Matthew Syed > Quotes

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Studies have shown that we are often so worried about failure that we create vague goals, so that nobody can point the finger when we don’t achieve them. We come up with face-saving excuses, even before we have attempted anything.

We cover up mistakes, not only to protect ourselves from others, but to protect us from ourselves. Experiments have demonstrated that we all have a sophisticated ability to delete failures from memory, like editors cutting gaffes from a film reel—as we’ll see. Far from learning from mistakes, we edit them out of the official autobiographies we all keep in our own heads.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Well, it doesn’t work. Lowering standards just leads to poorly educated students who feel entitled to easy work and lavish praise.”
― Matthew Syed, Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success

“Creativity is, in many respects, a response.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Everything we know in aviation, every rule in the rule book, every procedure we have, we know because someone somewhere died . . . We have purchased at great cost, lessons literally bought with blood that we have to preserve as institutional knowledge and pass on to succeeding generations. We cannot have the moral failure of forgetting these lessons and have to relearn them.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Child prodigies amaze us because we compare them not with other performers who have practiced for the same length of time, but with children of the same age who have not dedicated their lives in the same way. We delude ourselves into thinking they possess miraculous talents because we assess their skills in a context that misses the essential point. We see their little bodies and cute faces and forget that, hidden within their skulls, their brains have been sculpted—and their knowledge deepened—by practice that few people accumulate until well into adulthood, if then. Had the six-year-old Mozart been compared with musicians who had clocked up 3,500 hours of practice, rather than with other children of the same age, he would not have seemed exceptional at all.”
― Matthew Syed, Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success

“Marginal gains is not about making small changes and hoping they fly. Rather, it is about breaking down a big problem into small parts in order to rigorously establish what works and what doesn't.”
― Matthew Syed

“When most people practice, they focus on the things they can do effortlessly,” Ericsson has said. “Expert practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.” So far the focus in this book has been on the quantity of practice required to reach the top, and we’ve seen that it’s a staggering amount of time, stretching for a period of at least ten years.”
― Matthew Syed, Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success

“If we are intent upon answering our most serious questions, from climate change to poverty, and curing diseases to designing new products, we need to work with people who think differently, not just accurately.”
― Matthew Syed, Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking

“that collective intelligence emerges not just from the knowledge of individuals, but also from the differences between them.”
― Matthew Syed, Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking

“Learning from failure has the status of a cliché. But it turns out that, for reasons both prosaic and profound, a failure to learn from mistakes has been one of the single greatest obstacles to human progress”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“The only way to be sure is to go out and test your ideas and programmes, and to realise that you will often be wrong. But that is not a bad thing. It leads to progress.   This”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Growth Mindset and the Secrets of High Performance

“Later doesn’t always come to everybody.”
― Matthew Syed, Bounce

“The extraordinary dedication of the young Mozart, under the guidance of his father, is perhaps most powerfully articulated by Michael Howe, a psychologist at the University of Exeter, in his book Genius Explained. He estimates that Mozart had clocked up an eye-watering 3,500 hours of practice even before his sixth birthday.”
― Matthew Syed, Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success

“If you don’t know what you are doing wrong, you can never know what you are doing right.”
― Matthew Syed, Bounce

“It is partly because we are so willing to blame others for their mistakes that we are so keen to conceal our own. We”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Growth Mindset and the Secrets of High Performance

“John Cleese? ‘Everybody has theories,’ he said. ‘The dangerous people are those who are not aware of their own theories. That is, the theories on which they operate are largely unconscious.”
― Matthew Syed, Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking

“It is only by starting at an unusually young age and by practicing with such ferocious devotion that it is possible to accumulate ten thousand hours while still in adolescence. Far from being an exception to the ten-thousand-hour rule, Mozart is a shining testament to it.”
― Matthew Syed, Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success

