Your first choice, Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance by Neil Charness, Paul J Feltovich and Robert R Hoffman, is seen by many as the definitive tome in what expertise is.

Yes, it’s a remarkable compendium of essays by the leading academics in the field, explaining how excellence is constructed in each of those areas. It is remarkably extensive, authoritative but also deeply entertaining. It covers everything from expertise in chess to expertise in psychology and computer science and mathematics. There is sexual expertise and medicine as well. Throughout all these different fields the consensus is the excellence is constructed on hard work but it nuances that explanation all the way through For me it is a wonderful set of essays and required reading for anyone interested in the subject.

Aside from hard work leading to expertise, what else is required?

On each occasion if you look at chess or sports or maths different compelling stories are told about how the hard work transforms the software that we use to process the information that comes towards us from around the world. It is often very specific so if you build up an expertise as a taxi-driver it is not transferable to being an expert as a mathematician. It is all very narrow and that is why it is really specialisation in the modern world that has permitted us to attain excellence in these various fields. In the old days when we were jack-of-all-trades we really were master of none.

From your experience what would you say makes a champion?

It really is hard work extending over very many years. I think the mistake people often make is to think that experts get to the top rather quickly and to think we wouldn’t be able to get that good in a short time frame. But I think if people were to watch the whole process it wouldn’t be quite so mystical – it would just seem the product of hard work.

Your next book is a controversial one. John Harris is making the ethical case for using biotechnology to improve human life in Enhancing Evolution.

Harris is a brilliant essayist and the book explores and explodes a great deal of conservatism in bioethics. His arguments are compelling. He is sort of a radical utilitarian. He thinks that we should embrace any technologies that make life go better for humanity and not to turn these things down because either we feel squeamish or it sounds too radical. He says the basic test is: does it make life better? And if that is stem cell research or intervening in evolution to make humans longer-lived or more intelligent we should go and do it.

Do you agree with him?

Yes, I do by and large. I think his arguments are sound and that ethical conservatism hinges on a number of different fallacies, all of which he persuasively deals with.

But what about looking at this idea in terms of sport?

Well he makes a very interesting distinction. In sports drug-taking, or what we can call enhancement, is a very different thing from enhancement in life. If, for example, I take an enhancement that helps me to run faster, and that enhancement is denied to others, then I win at their expense. If, on the other hand, we all take a drug or enhancement that improves our times by ten per cent the relative performance is exactly the same.

But you may as well not give anyone the drug in the first place because you will all be in the same position.

Yes, enhancing in any zero sum game can only help somebody at the expense of somebody else and so there is a valid case for making certain types of enhancements illegal in certain sports. But in life if you could enhance humanity so that you could engineer, for example, immunity from the common cold I would be happy to have that even if it meant interfering with the fabric of my DNA.

If somebody said to me, ‘Do you want someone else to have that?’, I would say yes I do, because I want it for its own sake, not just so that I can improve my relative position.

But critics would talk about the unfairness of the situation where you have the haves and the have-nots.

Yes and Harris deals with that. He talks about the dubious ethics involved in withholding enhancements for some until they are available to all. Because, if we did that historically, there would have been no education for anybody until it was universally available. If you delay enhancing and helping a group of people until you can help absolutely everybody, equally there would be no innovation at all. I suppose it hinges on the idea that if some people get that advantage eventually it will trickle down to others. And I think it is dubious ethics to withhold a really powerful benefit for humanity on the basis that not everyone can have it simultaneously. But sport is different. If you introduce enhancements which are not available for everyone, of course that would undermine its appeal.

Next up is Carol Dweck looking at how people develop their beliefs about themselves in her book Self-Theories.

This is an absolutely revolutionary book because it reflects Dweck’s research over many years as a professor of psychology at Stanford University where she argues that the pattern of success and failure in the world are very much to do not with our talent but our mind sets or our beliefs. Essentially, what she means by that is that if you believe that success hinges on talent, it follows that any time you fail you are likely to interpret that as meaning that you have insufficient talent and you are likely to give up, which is a perfectly rational thing to do if your premise is correct.

But if, on the other hand, you believe that excellence hinges on effort you don’t take failure as an indictment but as an opportunity to grow. If it is true that excellence hinges on effort you will eventually excel. Dweck has lots of research to show that we can inculcate the growth mind set – the mind set that believes that excellence hinges on effort by praising effort rather than talent.

But I do think that you have to have some kind of aptitude in the first place. For example, some people aren’t that good at ball games and really are never going to become a champion or get that good at them.

But how do you know that they wouldn’t get good or excellent if they try? They might not be a world champion but they could certainly become very good. A better example than sport, which is a zero sum game, is mathematics. A lot of people think, well I am never going to get any better at that, and they give up. But why? The evidence often is that they have only tried it for a few hours. But the point about Dweck’s book is that you have to keep going for a long time before you see your true potential.

And you have to want it as well because with all the effort you need to put in it’s got to be something you really want to get better at.

That’s spot on and I think Dweck deals with this, although I deal with it more in my own book. I think you really must care about the destination. You really need that passion and it needs to come from the inside rather than be externally thrust upon you by pushy parents or teachers.