You may have a leg up on the child prodigies who made you feel inadequate as a school kid.
Despite outliers like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a new analysis based on 19 studies involving 34,000 high achievers across multiple disciplines — including Nobel laureates, top chess players, Olympic champions, and elite musicians — found that individuals who achieved peak performance early in life were not always the same people to reach high success in adulthood.
“Across the highest adult performance levels, peak performance is negatively correlated with early performance,” the report, which was published in the journal Science, said.
The researchers, led by Arne Güllich of RPTU Kaiserlautern-Landau in Germany, noted that prodigies often specialized in a single discipline, pigeonholing themselves in a particular field early in life. By contrast, late bloomers found success across multiple fields.
The study provides key insights into long-debated scientific inquiries into the origins of elite knowledge. While many parents may assume that helping their kids specialize early in life prepares them for successful careers, the latest research suggests otherwise. Early field-specific development can provide short-term success. However, longer-term success is more common among late bloomers.
“World top-10 youth chess players and later world top-10 adult chess players are nearly 90% different individuals across time,” the researchers wrote, suggesting that those who bloom early in life don’t tend to reach the height of their success at the same time late bloomers hit their stride. It also means that child prodigies and late bloomers develop differently and grow up to be fundamentally different people.
To be sure, talented children usually find success in adulthood. In fact, a 2023 study found that child prodigies tend to earn more and have more career success than the average person.
Güllich and his team also note that their study is limited by its methodology. The research analyzed data from two types of studies: prospective studies, which scrutinize high-performing children over time, and retrospective studies, which looked back at the childhood development of high-achieving adults. Researchers pointed out that it is impossible to assign children to random careers, and that further research is required to understand how early development relates to success later in life.
Still, the study’s findings challenge the emphasis on early signs of high performance that elite schools, conservatories and youth sport academies often look for when recruiting talent.
In fact, earlier research indicates that such training could be detrimental, inspiring burnout. A 2018 NIH study found that “gifted” children had poor perceptions of their physical health, and that gifted kids were more at risk of poor mental health compared to non-gifted kids.
“All the findings obtained in this study suggest that gifted children are at risk in respect of mental health,” it warned.
