8 ms·

Child prodigies rarely become elite performers

143 points by _bypa 8mo ago

https://archive.md/dhAJl https://archive.md/dhAJl

stevefan1999 8mo ago
OTOH, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2509261-high-achieving-adults-rarely-began-as-child-prodigies/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2509261-high-achieving-...
b00ty4breakfast 8mo ago
I always think of the Little League World Series when I read about stuff like this; these kids are often peaking early and so rarely make it to the highest levels as an adult. This is either because they quit advancing at the same rate or they've destroyed their bodies before they get to high school. I think there's been like a handful LLWS winners who have done anything in the MLB and even fewer who have reached the top of pros.
- iwontberude 8mo ago
  It’s also the case that the LLWS kids aren’t elite prospects because it’s a geographic lottery of affiliated leagues. Its more about keeping people watching ESPN5 than actual talent scouting.
- Paracompact 8mo ago
  > I think there's been like a handful LLWS winners who have done anything in the MLB and even fewer who have reached the top of pros. If the LLWS winners are a sample of N kids, then your statement is even more true for any random sample of N kids. Which is to say, LLWS may give you a big advantage, but not the truly massive advantage that would be required to make you a shoe-in.
happytoexplain 8mo ago
Natural ability (physical or mental) is not strongly correlated with the personality traits that enable a person to "perform", "succeed", or "achieve" in society the way it is structured. In fact, they may be inversely correlated (consider how often people in leadership positions are not apparently exceptional).
- kevinmchugh 8mo ago
  There's a story about, I think, the kickboxer/fighter Alistair Overeem that he was playing Connect 4, and lost, and kept demanding rematches until he had the winning record. Just a refusal to be the loser. That matches every story I've ever heard about Michael Jordan.
  - shermantanktop 8mo ago
    Miserable way to live, if you ask me.
    - totetsu 8mo ago
      Everybody playing forced games of connect4 is the loser.
      - hackeraccount 8mo ago
        The only winning move is not to play.
  - kjksf 8mo ago
    At the same time, I can refuse to be a loser in chess and I'll still have 0% chance of beating Magnus Carlsen. I'm very much a proponent of hard work to the best of your ability but I'm also a realist. I'm pretty good at programming. I doubt Usain Bolt would ever be as good as I am at programming, even if he tried, and I certainly wouldn't be even close to be as good as Usain Bolt in running no matter how hard I tried. I know how fast I was running in high school compared to 30 of my peers (my class) and there was never a path from there to a world class athlete.
  - hackeraccount 8mo ago
    I always think of a kid who was a friend of my daughters. He just really liked winning. I mean, when I was a kid and our team won a soccer game I was happy enough. This kid - if his team was playing a tomato can of a team and the score was 12-0 he was just as ecstatic about making the score 13-0 as was with that first goal. I honestly think he was happier about that kind of game then a struggle to beat a reasonable opponent. Heaven forbid they should lose. Oddly he drifted away from sports (physically he was too small and honestly fragile - 2 or 3 broken bones before he was 12) and into the arts.
harry8 8mo ago
Tiger woods. I can't think of any tennis player who has been in the top 100 for the past few decades who didn't commit to it totally as a young child. Start tennis at 10? Too old. Swimmers. Has anyone stumbled into sporting greatness from being outside the top 5%? Or 1% when they hit adulthood? So what is being said? A huge amount of elite success is in the hardware, i.e. the body &/or brain. These go through rather large changes between ages 10 an 18. Puberty. This shakes up the ordering among those who showed enough promise to have already committed to becoming elite. What am I missing here? Seems like this research is nothing more than "Kids change through puberty, the nature and sizes of the changes are a bit of a lottery for each kid." Much like the the genetic factors are also a lottery so you can't reliably predict who is going to be great from the results of their parents. (But if your parents are both 5ft, the NBA seems an unlikely destination for you).
- g947o 8mo ago
  You missed the second word in the title, "prodigies".
  - benatkin 8mo ago
    That was covered just fine IMO. The reaction seems to be "so what?" I think that's a valid reaction. It's a long article to state something obvious, that the important thing about being on your way to greatness is having great talent and training to win starting at an early age, not winning before reaching a certain age. I had an LLM first pick five figure skaters, and in the follow up query tell me which had wild success before age 12, and only two of the five fit that category, but each started learning at 6 years old or earlier. The other three seem like child prodigies in retrospect to me.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- kazinator 8mo ago
  What is being said is not simply that people who engaged in a certain activity since childhood do not become top performing adults. Obviously that happens a lot. But rather that the top child or youth performers are not reliably the ones that turn into top adult performers.
opinologo 8mo ago
https://archive.is/dhAJl https://archive.is/dhAJl
- cpncrunch 8mo ago
  Unsafe archive site, as it's still DDoSing gyrovague.com. Don't use archive.is until they resolve it. (Not sure if it's really ever safe now, after this shitshow).
  - nicman23 8mo ago
    what even is this rabbit hole
    - cpncrunch 8mo ago
      See the other comment in this thread. Very disturbing.
  - emmelaich 8mo ago
    Bizarre. https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-attack-against-my-blog/ https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-...
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
FeteCommuniste 8mo ago
> Around 90% of superstar adults had not been superstars as children, while only 10% of top-level kids had gone on to become exceptional adults (see chart 1). It is not just that exceptional performance in childhood did not predict exceptional performance as an adult. The two were actually negatively correlated, says Dr Güllich. Even if "only" 10% of elite kids go on to become elite adults, 10% is orders of magnitude larger than the base percentage of adults who are elite athletes, musicians, etc. This doesn't sound "uncorrelated" to me so much as "not as strongly correlated as one might expect." And describing something that happens 10% of the time as "rare" sounds a bit weird, like referring to left-handedness (also about 1 in 10) as rare.
- nothercastle 8mo ago
  Being smart isn’t enough need resources and need to deal with people
- jhallenworld 8mo ago
  It's like those articles that say super high IQ people are not always successful. So I think human brain development is like some kind of optimization algorithm, like simulated annealing or gradient descent. I think this because there is way more complexity in the brain than there is in human DNA, which has pretty low information by comparison. Anyway, child prodigies occur when the algorithm happens to find a good minimum early on.
  - Retric 8mo ago
    Prodigies almost always spend vastly more time doing their thing than the average kid. So it’s not just some random outcome. That relative advantage goes away as people age and specialize.
  - ozim 8mo ago
    Around puberty brain drops loads of connections to become an adult brain. More than 40% of all synapses are eliminated.
    - 8mo ago
energy123 8mo ago
"Child prodigies are more likely to become elite performers" is an equally accurate and less misleading title.
- raincole 8mo ago
  far more likely
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- shermantanktop 8mo ago
