Young prodigies — the teenage sports stars, the high schoolers soaring up the chess ranks or making scientific discoveries — are usually not the same people who reach the pinnacles of their fields in adulthood, according to a new study. And the two groups begin their journeys in very different ways.
The study, published on Thursday in the journal Science, found that elite achievement in youth typically starts with a focus on one thing: A pianist plays no other instrument; a swimmer stays off the running track. But the people who achieve the most later in life typically start off with less single-minded engagement across multiple disciplines, and less early success.
“When comparing performers across the highest levels of achievement,” the researchers wrote, “the evidence suggests that eventual peak performance is negatively associated with early performance.”
There are exceptions, of course, those rising stars who end up probing the outer limits of human capacity. Just look at Simone Biles or Mozart, whose exceptional abilities were evident in childhood. But more often, the long-term elites progress slowly and eventually surpass the wunderkinds.
The new study analyzed 19 existing data sets encompassing more than 34,000 adult high achievers around the world, including comprehensive ones that included, for example, all Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics up to the time of publication of those data sets. It also looked at 66 studies of young prodigies and people just below the elite level of their fields. The research was conducted by a sports scientist, a sports economist and two psychology experts.
The youth model — an early, single-discipline focus with rapid advancement — has been a common view of how people reach peak ability, the researchers wrote, because studies of high achievement have frequently focused on youth. But the researchers weren’t sure whether the findings of those studies could be extrapolated to the top adult achievers.
They found that they couldn’t. People who reach the pinnacle of their field — Nobel laureates, say — generally pursue a variety of disciplines in childhood and advance more gradually in their eventual field over a longer period of time.
These patterns held true across the disciplines that the researchers looked at, including athletics, music, science and chess.
Arne Güllich, a sports scientist at the RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau, was one of the authors of the study. “Across very different disciplines, with very different skill profiles and very different age structure in terms of starting age and age of peak performance, the pattern of the development of the world’s best performers is very similar,” Dr. Güllich said in an interview.
The patterns were visible between the most elite performers and the people just below them; think Nobel laureates and those who topped out at national-level scientific awards. Both groups are high-achieving, but the people who reached the absolute peak — the Nobel laureates — generally showed the more gradual progression with a multidisciplinary start.
“There’s something hopeful here for those of us who were not child prodigies,” said Dean Keith Simonton, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the research but was part of the peer review process. “Often the tortoise beats the hare.”
But there are limitations to the analysis. The research examined data from two types of studies: prospective studies, which observed high-achieving young people over time, and retrospective studies, which looked back at the childhoods of high-achieving adults. They were not randomized studies where different groups of children were assigned to pursue one activity or many.
Ellen Winner, a senior research associate at Harvard’s Project Zero who has studied child prodigies, and who was not involved in the new study, said she would have liked to know the results of the prospective and retrospective studies separately.
Her hypothesis, she said, was that most child prodigies didn’t reach the height of their field in adulthood, but that most adults who did reach the height of their field were in fact “recognized as unusual as children.”
“If so, that would mean that lots of prodigies burn out, but those who do make it big come from the pool of prodigies who did not burn out,” she wrote. “I suspect late bloomers (they do exist) are less common than early bloomers who keep on blooming.” But with prospective and retrospective studies combined in the analysis, it’s harder to tease out the two.
And while some accomplishments are easy to measure — one either makes the Olympics or doesn’t — others, such as cognitive performance, are harder. Dr. Winner said it was not clear how the analysis measured cognitive performance in childhood. She also noted that in some areas, it relied on adult salaries as a proxy for achievement, which some previous studies have done too but isn’t necessarily how those within a given field would measure success.
Dr. Güllich said that most of the highest achievers in the analysis “were not among the best of their age when they were young, but they demonstrated a marked increase in performance improvement around the middle part of their careers.”
The study does not confirm why this might be the case, but the researchers offered three hypotheses, all of which Dr. Güllich said probably played a role.
First, children who try a range of activities may have a better chance of finding one that they are exceptionally good at. Second, someone may develop a higher capacity for learning after being challenged early in life by a variety of tasks and situations. Third, children who put all their eggs in one basket run the risk of developing overuse injuries or burning out mentally.
“Many of them drop out prematurely, because this pattern of engagement is associated with increased risk,” Dr. Güllich said. “Maybe you’re much better in another discipline, but you will never get to know because you haven’t tried it out.”
So kids, try picking up new activities. Who knows — you might win a Nobel Prize.
Maggie Astor covers the intersection of health and politics for The Times.
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