26 Quotes by Matthew Syed

As Duflo puts it: “It is possible to make significant progress against the biggest problem in the world through the accumulation of a set of small steps, each well thought out, carefully tested, and judiciously implemented.

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.

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.

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. Ultimately the approach emerges from a basic property of empirical evidence: to find out if something is working, you must isolate its effect. Controlled experimentation is inherently “marginal” in character.

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.

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.

The secret to modern F1 is not really to do with big ticket items; it is about hundreds of thousands of small items, optimized to the nth degree. People think that things like engines are based upon high-level strategic decisions, but they are not. What is an engine except many iterations of small components? You start with a sensible design, but it is the iterative process that guides you to the best solution. Success is about creating the most effective optimization loop.

The marginal gains approach is not just about mechanistic iteration. You need judgment and creativity to determine how to find solutions to what the data is telling you, but those judgments, in turn, are tested as part of the next optimization loop. Creativity not guided by a feedback mechanism is little more than white noise. Success is a complex interplay between creativity and measurement, the two operating together, the two sides of the optimization loop.