  Equally imprecise. “Child prodigies are more likely to become elite performers than they are to become non-elite performers” Vs “Child prodigies are more likely than non-child prodigies to become elite performers" Which is it?
  - owenpalmer 8mo ago
    Neither. That's what reading the article is for.
    - shermantanktop 8mo ago
      My comment was on the attempted retitling of the article. Agree that neither represent the actual article.
nvch 8mo ago
As someone who was not a child prodigy, but still closer to one than to normies, I can say that achieving results easily in childhood leads to not developing good discipline and persistence that are crucial in the adult world. There are more factors that are not easily accessible for both ends of the spectrum, like access to good, personalized education, amount of trauma, and proper psychological support. But the 'discipline' part is what affected me most. On the other side, maybe those who are more disciplined become real prodigies, and burn brightly because of the lack of social knowledge on how to support them and help to become highly developed adults.
- shermantanktop 8mo ago
  This observation about discipline is perceptive but I have also seen variations of it dozens and dozens of times on HN. Tons of former gifted kids on here. The gap between assumed potential and actual reality apparently has to get blamed on someone, and that person is the kid themselves. FWIW I do it too.
  - groundzeros2015 8mo ago
    All parts seem true to me. Most kids think they were more gifted than they were. Learning to work hard and be persistent was actually more important. A lot of talk about being gifted was an obstacle to that.
    - swader999 8mo ago
      We try to praise hard work and downplay the yer so smart talk. I still had get excited when they are lazy smart though.
- z2 8mo ago
  That resonates with me. Both in the lack of discipline as the adults in my world basically defaulted to, "You're so smart, keep it up!" And -- very much related -- the fixed mindset I developed not knowing until later how to actually study, learn, and practice. It lasted quite long unfortunately as I was a functioning undisciplined, fixed mindset person who could still one-shot stuff reasonably well.
tombert 8mo ago
I'm not quite a "child prodigy", but I did skip two grades in math in school. It made me feel very special when it was a kid but as a thirty-something software person I don't think I'm smarter than most of my coworkers now. I think I was better than most kids at math, particularly algebra, but those kids grew up and caught up and I suspect many of them are as good or better at math than I am. I know nothing about child psychology or anything adjacent, but I honestly think a lot of "advanced child" stuff is just maturity.
- FeteCommuniste 8mo ago
  > I know nothing about child psychology or anything adjacent, but I honestly think a lot of "advanced child" stuff is just maturity. That makes me think back to my elementary school, where a lot of the kids who got into the "gifted" program just happened to be, surprise surprise, some of the oldest kids in their grade. At that age the better part of a year in brain development can be exactly the "edge" one needs to excel. And then it can become self-reinforcing when kids gravitate toward the areas in which they dominate their peers.
  - aidenn0 8mo ago
    FWIW, the test for the gifted program at my elementary school normalized their entrytest results for age.
  - ithkuil 8mo ago
    This doesn't match my experience with that term. My son is diagnosed with ADHD and high IQ and labeled "gifted". He's very immature, has absolutely no method, is very impulsive and can't maintain focus for more than 20 minutes. He seems very much less mature than his peers in anything. Yet, he just understands and remembers every single thing at school much better and faster than his peers. So I guess technically that makes him "gifted" but it's not a very useful gift. It just creates problems at school because he gets bored quickly but cannot be given more work to do because he gets exhausted quickly too! I read recently a title of an article that said "gifted children are special needs children" and that marched my experience.
Esophagus4 8mo ago
Fantastic book called Range that talks about this phenomenon. Surprisingly, the child prodigy to adult superstar pipeline is less common than the generalist to adult superstar pipeline. Tiger Woods is the classic example of a child prodigy, but it turns out his path is unusual for superstars. Roger Federer’s (who played a wide range of sports growing up until he specialized in tennis as a teen) is more common. https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/review-range https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/review-range https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41795733 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41795733
- energy123 8mo ago
  It's not really surprising when it's a few thousand child prodigies competing against 7 billion people for a small handful of slots 10 years in the future. Everyday stuff like depression, changing interests, financial pressures, lack of desire to compete, will knock out more than half of the child prodigies, making room for the other 7 billion people.
- mmooss 8mo ago
  It depends on the field, afaik. I know someone who was an exceptional classical pianist, but they told me they knew they'd never make it in that field: They started at age 15, which was much too late to acquire the skills needed. Professional musicians I spoke to agreed.
  - alex43578 8mo ago
    I thought it was supposedly way easier to develop perfect pitch at a young age, compared to people who learned music later. Between things like that and the "10,000 hours" idea, I think some part of being exceptional is a function of: starting young, natural talent, and parents who can push/enable that skill.
  - Balgair 8mo ago
    Range goes into this. Epstein talks about Kind and Unkind learning environments. In Kind environments, the feedback is quick and ranking is easy to know. So the evidence says that the optimal strategy is drill ans kill. In Unkind learning environments, the feedback is slow and ranking is difficult and untimely. So the optimal strategy is to learn as much as you can in as many very different disciplines as possible. The paper that the Economist talks about extends this and (paraphrasing) says that the very top elite level, even Kind learning environments turn back into Unkind ones again as you try to push the field more.
jstummbillig 8mo ago
Maybe this can be explained by drift in what it means to be a "superstar" at different stages in life. In the beginning it's maybe mostly about the skill, later things get more complicated (media, money, negotiations etc) and what made the prodigy becomes relatively less important.
cush 8mo ago
Is this just a failure in our school system?
- necheffa 8mo ago
  Partially. Being gifted is special needs education. And the average K-12 in the US is not equipped to provide that for that special need, especially in a post No Child Left Behind era. A lot of adults conflate giftedness with maturity and expect the kid to act like an adult, combined with the pressure to perform and an identity built around being gifted...it fucks with development. There is a reason why depression and suicide in adults can be correlated with formerly gifted children.
  - alex43578 8mo ago
    Not only are they not equipped to provide for gifted students, they're scarcely equipped to educate basic students to the already-low bar of grade-level expectations. Depending on the year and test, four in ten struggle with basic reading or basic math. That's not even the pressure of high expectations, but just the pathetic state of US culture around educational attainment, expected behaviors, etc.
zephen 8mo ago
