The practice of training exceptionally performing children early in a specialized sport or other field does bring those young people youth championships and early achievements, but the adult sports champions and top scientists usually have taken a different path, with much more varied activities in different domains and often with a slow start.
This is what four psychologists and sports scientists write, led by the German Arne Güllich (Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität, Kaiserslautern). this week Science. The four examined a large number of studies into young top performances and top performers later in life.
Most studies on high-achieving people (“exceptional performers”) target young people. Usually in sports or music because talent reveals itself early there and performance is also easily measurable and comparable. And as they write: “There are simply no young fighter pilots or brain surgeons.” These studies on young people generally show that those who concentrate early and intensely on one discipline can go far at an early age. This is how the top schools for music and sports are set up. The team led by Gülich analyzed those studies, but also looked at the much smaller number of studies into the backgrounds of adult top performers in science, music and sports. The central question was: are the specialized trained youth champions also the people who will later dominate their field as adults?
And their answer is: no. Compared to other good performers from their generation, later top performers develop more slowly in the beginning and initially do not concentrate on one field at all. For example, the top 3 chess players of the past ten years now score an average of 48 so-called elo points higher than the rest of the top ten, but when they were fourteen they had 63 points less than the rest.
Peaks early in youth
And in a completely different area: Nobel Prize winners have, on average, lower publication impact figures at the beginning of their careers than other top scientists (who were nominated for the Nobel Prize but did not receive it). Nobel Prize winners also obtain a professorship or an important grant later on average than those other ‘sub-toppers’.
Of course, adult champions and youth champions have a lot in common, especially compared to the rest of the population, but the difference between them is also striking: early specialization leads to early peaking in youth, and early multidisciplinarity leads to slower growth and later peak performance.
The researchers find this pattern almost everywhere. They even found it in a survey of the most successful operas. The lasting success of an opera appears to be less successful as the composer has written more operas in the same genre. Practice makes perfect, but variation seems crucial for true top performance. The specialist youth training courses only produce a minority of adult toppers, and because of their concentration on early achievements they also neglect the broad training that turns out to be the basis of most adult toppers later in life.
In the world of top performances, the later successful prodigies often stand out the most, such as the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the mathematician Terence Tao and the golfer Tiger Woods, but the comparisons by Arne Güllich’s team show that relative late bloomers such as the composer Ludwig van Beethoven, the chess player Viswanathan Anand and the scientist Charles Darwin are more common.
Golfer Tiger Woods is considered a child prodigy. He appeared on TV at the age of two.
Photo Tannen Maury/EPA
The literature study Science is a sequel to a large meta-study in the magazine Sports Medicine from 2023, by the same team in which they compared a large number of studies on young and older sports champions. With the same outcome: that early specialization does lead to great youth championships, but that the later adult champions are usually shaped differently, less specialized, slower and more broadly developed. This study led to concerned reports, especially in the German-speaking press, about the specialized organization of youth training in sports. We have children who are completely falsch – yes, we will harm themfor example, headlined the Berner Zeitung in 2023.
In Science the researchers also make simple recommendations for elite youth training courses, which mainly exist in music and sports. “Instead of playing football four to six days a week, a youth coach could also encourage his pupils to play another sport twice a week, such as basketball, tennis or gymnastics. The piano teacher could encourage the students to take up another instrument such as flute, violin or percussion. The school programs for special talents in physics could also broaden their program with courses in computer science, ecology and philosophy.”
More research is needed to better understand the deeper causes of this pattern, Güllich and his colleagues write Sciencebut they do offer a few possible explanations for the unexpectedly positive effect of a slow and broad development. The first is inspired by labor market theories: those who practice different disciplines are more likely to find a profession that suits them perfectly than someone who specializes very early. The second uses ideas from learning psychology: those who delve into multiple domains can often think more flexibly and pick up new things more quickly. The third is a kind of inverse of the first and based on risk analysis: those who master multiple disciplines during their training are less likely to get stuck in a profession in which the pleasure decreases. Overspecialization can also lead to stress and susceptibility to injuries.
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