Child prodigies and superlative adult achievers are often not the same people. Understanding what makes remarkable abilities appear at different phases of a person’s life provides an important insight into what talent really is.
In Michael Jordan’s prime, he could leap so far to the hoop, and remain airborne for so long, it looked as though he could actually defy gravity. They called it “hang time”—that spectacular second or two during which Jordan seemed to suspend himself in midair and fly forward, rolling his tongue, pumping his wing-legs, and finally stuffing the ball. Then he’d gently descend back to earth. It was far from the only move in his arsenal; for several years Jordan could move, shoot, pass, defend, and dunk so much better than any other player that he took on a superhuman aura. Near the end of his career, when Jordan confided to Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson his intention to retire, the coach responded with an unusual appeal. “Michael,” he said, “pure genius is something very, very rare and if you are blessed enough to possess it, you want to think a long time before you walk away from using it.”
But where did that indisputable “pure genius” come from? Interestingly, it had been nowhere in sight during Jordan’s childhood. Michael was not the best athlete in the Jordan family as a youth (his older brother Larry was); not the most industrious (of five siblings, he was by far the laziest); and not very mechanically inclined (a prized family skill). “If Michael Jordan was some kind of genius, there had been few signs of it when he was young,” writes David Halberstam in his biography Playing for Keeps. In his sophomore year of high school, after attending summer basketball camp with his friend Roy Smith, Jordan didn’t even make the varsity basketball squad. Smith did.
The virtuoso cellist Yo-Yo Ma, on the other hand, showed his stuff from very early on, dazzling his piano teacher at age three, playing difficult work by Bach on the cello at age five, and performing for Leonard Bernstein and President John F. Kennedy at age seven. On hearing the young Yo-Yo play for the first time, legendary cellist Pablo Casals called him simply “Wonder Boy.”
What makes abilities come into view at such different times in a person’s life? In the popular imagination, a person either has talent or does not; if so, it flows through him or her like an invisible river of energy, constant and timeless. The reality, though, is that even superachievers develop very different abilities at different ages—so much so, in fact, that researchers have discovered that child prodigies and adult superachievers are very often not the same people. For every wonder child like Yo-Yo Ma who also thrives in adulthood, there is a long list of child prodigies who never become remarkable adult achievers. At the same time, an equally long list of profound adult achievers manage to attain greatness without first showing any profound abilities as children—a list that includes Copernicus, Rembrandt, Bach, Newton, Kant, da Vinci, and Einstein.
Only one paradigm—talent as process—can make sense of all these great achievements from such radically different life stages. All individuals have distinct biologies, but no one has a predestined biological fate. Every individual is built with the capacity, as Patrick Bateson says, “to develop in a number of distinctly different ways.” To discover your own potential, add water, love, perseverance, and lots and lots of time.
Unfortunately, some talent researchers still insist on categorizing causes as either nature or nurture, describing them as additive (G+E) rather than interactive (GxE), and presenting core abilities as innate and immutable—when contemporary science so plainly points to a more interactive dynamic.
It is a difficult legacy to shed, given what seems like such clear evidence for innate talent right in front of our eyes. Without question, child prodigies exist and always have. The eighteenth-century English jurist Jeremy Bentham began studying Latin at age three and entered Oxford University at age twelve. The mathematician John von Neumann could divide eight-digit numbers in his head by age six. Hungary’s Judit Polgár became a chess grandmaster at age fifteen. Seattle’s Adora Svitak began writing stories at age five and published her first book at age seven. Over many centuries, we have reliable records of young children demonstrating extraordinary abilities in math, music, language, spatial intelligence, and the visual arts.
Where do these extraordinary abilities come from? Because they appear so early (parents often say “out of nowhere”) and are often so bewitching, the most common instinct from parents and researchers alike is to answer the big mystery with a simple idea: such talent is an inborn gift. In the 1990s, Anders Ericsson and others challenged that long-held view by bringing the talent-formation process partially into the light, documenting a new “science of high ability.” In the face of Ericsson’s paradigm-challenging data, though, other researchers pushed back. Boston College’s Ellen Winner responded in 2000 that “Ericsson’s research demonstrates the importance of hard work but does not rule out the role of innate ability … [We] conclude that intensive training is necessary for the acquisition of expertise, but notthat it is sufficient.” An exceptional “inborn giftedness” must also be present, she argued.
“Necessary but not sufficient” became a common reaction to Ericsson as many professionals clung to the unsustainable notion of innate gifts. This critique overlooked the possibility of an entirely new model that recognized training and biology as one interconnected, dynamic force.
