It's Good News for Those Who Weren't Child Prodigies

Being the star kid in the classroom or on the team may not be the ticket to top-tier success later on, according to a sweeping new study of elite performers. Researchers led by Arne Gullich at Germany's University of Kaiserslautern-Landau analyzed career paths for more than 34,000 high achievers in science, sports, music, and chess, including Nobel Prize winners and Olympic champions. They found that standout children rarely became the most high-achieving adults: In many fields, only about 1 in 10 prodigies ultimately reached world-class status. Many of the highest achievers, meanwhile, looked merely average—or even behind—when they were young.

"When comparing performers across the highest levels of achievement, the evidence suggests that eventual peak performance is negatively associated with early performance," the researchers write in the study published in Science, per the New York Times. In particular, the study challenges the notion that children should focus on one specialty. The researchers found that future greats typically specialized later and spent more of their youth exploring disciplines or activities. Top athletes, for example, often played multiple sports as kids. Nobel laureates were more likely to move between scientific fields or pursue interests beyond science. And successful composers tended to work across styles instead of locking into a single genre.

In the authors' words, "adult world-class performance is associated with limited discipline-specific practice [during childhood], increased multidisciplinary practice, and gradual early progress." A scientist not involved with the research offers this takeaway: "There's something hopeful here for those of us who were not child prodigies," Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California, Davis, tells the Times. "Often the tortoise beats the hare."