In a fascinating interview on Australian television, Matthew Syed, a 3 times Commonwealth Mens singles champion and highly world ranked player talks frankly and openly about his thoughts on talent, hard work and opportunity. He’s also the author of a book called ‘Bounce: How Champions Are Made’.

Here is an excerpt of the transcript from the interview.

LEIGH SALES (Interviewer): In people who become highly successful at something, world class in fact, what weight do you give innate talent versus hard work and opportunity?

MATTHEW SYED: I give innate talent almost no weight at all, and that’s a controversial view and I know it’s a radical and rather subversive view, but I think the evidence backs up that assertion.

If you dig down into the narrative histories of anyone who has reached a high level in virtually any task with a certain level of complexity, what you find is they have spent many, many hours, many months, many years building up to that level.

There is no shortcut, even if sometimes we look at young performers and it seems as if they’ve short-circuited that long road to excellence, when you actually find out about what they did, you find that they started super-young.

Tiger Woods as a two-year-old, the Williams sisters at three-year-olds, Mozart, who was dazzling the aristocracy with piano skills at six and a half. His most eminent biographer assesses that he had already practiced 3,500 hours.

The process of ingraining excellence is long-term, but what the evidence suggests is that almost all of us who are healthy have the potential to get there, provided we’re willing to stick at it for all those many hours.

LEIGH SALES: Given the mental skills that people have to develop to get to these elite levels in sport and music, why do we still sometimes see top performers choke?

MATTHEW SYED: Well, this is one of the great mysteries of sport and one that I had good reason to look at in the book, because I, in one of the defining matches of my table tennis career at the Olympic Games in Sydney, I had a catastrophic meltdown in my opening match.

It wasn’t that my ability was insufficient, ’cause I was a good table tennis player, it’s that I just couldn’t cope with the pressure, the expectation, the occasion. And this is a fascinating phenomenon, because it’s something I think that we can all relate to.

You know, Greg Norman, great Australian sportsman, final round of the US Masters in the 1990s, he was leading by five or six shots from Nick Faldo and he totally fell apart and he did it a number of times in the defining stages of golf’s major titles. And I think the answer is actually relatively simple.

When you learn a skill for the first time, you exercise conscious control over it, like when you drive a car, you’re thinking about turning the steering wheel, looking in the mirror, moving the gear stick and so on. And as you build up the neural frameworks supporting the skill, you have to concentrate very, very hard.

When you become brilliant at something, proficient at something, you can do it subconsciously. So when you drive you can actually think about what you’re gonna make for dinner. The problem with choking is you become so anxious that you wrestle conscious control over a skill that you ought to be delivering automatically and that complicates the kind of the smooth workings of the connection between, if you like, brain and hand or brain and foot or whatever it happens to be. And that’s why you get such a dramatic decline from brilliance to somebody who looks actually rather like a novice.

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