pumpkinstrokemarrow

After some pondering I work out the the 'TE' of several posts around the time of the old show is the initials of a person, disguised for privacy. But it took me a few seconds to work out who it was. Perhaps a lot of seconds in a year or two's time. And the blog search facility produces rather odd results for this particular string, although they do appear to include what I was looking for. The search must be a tricky beast, given the way it sometimes throws out googlies. Perhaps all the blogs are held in deconstructed form in some huge database and the search has to work its way through that, and back out again.

Earlier in the day I had finished with 'Bounce', trailed on 12th July, a book sold on the basis that it exploded the talent myth. On could get on fine without it.

It turns out to be a short book of popular science with a strong sports bias, written by a ping-pong player turned sports journalist. A journalist who topically enough thinks that News Corp. are wonderful people to work for. A journalist with a sometimes irritating writing style, particularly so in the middle half of the book. This perhaps the consequence of someone who usually writes a page having to write hundreds.

While I find the central claim that talent is not necessary unproven, certainly in the case of the more cerebral activities, he does come up with some surprising stories. One can certainly do quite well without what is commonly called natural talent. One particularly striking example was a Hungarian, not particularly a chess player himself, who set out to breed chess champions and who went on to have three girls, all of whom went on to achieve considerable success in the chess world.

There was also some stuff which I recognised about the need to be very careful about calling anyone talented. Being given the label can have all kinds of bad effects, including becoming very intolerant of failure. Success is built on failure! Successful people know how to use failure rather than worry about how to avoid it! Nevertheless, a mantra which works in the school room or the training camp but which needs to be applied with care in the bank.

More convincing are his tales about the importance of good quality and good quantity training. Few if any sports people make it to the top of the heap without it. Ten thousands of hours of it to be precise. A corollary, is that you quite often get clusters of success coming out of very special circumstances. Clusters which die out when their special circumstances are copied or or stop being special otherwise. Perhaps the uniquely gifted coach retires or dies.

The second half of the book moves onto other matters, about sports success more generally. So there is a section on the importance of positive thinking and on how to achieve what he calls 'double think'. This last including the ability to be able to believe, at the time that it matters, that victory is certain. At a time when it is far from certain, but one needs to believe to perform. There is another section on what he calls 'choking', which is what happens when the conscious attempts to take over control from the unconscious. A complete disaster in the case of finely honed skills but something which can happen to any top class practitioner of such skills. Another section on the importance of rituals, amulets and other magic in higher sport. The penultimate section on drugs in sport and the ultimate on black runners. In which last he makes the reasonable point, which I had not thought of or come across before, that the fact that black people happen to be good at sprint running and at long distance running does not mean that being black has anything much to do with running. About on a par with saying that having blue eyes, as I do, says that you have the genes for flannel. He goes on to provide a good, race free explanation for the long distance running, but does not do such a clean job for the sprint running.

So not twaddle at all, after all. I imagine the material would go down well in management courses, so I am a little surprised that I did not come across in my days in the world of work. Cuddles yes, knocking talent in favour of training and attitude no.