Driving Winner’s argument were two core beliefs:
1. Some extraordinary abilities appear earlier than they could possibly be developed.
2. There is evidence for what she called “atypical brain organization” in gifted children, occurring “as a result of genetics, the in-utero environment, or after-birth trauma.”
Her first point has, historically, been the most popular driver of the giftedness paradigm: since one cannot see talent being developed, it must simply exist. But is this thinking still justified, given what we’ve learned? As noted in earlier chapters, studies have now shown conclusively that mind-set, nutrition, parenting, peers, media culture, time, focus, and motivation all profoundly affect the development of abilities. All of these factors are in play from the first day of a child’s life (or earlier). We need look no further than Hart and Risley’s spoken-word study to understand how early life experience dramatically affects the trajectory of a very young child. We also know for sure that early musical exposure can work the same way. The same experience has been documented with chess players. Like any taxi driver’s brain, a young child’s brain adapts to demands. The process is very slow and impossible to see from the outside, but it still happens. Imperceptibly, like water evaporating into a rain cloud, tiny events pave the way for development in one direction or another.
As to Winner’s second point, it is indisputably true that some people with extraordinary abilities have distinct physiological differences in their brains. For example, Winner points out that mathematically and musically “gifted” individuals tend to use both lobes of the brain for tasks usually dominated by the left hemisphere in individuals with normal abilities, and that artists, inventors, and musicians tend to have a higher proportion of language disorders. But does it follow that these differences are innate? Winner’s list of three possible causes—genetics, in utero environment, and after-birth trauma—actually all turn out to be dynamic actors in every person’s development. Consider that “genetics” actually means “genetic expression” and that the uterine environment and after-birth events are both highly developmental, and the notion of “innate” quickly dissolves away. Further, there’s no logical reason why her list should be limited to three possible causes. If she’s allowing for after-birth trauma, why not also allow for other infant and toddler life experiences?
The very rare phenomenon of spectacular savants like Kim Peek (the “real Rain Man”) points even more clearly to developmental dynamics than hardwired abilities. Peek is severely cognitively disabled, cannot button his own shirt, and tests very poorly on a standard IQ test, but has memorized many thousands of books word for word. He is one of an estimated one hundred living prodigious savants who have both severe impairments and extraordinary abilities. The group also includes Daniel Tammet, who lives with autism but who can recite pi to 22,514 digits and was able to add Icelandic to his other nine languages in just nine days; Leslie Lemke, who couldn’t stand until twelve years of age or walk until fifteen—but one night at age sixteen began playing every note of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 after hearing it just once on television; and Alonzo Clemons, who, ever since a childhood head injury, has been unable to feed himself or tie his own shoes but can sculpt an animal in exquisite detail after seeing a fleeting image of it.
University of Wisconsin psychiatrist Darold Treffert, perhaps the world’s leading expert on what he calls “savant syndrome,” points out that these are actually extreme examples of a more universal phenomenon. He estimates that approximately one in ten persons with autism has some savant skills. The syndrome, he explains, occurs when the brain’s left hemisphere is severely damaged, inviting the right hemisphere (which is responsible for things like music and art) to compensate heavily for the loss.
It is critical to note that the damage does not create the ability; rather, it creates the opportunity for the ability to develop. This, says Treffert, “promote[s] the idea of the brain’s plasticity, and the brain’s ability to recruit other areas to be put to use.”
In fact, it has prompted Treffert to wonder aloud, “Might there be a little Rain Man in each of us?”
In the case of the prodigious savant, it appears to me, there is a marvelous coalescence of idiosyncratic brain circuitry [combined with] obsessive traits of concentration & repetition and tremendous encouragement & reinforcement from family, caretakers and teachers. Does some of that same possibility, a little Rain Man as it were, perhaps reside within each of us? I think that it does.
Other savant researchers heartily agree. In 2003, the University of Sydney’s Allan W. Snyder and colleagues used magnetic pulses to temporarily impair the left frontotemporal lobe in healthy persons, resulting in some temporary savant-like tendencies—drawing animals with more detail, for example, and proofreading with more accuracy. Shutting off portions of their brain did not suddenly transform them into amazing artists or brilliant thinkers; rather, it altered their way of thinking and observing, shifting attention away from meaning and understanding and toward detail. Such an effect, Snyder and colleagues noted, can be achieved through other means. “Apart from brain impairment and magnetic stimulation,” they wrote, “savant-like skills might also be made accessible by altered states of perception or by EEG-assisted feedback. [Oliver] Sacks provides support for the former view. He produced camera-like precise drawings only when under the influence of amphetamines. Early (savant-like) cave art has been attributed to mescaline induced perceptual states.”