“Psychologists often make a distinction between mistakes where we already know the right answer and mistakes where we don’t. A medication error, for example, is a mistake of the former kind: the nurse knew she should have administered Medicine A but inadvertently administered Medicine B, perhaps because of confusing labeling combined with pressure of time. But sometimes mistakes are consciously made as part of a process of discovery. Drug companies test lots of different combinations of chemicals to see which have efficacy and which don’t. Nobody knows in advance which will work and which won’t, but this is precisely why they test extensively, and fail often. It is integral to progress.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“trying to increase discipline and accountability in the absence of a just culture has precisely the opposite effect. It destroys morale, increases defensiveness and drives vital information deep underground. It”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Growth Mindset and the Secrets of High Performance

“The idea that the Creator is on your side, guiding your footsteps, taking a personal interest in your troubles, deriving pleasure from your victories, providing solace in your defeats, orchestrating the world such that, in the words of Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, ‘All things work together for good to those who love God’ – all this must have a dramatic impact on the efficacy of a sportsman, or indeed anyone else. As Muhammad”
― Matthew Syed, Bounce

“Success is not just dependent on before-the-event reasoning, it is also about after-the-trigger adaptation.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Growth Mindset and the Secrets of High Performance

“The subversive idea at the centre of Ericsson’s work is that excellence is not reserved for the lucky few but can be achieved by almost all of us.”
― Matthew Syed, Bounce

“This, then, is what we might call “black box thinking.”* For organizations beyond aviation, it is not about creating a literal black box; rather, it is about the willingness and tenacity to investigate the lessons that often exist when we fail, but which we rarely exploit. It is about creating systems and cultures that enable organizations to learn from errors, rather than being threatened by them.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“When a culture is unfair and opaque, it creates multiple perverse incentives. When a culture is fair and transparent, on the other hand, it bolsters the adaptive process.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Growth Mindset and the Secrets of High Performance

“True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Growth Mindset and the Secrets of High Performance

“The reason is not difficult to see: if we drop out when we hit problems, progress is scuppered, no matter how talented we are. If we interpret difficulties as indictments of who we are, rather than as pathways to progress, we will run a mile from failure. Grit, then, is strongly related to the Growth Mindset; it is about the way we conceptualise success and failure.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Growth Mindset and the Secrets of High Performance

“Michael Jordan, the basketball great, is a case in point. In a famous Nike commercial, he said: ‘I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots. I’ve lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed.’ For many the ad was perplexing. Why boast about your mistakes? But to Jordan it made perfect sense. ‘Mental toughness and heart are a lot stronger than some of the physical advantages you might have,’ he said. ‘I’ve always said that and I’ve always believed that.’ James”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Growth Mindset and the Secrets of High Performance

“Much of the literature on creativity focuses on how to trigger these moments of innovative synthesis; how to drive the problem phase toward its resolution. And it turns out that epiphanies often happen when we are in one of two types of environment. The first is when we are switching off: having a shower, going for a walk, sipping a cold beer, daydreaming. When we are too focused, when we are thinking too literally, we can’t spot the obscure associations that are so important to creativity. We have to take a step back for the “associative state” to emerge. As the poet Julia Cameron put it: “I learned to get out of the way and let that creative force work through me.”8 The other type of environment where creative moments often happen, as we have seen, is when we are being sparked by the dissent of others. When Kevin Dunbar, a psychologist at McGill University, went to look at how scientific breakthroughs actually happen, for example (he took cameras into four molecular biology labs and recorded pretty much everything that took place), he assumed that it would involve scientists beavering away in isolated contemplation. In fact, the breakthroughs happened at lab meetings, where groups of researchers would gather around a desk to talk through their work. Why here? Because they were forced to respond to challenges and critiques from their fellow researchers. They were jarred into seeing new associations.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“Most closed loops exist because people deny failure or try to spin it. With pseudosciences the problem is more structural. They have been designed, wittingly or otherwise, to make failure impossible. That is why, to their adherents, they are so mesmerizing. They are compatible with everything that happens. But that also means they cannot learn from anything.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do