The Two Second Advantage

When the Universe puts together a series of fortunate circumstances, it's probably a good idea to pay attention.

This book is a powerful tool to help us understand how to succeed by anticipating the future. The book is divided into three parts
What is natural- Talented Brains
What is built- Talented Systems
What happens when both are combined- The Two Second Advantage.

In a nutshell, talented brains operate with a powerful in built tool of predicting and anticipating what may occur in the future and thereby gain that split second advantage which could be crucial to succeed in a scenario. Be it sports, business or life. The good news is talented brains are born but with sufficient practice, ideally around 10 thousand hours which would be 3 years of 8 hour day practice will help build a talented brain – one that essentially gets rewired to perform that particular activity by chunking various sets of activities thereby going on auto pilot without consciously doing it. This holds true for a job function or a hobby or any other activity and is a powerful mathematics for parents who want to identify and develop talent in their children.

Talented systems are tools that help one gain an overall perspective of a situation- it could be just a collection of traffic data which when analysed could help one predict a traffic jam situation and thereby reroute traffic or an analysis of a series of games that help one understand a pattern or perhaps an analysis of specific search words like "flu" and predict where there could be a possibility of an occurrence of an epidemic and move medical supplies in that region. The problem with talented systems is that they cannot think. They can collect data, throw up search results but are not able to think and throw up the data that is needed by a particular user.

The two-second advantage could be a combination of talent and practice and a focused approach to a situation. Or it could simply be a combination of talented brain using a talented system to analyse and act. It would be thinking on your feet, which cannot come without practice and an ability to predict.

I found this book extremely interesting and it flows like a story using sufficient examples to highlight the approaches that talented brains do. It also talks of technical jargons to explain talented systems and their scope and possibility. It would universally appeal to business / working people, hobbyists, parents and even an individual who is simply looking at bettering their approach to handling situations- social/ emotional or others. It is like a tool that one could use for brainstorming or as training capsule to refresh our approach towards a situation.

Highly recommended.

Title- The Two Second Advantage
Authors- Vivek Ranadive & Kevin Maney
Publisher- Hachette
Price- Rs 499