Even very ordinary brains are capable of extraordinary things when provoked.
Perhaps the most interesting longitudinal study on giftedness comes from IQ inventor and staunch innate-intelligence advocate Lewis Terman (last mentioned in chapter 2). In the early 1920s, Terman began a massive, decades-long study of child achievers, which he pointedly called “Genetic Studies of Genius.” It was his contention that the most successful children were endowed with elite genes propelling them to lifelong success. To prove this, he began tracking nearly fifteen hundred California schoolkids identified as “exceptionally superior.” Alas, as Terman’s exceptional kids matured, they seemed less and less exceptional. They did grow up to be healthier and more successful than the average American, but very few ultimately emerged as geniuses or superachievers. None went on to earn the Nobel Prize—as two children rejected from Terman’s original group did. None became world-class musicians—as two other Terman rejects, Isaac Stern and Yehudi Menuhin, did. All in all, Terman’s epic studies in genius turned out to be studies in disappointment.
The frustration was especially keen when it came to the very top of Terman’s group—the 5 percent who had scored 180 or better on the IQ test. “One is left with the feeling that the above-180 IQ subjects were not as remarkable as might have been expected,” concluded Tufts’s David Henry Feldman in a 1984 retrospective of the long study. “There is the disappointing sense that they might have done more with their lives.”
A few years later, Feldman concluded his own separate study of six child prodigies in music, art, chess, and math. None of his subjects grew up to become extraordinary adult achievers. In her research, Ellen Winner had found exactly the same thing. “Most gifted children, even most child prodigies, do not go on to become adult creators,” she reported.
Why?
First off, it turns out that the skill sets are very different. The attributes necessary for high child achievement are simply not the same as those that drive adult achievement, so one would not automatically flow from the other. “A high IQ six-year-old who can multiply three-digit numbers in her head, or solve algebraic equations, wins acclaim,” explains Winner. “But as a young adult, she must come up with some new way to solve some unsolved mathematical problem, or must discover some new problems or areas to investigate. Otherwise, she will not make her mark in the domain of mathematics … The situation is the same in art or music. Technical perfection wins the prodigy adoration, but if the prodigy does not eventually go beyond this, he or she sinks into oblivion.”
The second reason is even more interesting: child achievers are frequently hobbled by the psychology of their own success. Children who grow up surrounded by praise for being technically proficient at a specific task often develop a natural aversion to stepping outside their comfort zone. Instead of falling into a pattern of taking risks and regularly pushing themselves just beyond their limit, they develop a terrible fear of new challenges and of any sort of flaw or failure. Ironically, this leads them away from the very building blocks of adult success. “Prodigies [can] become frozen into expertise,” says Ellen Winner. “This is particularly a problem for those whose work has become public and has won them acclaim, such as musical performers, painters, or children who have been publicized as ‘whiz kids’ … It is difficult to break away from [technical] expertise and take the kinds of risks required to be creative.”
Underneath all this is the core reality that talented children and their parents frequently do not notice the development of their own skills during infancy and toddlerhood. This is perfectly understandable—obviously, tiny children themselves can’t notice such things, and for parents to take note of such a nuanced process in fine detail could be construed as odd and obsessive—but it can also lead to a grave logical error: failure to see it as a process may inspire the conclusion that a collection of skills is really an innate gift. “Mommy, I don’t know,” the toddler Yo-Yo Ma replied to his mother, Marina, when she asked how he could sense an out-of-tune note. “I just know.” What was the true source of Yo-Yo’s uncanny ability? In her memoir, his mother chalks it up to genetics—but then she details how, from the very moment of his birth, Yo-Yo was exposed to music in the most profound and exquisite way. Both Marina, a trained opera singer, and her husband, Hiao-Tsiun, a teacher/composer/conductor, had immigrated to Paris as young adults to study, play, compose, and teach music. Having traded comfort and status in China for immigrant poverty in France, the Ma family breathed, ate, and slept music. Their tiny two-room Paris apartment was arranged thusly:
Mother and children slept in one room; the other, a smaller bedroom-studio, was used by Hiao-Tsiun. Amazingly he had squeezed into that room his piano, a collection of children’s string instruments, and his cot. His precious manuscripts and music scores, meticulously arranged by him for children, were jammed into an old armoire and piled up on the piano top. Every corner was bulging with his papers.