The article is a paradigmatic example of innumeracy. 10% of prodigies becomes 10% of elite, whereas (whoknows)% of (general_population - prodigies) becomes 90% of elite. How big is elite? How big is prodigies? Well, for a start, I guess we can assume that size of elite == size of prodigies, because 10% == 10%. But what is that size compared to general population? If it's 1%, then 99% of muggles compete for slots in 0.9% of the population, so, hey, a prodigy is 11 times more likely to become an elite than a muggle. If it's 0.1%, then a prodigy is 111 times more likely to become an elite than a muggle. If it's 10% -- well, that's kind of stretching the definition of both prodigy and elite, isn't it? tl;dr -- article is crap; research probably is, as well.
- guillaumec 8mo ago
  At least for chess the article mentions that they considered the top 10 players in children and senior categories. This would indicate that prodigy chess players are millions of time more likely to become elite compared to the general population.
  - zephen 8mo ago
    Exactly. If their metric implies that 1 of the top 10 prodigy chess players became 1 of the top 10 adult chess players, and that holds down the line, then a prodigy has a 1 in 10 chance of becoming a top player, but a muggle has a 1 in 889 million chance. To be a top child player, you need talent, recognition of that talent, and investment of time and energy. So, who's to say that the time and involvement didn't make them better as adults than they would have been? ISTM that if you groom 10 children and even one of them outperforms a billion other potential players, you've done well, even if they had some latent talent to start with. They claim to "prove" that catering to young talent is counterproductive, but this certainly doesn't prove it. And part of their "proof" is that generalist sportsmen in youth do better as adults than specialist sportsmen in youth. This is beyond stupid -- to be a generalist youth sportsman typically means that the parents have invested significantly more time, energy, and money, and it's pretty obvious that effort in related fields usually pays off well, and most sports don't run all year, and it's useful in physical endeavors to make your body move in different ways. It is trivially accurate for them to mention that the possibility of burnout is a real thing, but it is also risible to discount the positive benefits of sustained attention and effort.
whatsupdog 8mo ago
Ted Kaczynki was a child prodigy.
- stevenwoo 8mo ago
  He was also abused in a psychology study at Harvard when he was 17, which may have been part of the CIA’s MK Ultra drug experiments. Maybe he would have done it all the same or not in the absence of that, who knows.
pickleRick243 8mo ago
Regardless of the basic conceptual point being made (merits of tiger parenting vs. holistic "participation trophy" style parenting), this research doesn't look that convincing. There's the graphic: "Top 1% cognition aged 12 and top 5% salary mid-30s" which is supposed to be the most dramatic one. So apparently we suddenly just take at face value the criticism "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich"?
WalterBright 8mo ago
Being smart is not good enough. Being motivated and willing to work at it makes the difference. I once knew a fellow who was exceptionally smart. He tried all kinds of schemes to make a go of his life, but when the going got tough he'd always quit.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
deleted 8mo ago
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codemystery 8mo ago
[flagged]
bethekidyouwant 8mo ago
What is the ratio of child prodigies to elite performers?
cpncrunch 8mo ago
Flagging as article is paywalled with no way around, and there doesn't seem to be any way around the paywall now that archive.is is a DDoSer.
- cpncrunch 8mo ago
  https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-attack-against-my-blog/ https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-...
vladmk 8mo ago
I’ll do you one better - elite performers rarely become child prodigies
mmooss 8mo ago
I saw an interview with an all-time great NBA basketball player. He was a top high school player and described his childhood like this: When you were at the movies, I was practicing. When you were on dates or hanging out with your buddies, I was practicing. When my family went on a cruise, I was dribbling up and down the hallways. ... Now imagine the prodigy athlete who goes the movies, hangs out, and relaxes on the cruise. How could they hope to compete? I recently read an interview Jadeveon Clowney, who was the country's top high school American football player and then the number one pick in the NFL draft. He was widely called a 'freak' athlete. Clowney said he didn't really learn how to understand and play the game until the NFL; until then he could dominate with his physical ability, even playing against elite college players. He's played 11 years so far in the NFL, which is a long career in an extremely competitive job. We can call him truly 'good'; he was chosen for the Pro Bowl three times, in those years making him > ~85th percentile for his position, but nobody thinks he's an all-time great. There's not such a clear story about where these people come from. Maybe the basketball player just wasn't as athletic (relative to the population of elite athletes) as Clowney and had to make up for it. Maybe Clowney would have been an all-time great with more work. Maybe there are many other inputs besides work and talent.
- levi-turner 8mo ago
  The main under appreciated influence in all this is how much talent can reinforce work. There are outliers on either side (pure talent, pure work) if you squint, but ultimately the best of the best are the ones who are extraordinarily talented but put in an incredible amount of work (and are intelligent enough / discerning enough to find the right coaches to work on the right things). From the outside we look at the work as superhuman, but for many "common" people, we all spend ridiculous amounts of time on things we enjoy. The academic finding that I always found the most illustrative of this was that the correlation of IQ to outcome increases after age 18. The environmental influence of your parents goes away, both the overeager parents who push their kids when the kids don't care and the dreadful parents who drag down their kids success.
EGreg 8mo ago
That’s exactly what Vladimir Feltsman said about me when I was like 8 LOL. He is on video here saying it… “I want him to start playing concerts 3-4 years later but be in business 40 years longer!” https://youtu.be/lf2DWzQ-5zk https://youtu.be/lf2DWzQ-5zk Spoiler: I got into computers as a teenager and my piano career took a nosedive, from Carnegie Hall and Juilliard to like… playing for friends at a house party :)
- padjo 8mo ago
  Crazy stuff, I've been playing for 40 years since I was 3 and I could maybe just about play some of those pieces with a lot of practice! I hope you can still get some joy from playing, that's probably way more important than whether you made a career out of it or not.
Razengan 8mo ago
Because most societies and cultures are optimized to snuff that out.
gwern 8mo ago
Previously discussed (and criticized) at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722853
tsunamifury 8mo ago
This is a tautology. Child prodigies that are identified often become academics who are railroaded into uselsss irrelevance. Actual child prodigies like tiger woods or Justin Bieber who were genuinely insanely brilliant at a young age at non academic things went on to be wildly successful.
hn_throwaway_99 8mo ago
I admit I haven't read the full study, but I'm extremely skeptical that the takeaway as given in the article is valid. Take violinists, for example. Essentially every single world renowned soloist was "some sort" of child prodigy. Now, I've heard some soloists argue that they were not, in fact, child prodigies. For example, may favorite violinist, Hilary Hahn, has said this. She still debuted with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra when she was 12, and here she is performing as a soloist at 15: https://youtu.be/upkP46nvqVI https://youtu.be/upkP46nvqVI. Nathan Milstein, one of the greatest violinists of all time, said he was "not very good until his teens" - he still started playing at the age of 5, and at the age of 11 Leopold Auer, a great violin teacher, invited him to become one of his students, so he clearly saw his potential. I have no doubt lots of prodigies burn out. But, at least in the world of violins, essentially every great soloist was playing at an extremely high level by the time they were in middle school.
