there is a willingness to engage with the learning opportunities part of the dynamism of human progress. The stakes are very high, I think, and you're absolutely right. It's important for children, it's important for healthcare, for aviation, for our political institutions. But the history of science is maybe the most eloquent testimony to moving from a fixed to a growth conception. Really, the fixed conception is a sort of static notion of success. The growth mindset is a dynamic notion of success, and it does change everything.

So good. And again, in black box thinking, Matthew highlights these ideas brilliantly with Galileo and the church and the epitome of cognitive dissonance. I want to hear your thoughts. We don't want to see it. No, we will not look through the telescope. Do not show us data. I want to hear your thoughts. I think it's such an original, brilliant idea, the application of doublethink to our lives. And I've gotten a lot of great feedback. I've shared that a little bit in my work. And people are always saying, I want to hear more about that. I've literally told them, well, I'm talking to Matthew and we'll be able to hear his insights on it. Tell us about doublethink.

So doublethink is a term associated with the English novelist George Orwell, and he uses it in a book called 1984. And it's the capacity to hold contradictory beliefs at the same time. And I use this to think about performance. You know, you've practiced, you've got the skill, you've got the ability, but then you go on to the 72nd hole at Augusta and the green jacket is beckoning and suddenly you start to shake and you're worried about it. And I've talked to a lot of high performers who that. Let's take golf as the example. They're about to take a second shot to a pin in a difficult position. They have to be quite rational about the potential for messing it up if they're too aggressive. They have to be realistic about their weaknesses and making a calculation of the shot they need to play. But once they've selected the shot they need to play, they have to banish all doubt and say, you know what? I am going to nail this. So this juxtaposition between at the moment of execution eliminating all the doubt and at the moment of conceiving of the right shot to play, harnessing a rational appreciation of the doubt, that's something that tops. And also in the build up to a competition, you know, sportsman saying, I'm going to justify all the pain and sacrifice in order to run 20 miles every day to be a marathon champion at the Olympic Games. And the reason is the marathon's so important. But when you're about to do the race, if in your mind this is a important thing ever, you can panic. And so a lot of athletes, when they're about to perform, take the pressure off by saying, you know what doesn't matter that much, and it liberates them to perform. So I do think that, I mean, I've used the performance example, but I think we as human beings are quite contradictory and ambiguous in the way that we use different types of beliefs at different times in very much the way that Orwell described in 1984.

I love it. And it connects to Nassim Taleb's idea of anti fragility too, of being simultaneously super aggressive and simultaneously super conservative. His barbell theory, right?

Yeah, it does. It does I hadn't thought of it like that. Yes, in a structural, systemic way. There is a. There is an analogy there. Yes.

I draw a barbell when I journal nearly every morning of just reminding myself, okay, go lean in, go for it, be grounded and just for everything, you know? Yes and yes and yes and Great book, that.

Terrific.

Yeah. Is there anything that we didn't touch.

On that sounded like. I mean, by the way, thank you for reading and absorbing it. So it's great to talk to somebody and that's very gratifying too. But no, that sounded exhaustive to me.

Right on, right on. Well, again, thank you. As you can imagine. So recommend Bounce Black Box Thinking. Check it out, Matthew. Where else can they connect with you to go deeper into your work?

I have a website, www.matthewsia.co.uk fantastic.

And Syed is spelled S Y E D. And then that's matthewsia.co.uk Matthew, thanks for taking the time. Have fun with your family.

Thank you very much.

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