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Chapter 3
Matthew Syed
Matthew is one of the most accomplished individuals I have ever met. He was interviewed on Transworld Sport whilst he was at Oxford and said that when he retired from table tennis, he didn’t really know what he wanted to do. He said flippantly, “Maybe I will come back to college and do a PhD, be boring, do something like that or maybe I will go into journalism, politics or economics.” He predicted his future very well in 1995.
He is a multi-award-winning journalist for The Times and a regular contributor to television and radio. He stood as the Labour candidate in the 2001 UK General Election in Wokingham, coming third in a safe Conservative seat to John Redwood. He won a place on the Labour Party’s shortlist to succeed Ashok Kumar for the Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland constituency in the 2010 UK General Election. He is an author and has written six bestselling books about mindset and high-performance including Rebel Ideas, Bounce, Black Box Thinking, The Greatest and his celebrated children’s books.
I worked with him many times but on one occasion back in Dublin in 2012, he contributed to the content of an event called “Getting the Edge” which led to a successful intervention, that ultimately saved the live of one of our clients.
By Harvey Thorneycroft
Chapter 3: Matthew Syed
Many of the Brilliant Minds that we have been working with over the years, like Professor Steven Hawking, have found themselves at some point at Oxford or Cambridge, during their various periods of reinvention.
They used these hallowed halls as a steppingstone to the next part of their journey. There is one individual that I would like to refer to at this point; Matthew Syed chose to go to university, but academia certainly wasn’t his primary driver; he had other things going on well before he arrived at Balliol College.
Matthew Syed was a professional table tennis player in Sweden for Angby, one of the strongest teams in Europe at that time. His father suggested that he should apply to university. He had been studying Maths and Economics in his spare time. But he thought university was a bad idea because he was determined to make the grade in table tennis. He wanted to play for England, but the administration was against his style of play which was defensive. He became extremely demoralised, so applied for Oxford despite his academic credentials not being that impressive at the time. He did an interview at Baliol College and made it into Oxford on condition that he passed his A-levels, but in the back of his mind, he still wanted to carry on with table tennis. Donald Parker, the national coach, felt a full-time university degree was not compatible with playing top-class sport, and that therefore it was not likely that he would be selected to play for England if he studied at university.
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