- vintermann 8mo ago
  In contrast, it's rare to find any classical singers who were child prodigies. Whatever skills you may develop as a child there apparently don't transfer well into adulthood. It makes sense to me that there may be fine ear/motorics skills which are far more relevant to violinists, which do transfer.
  - alex43578 8mo ago
    Upthread someone made the point that adult "physique" for lack of a better word matters more for some pursuits than others. Chess prodigies don't need to grow to 6ft tall, but if a basketball prodigy doesn't get tall enough, he's never making the NBA. I think the same concept could generalize: for pursuit X, the impact of childhood skill is inversely related to the impact of adult form.
- simianwords 8mo ago
  I never got the idea of an art prodigy. It’s like treating violin as a sport but not as a beautiful medium to communicate with fellow humans.
aappleby 8mo ago
This article is taking some liberties with the word "prodigy" that I disagree with. If the way you nurture a talented student is via "intense drilling", I would argue that the student is not a prodigy in the traditional sense, but a talented and determined student who may or may not be dealing with parental pressure. The actual prodigies I've known absorb information and gain skills without significant effort - I knew someone who enrolled in a calculus class, skimmed through the book in a week or so, and then would only show up to class for tests (which they would ace). So the article conclusion doesn't surprise me - inflict relentless training on a young talented person and yeah maybe they won't want to do that as an adult. But as far as actual "prodigies"? There is no burn-out because there is no (or minimal) effort. The choice of whether to stick with an area of interest through adulthood is more of a personal preference than anything ingrained.
lp4v4n 8mo ago
As I see it, reaching meaningful progress is a very complex, uncertain and non-deterministic process of which being a high capacity individual is only one of the inputs. A very intelligent individual can spend decades working on a product doomed to fail. Many bright mathematician might be working right now on a proof of a problem that in the future may be shown to be undecidable. Einstein, according to himself, was almost never the brightest mathematician in the room and yet gave the world a super-extraordinary contribution. In my opinion, the humbling lesson that child prodigies give us is that we should value as much as possible all the humans involved in the often ungrateful task of trying to advance science. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the case and society seems obsessed with trying to discard and disqualify the human factor.
general1465 8mo ago
That has very simple answer - they are not used on persistent work since childhood, everything comes easy when they are young and smarter than everyone else. When things will start getting harder, lack of discipline and lack of coping mechanism for ventilation of mental stress will catch up with them.
emmelaich 8mo ago
Why child prodigies rarely become elite performers I understand this is typical HN auto-edit.
PunchyHamster 8mo ago
Isn't it just plainly that the "top" doesn't have enough space, even if every single one of them would be exceptional ?
CM30 8mo ago
I mean it makes sense. Keep in mind that: 1. There's a lot of competition in many elite fields, and a decent percentage in both groups aren't going to make it anyway. 2. Being good at something as a child doesn't mean that's your passion or the thing you want to devote your life to. Plenty of these prodigies may want to get into different fields they're not naturally gifted at instead. 3. Being really good at something as a kid can make it hard to learn the discipline needed to stay on top when things get tougher. I'm not a prodigy, but many of the things I did well at in school/college are things I did worse than expected at in unversity, since I wasn't motivated/disciplined enough to get everything done on time. 4. Some fields require physical capabilities that a child prodigy may not grow up to have, like certain sports.
alkyon 8mo ago
For the super-prodigy category, someone like Mozart or Chopin, who could compose symphonies or polonaises at the age of 8, it's almost certain to maintain their elite status in adulthood (as opposed to someone who just plays the piano well or skipped a class or two in elementary school).
kqr 8mo ago
Isn't this just Berkson's paradox? If you filter for either exceptional childhood or exceptional adulthood they will appear negatively correlated.
cyber_kinetist 8mo ago
I think the reality is, if you're too smart than you're going to be easily disinterested in the things that you've been trained for during your entire childhood. Because, you're going to be bored of it eventually! I remember an interview from current #1 chess grandmaster Magnus Carsen about why John Nunn never became World Champion because he is too intelligent: > SPIEGEL: Mr Carlsen, what is your IQ? > Carlsen: I have no idea. I wouldn’t want to know it anyway. It might turn out to be a nasty surprise. > SPIEGEL: Why? You are 19 years old and ranked the number one chess player in the world. You must be incredibly clever. > Carlsen: And that’s precisely what would be terrible. Of course it is important for a chess player to be able to concentrate well, but being too intelligent can also be a burden. It can get in your way. I am convinced that the reason the Englishman John Nunn never became world champion is that he is too intelligent for that. > SPIEGEL: How that? > Carlsen: At the age of 15, Nunn started studying mathematics in Oxford; he was the youngest student in the last 500 years, and at 23 he did a PhD in algebraic topology. He has so incredibly much in his head. Simply too much. His enormous powers of understanding and his constant thirst for knowledge distracted him from chess. > SPIEGEL: Things are different in your case? > Carlsen: Right. I am a totally normal guy. My father is considerably more intelligent than I am.
cucumber3732842 8mo ago
There are a lot of off ramps to comfort on the road to greatness. The hypothetical man who is genetically sufficient for the job (a short man will not succeed in many sports nor will a man with a bad voice be a good singer, a creative mind will not excel at the analytical and an analytical mind will not succeed at the creative), and mentally "just gets" the volumes of understanding it takes to be a once in a generation performer of some craft by mid teens or so will in starting down that path will necessarily achieve the intelligence to determine that there are other, orders of magnitude more sure paths to a comfortable life.
daymanstep 8mo ago
In the past 50 years, not a single chess world champion started playing chess after the age of 10. I suspect the article is playing some games with statistics, and in any case I hope people don't come away from this article with the idea that "you can become a chess world champion even if you never touched chess as a child!"
duxup 8mo ago
10% seems like an incredibly high rate when it comes to becoming elite at something.
tsoukase 8mo ago
Prodigy, even just above normal, children don't own the experience to handle their powers, besides the low motivation that is mentioned. They rarely form a valid, concrete plan to success and let themselves progress only in small steps. They make a few career mistakes early that kill their end result. And some non productive activity will absorb their powers and time (usually a low level job or some form of screen addiction)

