High-achieving adults rarely began as child prodigies

International chess masters, Olympic gold medalists and Nobel Prize-winning scientists were rarely child prodigies, a review shows. Likewise, early childhood achievements and intensive training programs have rarely led to the highest achievements at the global level in the adult world.

The analysis, based on 19 studies of nearly 35,000 high-performing people, shows that the vast majority of adults who top the world rankings in their area of ​​expertise grew up participating in a wide range of activities, only gradually developing their most challenging skills.

The results contradict the common belief that achieving the highest international level requires intense and focused training during childhood, he says. Arne Güllich at RPTU Kaiserslautern in Germany. “If we realize that most world-class performers were not all that great or exceptional in their early years, this means that early exceptional performance is not a prerequisite for long-term world-class performance.”

Many studies closely link the intensity of a child's program of teaching specific activities, such as music and athletics, to competitiveness in these activities during adolescence or young adulthood. But studies of world-class older athletes have shown the opposite trend. For example, 82 percent of international juniors do not become adults or senior international athletesand 72 percent of international seniors had not previously reached the international junior level.

The experience of renowned international experts also suggests that the link between success in childhood and in adulthood is not as strong as it may seem. For example, although composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, golfer Tiger Woods, chess player Gukesh Dommaraju and mathematician Terence Tao were prodigies, the composer Ludwig van Beethovenbasketball player Michael Jordan, chess player Viswanathan Anand and scientist Charles Darwin were not.

The studies Güllich and his colleagues reviewed included analyzes of the life histories of Olympic athletes, Nobel Prize winners in science, the world's top ten chess players, and the world's most famous classical music composers, as well as international leaders in other fields.

In different specialties, the first excellent students and then world-class performers were largely different people. Indeed, only about 10 percent of those who were successful as adults were top performers as teenagers, and only about 10 percent of the top youth achievers were top performers as adults.

The team also compared their results with data from 66 studies on the training history of young and “sub-elite” athletes – those who reach high local levels or junior championships, but are not necessarily the best in the world as adults. They noted that the traits that distinguish successful young people, such as early specialization, rapid progress and abundant practice in a particular discipline, are largely absent – or even reversed – among world-class adult performers.

This may be because children who gain more experience in a variety of activities at an early age end up developing more flexible learning skills and finding activities that suit them best. “Essentially, they find optimal discipline and increase their learning capital for future long-term learning,” says Güllich.

Additionally, a less intense training schedule during childhood and adolescence could potentially help prevent burnout or injury, which could compromise long-term health. career. “There is an increased risk of becoming stuck in a discipline that you no longer enjoy and that has no alternative to change,” says Güllich.

The review addresses a long-standing research gap by clearly separating early success from long-term elite outcomes, he says. David Feldon at the University of Utah. He says there is still a tendency to encourage children to focus on learning and practicing a specific skill. “It certainly develops expertise and leads to quick profits,” he says. “But I don’t know if it will ultimately be productive for people throughout their lives.”

For Feldon, who is also a youth wrestling coach, the review has important implications for those who work with children to help them develop skills. “It not only helps to promote a very high level of knowledge, but it does so in a healthy and productive way that leads to better people in a broader sense, not just in the very narrow pursuit of an outcome.”

Programs designed to identify and accelerate early stars may thus miss out on many future top talent, favoring paths that optimize short-term success over long-term excellence, Gullich adds. “Those elite training programs, gifted development programs, scholarship programs and so on, which typically target very young ages and only one discipline? Well, as we now know from recent data, it will be more promising to encourage young people to study at least one, and maybe two, other disciplines over the course of a few years.”