Jack Nicklaus—a master in the art of purposeful practice—always created a clear idea of precisely what he wanted to achieve on every shot. “I never hit a shot, even in practice, without having a very sharp, in-focus picture of it in my head,” he said. “It’s like a color movie. First I ‘see’ the ball where I want it to finish, nice and white and sitting up high on the bright green grass. Then the scene quickly changes and I ‘see’ the ball going there; its path, trajectory, and shape, even its behavior on landing.” Nicklaus did not create this vivid mental representation for the fun of it, but so that he could gain access to the most detailed feedback possible. — location: 1265 ^ref-32298
Economics is a game where everyone can win simultaneously: productivity gains allied to trade generate further productivity gains and more trade, and so on. Win-win-win. This analysis goes to the heart of this chapter, and reveals its central irony. It is only in sport that the benefits of purposeful practice are accrued by individuals at the expense of other individuals, and never by society as a whole. But this is precisely the area in which purposeful practice is pursued with a vengeance, while it is all but neglected in the areas where we all stand to benefit. — location: 1337 ^ref-63121
This is Bollettieri’s published creed, which must be signed by all residents: “Every endeavour pursued with passion produces a successful outcome regardless of the result. For it is not about winning or losing—rather, the effort put forth in producing the outcome. The best way to predict the future is to create it—therefore, we believe we have the best training methods to help each athlete achieve their dreams and goals and ultimately reach their ability level in the arena of sports and life.” — location: 1637 ^ref-47245
In Dweck’s praise experiment we saw how praise for effort rather than talent helped to orient students toward a growth mind-set, with dramatic consequences. The problem is that further experiments by Dweck showed that those consequences were relatively short-lived: left to their own devices, children will eventually settle back into the default mind-set that predated the praise. — location: 1643 ^ref-15976
In 2001 three senior executives of McKinsey, the world’s largest and most prestigious management consultancy, published a book called The War for Talent. This book encapsulated a key tenet of McKinsey’s philosophy: that talent is what ultimately determines success and failure in the corporate world; that pure reasoning ability matters far more than domain-specific knowledge. — location: 1706 ^ref-5619
In 1952 Norman Vincent Peale, a Protestant preacher, wrote what was to become arguably the single most important work of popular psychology of the twentieth century. Its title: The Power of Positive Thinking. It spent 186 straight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and sold more than five million copies worldwide. In the book, Peale tells the reader of the power of religious belief to heal, urging the reader to develop religious conviction through the techniques of imagery, affirmations, and reading the Bible. — location: 1929 ^ref-39419
More than half of the England table tennis team was actively using Peale’s techniques by the mid-1980s. — location: 1946 ^ref-23492
Gallwey’s solution is to eliminate doubt with a variety of mental techniques, the most important of which is a form of mental association. “The technique is simply to remember or associate with a seemingly difficult task (in this case the golf shot) some action that is simple, preferably one that has never failed. For example, when addressing a ten-foot putt, you might remember the action of simply picking up a ball out of the hole. — location: 1989 ^ref-18199
“It normally takes around six months for a player to get the basic of the forehand topspin technique, and it is then that we can start trying to integrate it into footwork patterns involving other strokes and new spins,” Phillips says. “There is no shortcut.” — location: 2258 ^ref-9387
Choking is a problem of psychological reversion: the flipping from a brain system used by experts to one used by novices. Why does it occur? Consider what happens when executing a simple task, like keeping a cup of coffee upright under pressure—say, because you are walking across a very expensive carpet. In these circumstances, explicit attention is just what you need. By focusing on keeping the cup vertical, you are far less likely to spill the contents because of inadvertence or a lack of concentration. On simple tasks, the tendency to slow down and take conscious control confers huge advantages. But precisely the opposite applies when executing a complex task. When an expert hits a moving table tennis ball or strikes a fade on a golf shot, any tendency to direct attention toward the mechanics of the shot is likely to be catastrophic because there are too many interconnecting variables for the conscious mind to handle (this is another example of combinatorial explosion). — location: 2329 ^ref-60578
As Robert Louis Stevenson, a man who knew a thing or two about the ironies of the human psyche, wrote: “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.” — location: 2497 ^ref-9440
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 is that the plane’s detailed warning systems worked. — location: 2709 ^ref-62556
Krieger was not unusual in having been fed those pills: according to secret files uncovered at a military hospital on the outskirts of Berlin, more than ten thousand athletes were doped with Oral-Turinabol over a twenty-year period. — location: 2770 ^ref-11633