143 points by _bypa 8mo ago

https://archive.md/dhAJl https://archive.md/dhAJl

stevefan1999 8mo ago

OTOH, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2509261-high-achieving-adults-rarely-began-as-child-prodigies/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2509261-high-achieving-...

b00ty4breakfast 8mo ago

I always think of the Little League World Series when I read about stuff like this; these kids are often peaking early and so rarely make it to the highest levels as an adult. This is either because they quit advancing at the same rate or they've destroyed their bodies before they get to high school. I think there's been like a handful LLWS winners who have done anything in the MLB and even fewer who have reached the top of pros.

iwontberude 8mo ago
It’s also the case that the LLWS kids aren’t elite prospects because it’s a geographic lottery of affiliated leagues. Its more about keeping people watching ESPN5 than actual talent scouting.
Paracompact 8mo ago
> I think there's been like a handful LLWS winners who have done anything in the MLB and even fewer who have reached the top of pros. If the LLWS winners are a sample of N kids, then your statement is even more true for any random sample of N kids. Which is to say, LLWS may give you a big advantage, but not the truly massive advantage that would be required to make you a shoe-in.

happytoexplain 8mo ago

Natural ability (physical or mental) is not strongly correlated with the personality traits that enable a person to "perform", "succeed", or "achieve" in society the way it is structured. In fact, they may be inversely correlated (consider how often people in leadership positions are not apparently exceptional).

kevinmchugh 8mo ago
There's a story about, I think, the kickboxer/fighter Alistair Overeem that he was playing Connect 4, and lost, and kept demanding rematches until he had the winning record. Just a refusal to be the loser. That matches every story I've ever heard about Michael Jordan.
- shermantanktop 8mo ago
  Miserable way to live, if you ask me.
  - totetsu 8mo ago
    Everybody playing forced games of connect4 is the loser.
    - hackeraccount 8mo ago
      The only winning move is not to play.
- kjksf 8mo ago
  At the same time, I can refuse to be a loser in chess and I'll still have 0% chance of beating Magnus Carlsen. I'm very much a proponent of hard work to the best of your ability but I'm also a realist. I'm pretty good at programming. I doubt Usain Bolt would ever be as good as I am at programming, even if he tried, and I certainly wouldn't be even close to be as good as Usain Bolt in running no matter how hard I tried. I know how fast I was running in high school compared to 30 of my peers (my class) and there was never a path from there to a world class athlete.
- hackeraccount 8mo ago
  I always think of a kid who was a friend of my daughters. He just really liked winning. I mean, when I was a kid and our team won a soccer game I was happy enough. This kid - if his team was playing a tomato can of a team and the score was 12-0 he was just as ecstatic about making the score 13-0 as was with that first goal. I honestly think he was happier about that kind of game then a struggle to beat a reasonable opponent. Heaven forbid they should lose. Oddly he drifted away from sports (physically he was too small and honestly fragile - 2 or 3 broken bones before he was 12) and into the arts.

harry8 8mo ago

Tiger woods. I can't think of any tennis player who has been in the top 100 for the past few decades who didn't commit to it totally as a young child. Start tennis at 10? Too old. Swimmers. Has anyone stumbled into sporting greatness from being outside the top 5%? Or 1% when they hit adulthood? So what is being said? A huge amount of elite success is in the hardware, i.e. the body &/or brain. These go through rather large changes between ages 10 an 18. Puberty. This shakes up the ordering among those who showed enough promise to have already committed to becoming elite. What am I missing here? Seems like this research is nothing more than "Kids change through puberty, the nature and sizes of the changes are a bit of a lottery for each kid." Much like the the genetic factors are also a lottery so you can't reliably predict who is going to be great from the results of their parents. (But if your parents are both 5ft, the NBA seems an unlikely destination for you).

g947o 8mo ago
You missed the second word in the title, "prodigies".
- benatkin 8mo ago
  That was covered just fine IMO. The reaction seems to be "so what?" I think that's a valid reaction. It's a long article to state something obvious, that the important thing about being on your way to greatness is having great talent and training to win starting at an early age, not winning before reaching a certain age. I had an LLM first pick five figure skaters, and in the follow up query tell me which had wild success before age 12, and only two of the five fit that category, but each started learning at 6 years old or earlier. The other three seem like child prodigies in retrospect to me.
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kazinator 8mo ago
What is being said is not simply that people who engaged in a certain activity since childhood do not become top performing adults. Obviously that happens a lot. But rather that the top child or youth performers are not reliably the ones that turn into top adult performers.

opinologo 8mo ago

https://archive.is/dhAJl https://archive.is/dhAJl

cpncrunch 8mo ago
Unsafe archive site, as it's still DDoSing gyrovague.com. Don't use archive.is until they resolve it. (Not sure if it's really ever safe now, after this shitshow).
- nicman23 8mo ago
  what even is this rabbit hole
  - cpncrunch 8mo ago
    See the other comment in this thread. Very disturbing.
- emmelaich 8mo ago
  Bizarre. https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-attack-against-my-blog/ https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-...

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FeteCommuniste 8mo ago

> Around 90% of superstar adults had not been superstars as children, while only 10% of top-level kids had gone on to become exceptional adults (see chart 1). It is not just that exceptional performance in childhood did not predict exceptional performance as an adult. The two were actually negatively correlated, says Dr Güllich. Even if "only" 10% of elite kids go on to become elite adults, 10% is orders of magnitude larger than the base percentage of adults who are elite athletes, musicians, etc. This doesn't sound "uncorrelated" to me so much as "not as strongly correlated as one might expect." And describing something that happens 10% of the time as "rare" sounds a bit weird, like referring to left-handedness (also about 1 in 10) as rare.

nothercastle 8mo ago
Being smart isn’t enough need resources and need to deal with people
jhallenworld 8mo ago
It's like those articles that say super high IQ people are not always successful. So I think human brain development is like some kind of optimization algorithm, like simulated annealing or gradient descent. I think this because there is way more complexity in the brain than there is in human DNA, which has pretty low information by comparison. Anyway, child prodigies occur when the algorithm happens to find a good minimum early on.
- Retric 8mo ago
  Prodigies almost always spend vastly more time doing their thing than the average kid. So it’s not just some random outcome. That relative advantage goes away as people age and specialize.
- ozim 8mo ago
  Around puberty brain drops loads of connections to become an adult brain. More than 40% of all synapses are eliminated.
  - 8mo ago

energy123 8mo ago

"Child prodigies are more likely to become elite performers" is an equally accurate and less misleading title.

