High-achieving adults rarely began as child prodigies

International chess masters, Olympic gold medallists and Nobel prize-winning scientists were rarely child prodigies, a review reveals. Likewise, early childhood successes and intense training programmes have rarely led to top achievement at a global level in the adult world.

The analysis – based on 19 studies involving nearly 35,000 high-performing people – shows that the vast majority of adults who lead worldwide rankings in their field of expertise grew up participating in a broad range of activities, only gradually developing their most proficient skill.

The findings contradict popular beliefs that achieving top international performance levels requires intensive, highly focused training during childhood, says Arne Güllich at RPTU Kaiserslautern in Germany. “If we understand that most world-class performers were not that remarkable or exceptional in their early years, this implies that early exceptional performance is not a prerequisite for long-term, world-class performance.”

Much research has strongly linked the intensity of a child’s training programme in specific activities – like music and athletics – to competitive performance in those activities as teenagers or young adults. But studies in older world-class athletes have shown trends to the contrary. For example, 82 per cent of international-level junior athletes don’t become international-level adult, or senior, athletes, and 72 per cent of international-level seniors didn’t previously achieve the junior international level.

The backgrounds of famous international experts also suggest the link between childhood and adult success isn’t as strong as it might appear. For instance, although composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, golfer Tiger Woods, chess player Gukesh Dommaraju and mathematician Terence Tao were all child prodigies, composer Ludwig van Beethoven, basketball player Michael Jordan, chess player Viswanathan Anand and scientist Charles Darwin were not.

The studies that Güllich and his colleagues reviewed included analyses of the life histories of Olympic athletes, Nobel laureates in the sciences, world top-10 chess players and the most renowned classical music composers, as well as international leaders in other fields.

Across various specialisms, early high achievers and later world-class performers were largely different people. Indeed, only about 10 per cent of those who excelled as adults were top performers in their youth, and only about 10 per cent of top youth performers went on to excel as adults.

The team also compared their results with data from 66 studies on the training histories of young and “sub-elite” performers – those reaching high local levels or junior championships but not necessarily the best in the world as seniors. They noted that traits that distinguish high-achieving youths, like early specialisation, rapid progress and abundant discipline-specific practice are largely absent – or even reversed – among adult world-class performers.

That might be because children who gain a broader early experience in various activities end up developing more flexible learning skills, and finding the activities that fit them the best. “In essence, they find an optimal discipline match and they enhance their learning capital for future long-term learning,” says Güllich.

Plus, having a less intense training schedule during childhood and adolescence could potentially help prevent burnout or injuries that can compromise long-term careers. “There’s this increased risk of getting stuck in a discipline you cease to enjoy and have no alternative to change,” says Güllich.

The review addresses a long-standing research gap by clearly separating early success from long-term elite performance, says David Feldon at Utah State University. He says there is still a tendency to encourage children to focus hard on learning and practising a particular skill. “It certainly does develop expertise and leads to quick gains,” he says. “But I don’t know that it’s ultimately productive for people over their lifespans.”

For Feldon, who is also a children’s wrestling coach, the review has important implications for those who work with children to help them develop skills. “It’s not just helping foster very high levels of expertise, but doing so in a way that is healthy and productive, and which leads to the betterment of people in a broader sense, not just in a very narrow attainment of outcome.”

Programmes designed to identify and fast-track early stars might thus miss many future top performers, while favouring pathways that optimise short-term success rather than long-term excellence, Güllich adds. “Those elite training programmes, giftedness programmes, scholarship programmes, and so on, that typically focus on very young ages and on just one discipline? Well, as we now know from recent evidence, it’ll be more promising to encourage young people to do at least one, maybe two other disciplines over multiple years.”