raincole 8mo ago
far more likely
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shermantanktop 8mo ago
Equally imprecise. “Child prodigies are more likely to become elite performers than they are to become non-elite performers” Vs “Child prodigies are more likely than non-child prodigies to become elite performers" Which is it?
- owenpalmer 8mo ago
  Neither. That's what reading the article is for.
  - shermantanktop 8mo ago
    My comment was on the attempted retitling of the article. Agree that neither represent the actual article.

nvch 8mo ago

As someone who was not a child prodigy, but still closer to one than to normies, I can say that achieving results easily in childhood leads to not developing good discipline and persistence that are crucial in the adult world. There are more factors that are not easily accessible for both ends of the spectrum, like access to good, personalized education, amount of trauma, and proper psychological support. But the 'discipline' part is what affected me most. On the other side, maybe those who are more disciplined become real prodigies, and burn brightly because of the lack of social knowledge on how to support them and help to become highly developed adults.

shermantanktop 8mo ago
This observation about discipline is perceptive but I have also seen variations of it dozens and dozens of times on HN. Tons of former gifted kids on here. The gap between assumed potential and actual reality apparently has to get blamed on someone, and that person is the kid themselves. FWIW I do it too.
- groundzeros2015 8mo ago
  All parts seem true to me. Most kids think they were more gifted than they were. Learning to work hard and be persistent was actually more important. A lot of talk about being gifted was an obstacle to that.
  - swader999 8mo ago
    We try to praise hard work and downplay the yer so smart talk. I still had get excited when they are lazy smart though.
z2 8mo ago
That resonates with me. Both in the lack of discipline as the adults in my world basically defaulted to, "You're so smart, keep it up!" And -- very much related -- the fixed mindset I developed not knowing until later how to actually study, learn, and practice. It lasted quite long unfortunately as I was a functioning undisciplined, fixed mindset person who could still one-shot stuff reasonably well.

tombert 8mo ago

I'm not quite a "child prodigy", but I did skip two grades in math in school. It made me feel very special when it was a kid but as a thirty-something software person I don't think I'm smarter than most of my coworkers now. I think I was better than most kids at math, particularly algebra, but those kids grew up and caught up and I suspect many of them are as good or better at math than I am. I know nothing about child psychology or anything adjacent, but I honestly think a lot of "advanced child" stuff is just maturity.

FeteCommuniste 8mo ago
> I know nothing about child psychology or anything adjacent, but I honestly think a lot of "advanced child" stuff is just maturity. That makes me think back to my elementary school, where a lot of the kids who got into the "gifted" program just happened to be, surprise surprise, some of the oldest kids in their grade. At that age the better part of a year in brain development can be exactly the "edge" one needs to excel. And then it can become self-reinforcing when kids gravitate toward the areas in which they dominate their peers.
- aidenn0 8mo ago
  FWIW, the test for the gifted program at my elementary school normalized their entrytest results for age.
- ithkuil 8mo ago
  This doesn't match my experience with that term. My son is diagnosed with ADHD and high IQ and labeled "gifted". He's very immature, has absolutely no method, is very impulsive and can't maintain focus for more than 20 minutes. He seems very much less mature than his peers in anything. Yet, he just understands and remembers every single thing at school much better and faster than his peers. So I guess technically that makes him "gifted" but it's not a very useful gift. It just creates problems at school because he gets bored quickly but cannot be given more work to do because he gets exhausted quickly too! I read recently a title of an article that said "gifted children are special needs children" and that marched my experience.

Esophagus4 8mo ago

Fantastic book called Range that talks about this phenomenon. Surprisingly, the child prodigy to adult superstar pipeline is less common than the generalist to adult superstar pipeline. Tiger Woods is the classic example of a child prodigy, but it turns out his path is unusual for superstars. Roger Federer’s (who played a wide range of sports growing up until he specialized in tennis as a teen) is more common. https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/review-range https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/review-range https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41795733 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41795733

energy123 8mo ago
It's not really surprising when it's a few thousand child prodigies competing against 7 billion people for a small handful of slots 10 years in the future. Everyday stuff like depression, changing interests, financial pressures, lack of desire to compete, will knock out more than half of the child prodigies, making room for the other 7 billion people.
mmooss 8mo ago
It depends on the field, afaik. I know someone who was an exceptional classical pianist, but they told me they knew they'd never make it in that field: They started at age 15, which was much too late to acquire the skills needed. Professional musicians I spoke to agreed.
- alex43578 8mo ago
  I thought it was supposedly way easier to develop perfect pitch at a young age, compared to people who learned music later. Between things like that and the "10,000 hours" idea, I think some part of being exceptional is a function of: starting young, natural talent, and parents who can push/enable that skill.
- Balgair 8mo ago
  Range goes into this. Epstein talks about Kind and Unkind learning environments. In Kind environments, the feedback is quick and ranking is easy to know. So the evidence says that the optimal strategy is drill ans kill. In Unkind learning environments, the feedback is slow and ranking is difficult and untimely. So the optimal strategy is to learn as much as you can in as many very different disciplines as possible. The paper that the Economist talks about extends this and (paraphrasing) says that the very top elite level, even Kind learning environments turn back into Unkind ones again as you try to push the field more.

jstummbillig 8mo ago

Maybe this can be explained by drift in what it means to be a "superstar" at different stages in life. In the beginning it's maybe mostly about the skill, later things get more complicated (media, money, negotiations etc) and what made the prodigy becomes relatively less important.

cush 8mo ago

Is this just a failure in our school system?

necheffa 8mo ago
Partially. Being gifted is special needs education. And the average K-12 in the US is not equipped to provide that for that special need, especially in a post No Child Left Behind era. A lot of adults conflate giftedness with maturity and expect the kid to act like an adult, combined with the pressure to perform and an identity built around being gifted...it fucks with development. There is a reason why depression and suicide in adults can be correlated with formerly gifted children.
- alex43578 8mo ago
  Not only are they not equipped to provide for gifted students, they're scarcely equipped to educate basic students to the already-low bar of grade-level expectations. Depending on the year and test, four in ten struggle with basic reading or basic math. That's not even the pressure of high expectations, but just the pathetic state of US culture around educational attainment, expected behaviors, etc.

zephen 8mo ago

The article is a paradigmatic example of innumeracy. 10% of prodigies becomes 10% of elite, whereas (whoknows)% of (general_population - prodigies) becomes 90% of elite. How big is elite? How big is prodigies? Well, for a start, I guess we can assume that size of elite == size of prodigies, because 10% == 10%. But what is that size compared to general population? If it's 1%, then 99% of muggles compete for slots in 0.9% of the population, so, hey, a prodigy is 11 times more likely to become an elite than a muggle. If it's 0.1%, then a prodigy is 111 times more likely to become an elite than a muggle. If it's 10% -- well, that's kind of stretching the definition of both prodigy and elite, isn't it? tl;dr -- article is crap; research probably is, as well.

guillaumec 8mo ago
At least for chess the article mentions that they considered the top 10 players in children and senior categories. This would indicate that prodigy chess players are millions of time more likely to become elite compared to the general population.
- zephen 8mo ago
  Exactly. If their metric implies that 1 of the top 10 prodigy chess players became 1 of the top 10 adult chess players, and that holds down the line, then a prodigy has a 1 in 10 chance of becoming a top player, but a muggle has a 1 in 889 million chance. To be a top child player, you need talent, recognition of that talent, and investment of time and energy. So, who's to say that the time and involvement didn't make them better as adults than they would have been? ISTM that if you groom 10 children and even one of them outperforms a billion other potential players, you've done well, even if they had some latent talent to start with. They claim to "prove" that catering to young talent is counterproductive, but this certainly doesn't prove it. And part of their "proof" is that generalist sportsmen in youth do better as adults than specialist sportsmen in youth. This is beyond stupid -- to be a generalist youth sportsman typically means that the parents have invested significantly more time, energy, and money, and it's pretty obvious that effort in related fields usually pays off well, and most sports don't run all year, and it's useful in physical endeavors to make your body move in different ways. It is trivially accurate for them to mention that the possibility of burnout is a real thing, but it is also risible to discount the positive benefits of sustained attention and effort.

whatsupdog 8mo ago

Ted Kaczynki was a child prodigy.

stevenwoo 8mo ago
He was also abused in a psychology study at Harvard when he was 17, which may have been part of the CIA’s MK Ultra drug experiments. Maybe he would have done it all the same or not in the absence of that, who knows.

pickleRick243 8mo ago

Regardless of the basic conceptual point being made (merits of tiger parenting vs. holistic "participation trophy" style parenting), this research doesn't look that convincing. There's the graphic: "Top 1% cognition aged 12 and top 5% salary mid-30s" which is supposed to be the most dramatic one. So apparently we suddenly just take at face value the criticism "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich"?

WalterBright 8mo ago

Being smart is not good enough. Being motivated and willing to work at it makes the difference. I once knew a fellow who was exceptionally smart. He tried all kinds of schemes to make a go of his life, but when the going got tough he'd always quit.

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codemystery 8mo ago

[flagged]

bethekidyouwant 8mo ago

What is the ratio of child prodigies to elite performers?

cpncrunch 8mo ago

Flagging as article is paywalled with no way around, and there doesn't seem to be any way around the paywall now that archive.is is a DDoSer.

cpncrunch 8mo ago
https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-attack-against-my-blog/ https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-...

vladmk 8mo ago

I’ll do you one better - elite performers rarely become child prodigies

mmooss 8mo ago

I saw an interview with an all-time great NBA basketball player. He was a top high school player and described his childhood like this: When you were at the movies, I was practicing. When you were on dates or hanging out with your buddies, I was practicing. When my family went on a cruise, I was dribbling up and down the hallways. ... Now imagine the prodigy athlete who goes the movies, hangs out, and relaxes on the cruise. How could they hope to compete? I recently read an interview Jadeveon Clowney, who was the country's top high school American football player and then the number one pick in the NFL draft. He was widely called a 'freak' athlete. Clowney said he didn't really learn how to understand and play the game until the NFL; until then he could dominate with his physical ability, even playing against elite college players. He's played 11 years so far in the NFL, which is a long career in an extremely competitive job. We can call him truly 'good'; he was chosen for the Pro Bowl three times, in those years making him > ~85th percentile for his position, but nobody thinks he's an all-time great. There's not such a clear story about where these people come from. Maybe the basketball player just wasn't as athletic (relative to the population of elite athletes) as Clowney and had to make up for it. Maybe Clowney would have been an all-time great with more work. Maybe there are many other inputs besides work and talent.

levi-turner 8mo ago
The main under appreciated influence in all this is how much talent can reinforce work. There are outliers on either side (pure talent, pure work) if you squint, but ultimately the best of the best are the ones who are extraordinarily talented but put in an incredible amount of work (and are intelligent enough / discerning enough to find the right coaches to work on the right things). From the outside we look at the work as superhuman, but for many "common" people, we all spend ridiculous amounts of time on things we enjoy. The academic finding that I always found the most illustrative of this was that the correlation of IQ to outcome increases after age 18. The environmental influence of your parents goes away, both the overeager parents who push their kids when the kids don't care and the dreadful parents who drag down their kids success.

EGreg 8mo ago

That’s exactly what Vladimir Feltsman said about me when I was like 8 LOL. He is on video here saying it… “I want him to start playing concerts 3-4 years later but be in business 40 years longer!” https://youtu.be/lf2DWzQ-5zk https://youtu.be/lf2DWzQ-5zk Spoiler: I got into computers as a teenager and my piano career took a nosedive, from Carnegie Hall and Juilliard to like… playing for friends at a house party :)

padjo 8mo ago
Crazy stuff, I've been playing for 40 years since I was 3 and I could maybe just about play some of those pieces with a lot of practice! I hope you can still get some joy from playing, that's probably way more important than whether you made a career out of it or not.

Razengan 8mo ago

Because most societies and cultures are optimized to snuff that out.

gwern 8mo ago

Previously discussed (and criticized) at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722853

tsunamifury 8mo ago

This is a tautology. Child prodigies that are identified often become academics who are railroaded into uselsss irrelevance. Actual child prodigies like tiger woods or Justin Bieber who were genuinely insanely brilliant at a young age at non academic things went on to be wildly successful.

hn_throwaway_99 8mo ago

I admit I haven't read the full study, but I'm extremely skeptical that the takeaway as given in the article is valid. Take violinists, for example. Essentially every single world renowned soloist was "some sort" of child prodigy. Now, I've heard some soloists argue that they were not, in fact, child prodigies. For example, may favorite violinist, Hilary Hahn, has said this. She still debuted with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra when she was 12, and here she is performing as a soloist at 15: https://youtu.be/upkP46nvqVI https://youtu.be/upkP46nvqVI. Nathan Milstein, one of the greatest violinists of all time, said he was "not very good until his teens" - he still started playing at the age of 5, and at the age of 11 Leopold Auer, a great violin teacher, invited him to become one of his students, so he clearly saw his potential. I have no doubt lots of prodigies burn out. But, at least in the world of violins, essentially every great soloist was playing at an extremely high level by the time they were in middle school.

vintermann 8mo ago
In contrast, it's rare to find any classical singers who were child prodigies. Whatever skills you may develop as a child there apparently don't transfer well into adulthood. It makes sense to me that there may be fine ear/motorics skills which are far more relevant to violinists, which do transfer.
- alex43578 8mo ago
  Upthread someone made the point that adult "physique" for lack of a better word matters more for some pursuits than others. Chess prodigies don't need to grow to 6ft tall, but if a basketball prodigy doesn't get tall enough, he's never making the NBA. I think the same concept could generalize: for pursuit X, the impact of childhood skill is inversely related to the impact of adult form.
simianwords 8mo ago
I never got the idea of an art prodigy. It’s like treating violin as a sport but not as a beautiful medium to communicate with fellow humans.

aappleby 8mo ago

This article is taking some liberties with the word "prodigy" that I disagree with. If the way you nurture a talented student is via "intense drilling", I would argue that the student is not a prodigy in the traditional sense, but a talented and determined student who may or may not be dealing with parental pressure. The actual prodigies I've known absorb information and gain skills without significant effort - I knew someone who enrolled in a calculus class, skimmed through the book in a week or so, and then would only show up to class for tests (which they would ace). So the article conclusion doesn't surprise me - inflict relentless training on a young talented person and yeah maybe they won't want to do that as an adult. But as far as actual "prodigies"? There is no burn-out because there is no (or minimal) effort. The choice of whether to stick with an area of interest through adulthood is more of a personal preference than anything ingrained.

lp4v4n 8mo ago

As I see it, reaching meaningful progress is a very complex, uncertain and non-deterministic process of which being a high capacity individual is only one of the inputs. A very intelligent individual can spend decades working on a product doomed to fail. Many bright mathematician might be working right now on a proof of a problem that in the future may be shown to be undecidable. Einstein, according to himself, was almost never the brightest mathematician in the room and yet gave the world a super-extraordinary contribution. In my opinion, the humbling lesson that child prodigies give us is that we should value as much as possible all the humans involved in the often ungrateful task of trying to advance science. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the case and society seems obsessed with trying to discard and disqualify the human factor.

general1465 8mo ago

That has very simple answer - they are not used on persistent work since childhood, everything comes easy when they are young and smarter than everyone else. When things will start getting harder, lack of discipline and lack of coping mechanism for ventilation of mental stress will catch up with them.

emmelaich 8mo ago

Why child prodigies rarely become elite performers I understand this is typical HN auto-edit.

PunchyHamster 8mo ago

Isn't it just plainly that the "top" doesn't have enough space, even if every single one of them would be exceptional ?

CM30 8mo ago

I mean it makes sense. Keep in mind that: 1. There's a lot of competition in many elite fields, and a decent percentage in both groups aren't going to make it anyway. 2. Being good at something as a child doesn't mean that's your passion or the thing you want to devote your life to. Plenty of these prodigies may want to get into different fields they're not naturally gifted at instead. 3. Being really good at something as a kid can make it hard to learn the discipline needed to stay on top when things get tougher. I'm not a prodigy, but many of the things I did well at in school/college are things I did worse than expected at in unversity, since I wasn't motivated/disciplined enough to get everything done on time. 4. Some fields require physical capabilities that a child prodigy may not grow up to have, like certain sports.

alkyon 8mo ago

For the super-prodigy category, someone like Mozart or Chopin, who could compose symphonies or polonaises at the age of 8, it's almost certain to maintain their elite status in adulthood (as opposed to someone who just plays the piano well or skipped a class or two in elementary school).

kqr 8mo ago

Isn't this just Berkson's paradox? If you filter for either exceptional childhood or exceptional adulthood they will appear negatively correlated.

cyber_kinetist 8mo ago

I think the reality is, if you're too smart than you're going to be easily disinterested in the things that you've been trained for during your entire childhood. Because, you're going to be bored of it eventually! I remember an interview from current #1 chess grandmaster Magnus Carsen about why John Nunn never became World Champion because he is too intelligent: > SPIEGEL: Mr Carlsen, what is your IQ? > Carlsen: I have no idea. I wouldn’t want to know it anyway. It might turn out to be a nasty surprise. > SPIEGEL: Why? You are 19 years old and ranked the number one chess player in the world. You must be incredibly clever. > Carlsen: And that’s precisely what would be terrible. Of course it is important for a chess player to be able to concentrate well, but being too intelligent can also be a burden. It can get in your way. I am convinced that the reason the Englishman John Nunn never became world champion is that he is too intelligent for that. > SPIEGEL: How that? > Carlsen: At the age of 15, Nunn started studying mathematics in Oxford; he was the youngest student in the last 500 years, and at 23 he did a PhD in algebraic topology. He has so incredibly much in his head. Simply too much. His enormous powers of understanding and his constant thirst for knowledge distracted him from chess. > SPIEGEL: Things are different in your case? > Carlsen: Right. I am a totally normal guy. My father is considerably more intelligent than I am.

cucumber3732842 8mo ago

There are a lot of off ramps to comfort on the road to greatness. The hypothetical man who is genetically sufficient for the job (a short man will not succeed in many sports nor will a man with a bad voice be a good singer, a creative mind will not excel at the analytical and an analytical mind will not succeed at the creative), and mentally "just gets" the volumes of understanding it takes to be a once in a generation performer of some craft by mid teens or so will in starting down that path will necessarily achieve the intelligence to determine that there are other, orders of magnitude more sure paths to a comfortable life.

daymanstep 8mo ago

In the past 50 years, not a single chess world champion started playing chess after the age of 10. I suspect the article is playing some games with statistics, and in any case I hope people don't come away from this article with the idea that "you can become a chess world champion even if you never touched chess as a child!"

duxup 8mo ago

10% seems like an incredibly high rate when it comes to becoming elite at something.

tsoukase 8mo ago

Prodigy, even just above normal, children don't own the experience to handle their powers, besides the low motivation that is mentioned. They rarely form a valid, concrete plan to success and let themselves progress only in small steps. They make a few career mistakes early that kill their end result. And some non productive activity will absorb their powers and time (usually a low level job or some form of screen addiction)