Hiao-Tsiun studied at the conservatory by day and gave lessons in the evening, all the while clinging to his deeply personal dream of creating a children’s orchestra. Like Leopold Mozart, he designed elaborate pedagogical techniques specifically for children and was eager to put them to use. Yo-Yo’s older sister, Yeou-Cheng, was (like Nannerl Mozart) started on piano and violin at a very early age—around the time Yo-Yo was born. By the time Yo-Yo was ready to start piano at age three, his sister was already a budding prodigy. “From the cradle, Yo-Yo was surrounded by a world of music,” his mother recalls. “He heard hundreds of classical selections on records, or played by his father or his sister. Bach and Mozart were engraved on his mind.”
Engraved on his mind: according to neuroscientists and music psychologists, this is quite literally true. We know now that music activates neurons in many regions of the brain simultaneously and that every meaningful listening experience inspires the formation of multiple-trace memories, which, in turn, inform the encoding of all future musical memories. “Melodic ‘calculation centers’ in the dorsal temporal lobes appear to be paying attention to interval size and distances between pitches as we listen to music, creating a pitch-free template of the very melodic values we will need in order to recognize songs in transposition,” explains McGill University’s Daniel Levitin. Levitin also concurs with University of California, San Diego’s Diana Deutsch and others in deducing that every human being is likely born with the capacity for absolute pitch, but that it gets activated only in those who are exposed to enough tonal imprinting at a very early age.
In addition to the neural mechanics, there were also powerful psychological forces in Yo-Yo Ma’s life that helped shape him into an obsessively determined musician at the youngest possible age. Yo-Yo worshipped his sister and father and desperately wanted to impress both. From very early on, he responded to his stern father—who had vowed to “make a musician of him” at age two—with a blend of admiration, duty, and extreme stubbornness. Yo-Yo would hover in the doorway while his sister practiced and, when asked, critique her performances note by note. In his own performances Yo-Yo was determined to have it his way. Sometimes, he refused to perform for his parents as instructed; other times, he would play more than he was supposed to.
He also needed to chart his own course instrumentally. “I don’t like the sound violins make,” Yo-Yo informed his father at age four. “I want a big instrument.”
“Once you start playing with a big instrument, you cannot switch back to the violin,” Hiao-Tsiun responded firmly to his four-year-old son. “Don’t tell me a month from now that you have changed your mind.”
“I will play it,” Yo-Yo insisted. “I won’t change my mind.”
And he did not. In retrospect, his early life contained all the known ingredients for the brewing of extraordinary achievement: an early and intensively conditioned musical brain, world-class teaching resources, and a desperate personal desire that researchers universally agree is the key to precocious success. Ellen Winner calls it “the rage to master,” a fervent, never-let-go willfulness and focus that drives a child into an early version of Ericsson’s deliberate practice.
As a general rule, high achievers have exceptional drive. From Olympic athletes to Nobel physicists, from long-winded U.S. senators to the shyest poet laureate, you simply don’t see remarkable achievement without it. The question is, why does this obsessive need appear at different ages in different people, and why does it not appear in some people at all? If it was simply a matter of genetics, as Lewis Terman proposed, we would indeed see the pattern of lives he imagined with his Genetic Studies of Genius project. Instead, intense ambition evolves out of complex, real-world dynamics, settling into people’s psyches at different ages and circumstances—sometimes from extreme adversity, sometimes as a proxy for revenge, sometimes as a way of proving oneself to a beloved/feared parent or sibling, and so on. The collection of potential catalysts for intense ambition may never be entirely understood and will surely never be easily reproducible. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand the mechanism better, or apply its lessons.
Michael Jordan always seemed to hate losing (an everyday experience while growing up with his brother Larry), but his willingness to do absolutely anything to improve his skills didn’t appear until after his rejection from the varsity squad in tenth grade. At that point, according to his friend Roy Smith, his competitiveness went into overdrive. Laney High assistant coach Ron Coley remembers his very first sighting of Jordan, near the end of a JV basketball game that year. “There were nine players on the court just coasting,” Coley recalls, “but there was one kid playing his heart out. The way he was playing, I thought his team was down one point with two minutes to play. So I looked up at the clock and his team was down twenty points with one minute to play. It was Michael.”
For the remainder of his basketball career, no one within Jordan’s orbit ever practiced or played as hard. “All top athletes are driven,” writes David Halberstam, “and no one made the [University of North] Carolina roster unless he was by far the hardest-working kid in his neighborhood, his high school and finally his high school conference, but Jordan was self-evidently the most driven of all.” In a college program famous for its loyalty and dedication, Jordan impressed Carolina coach Dean Smith with his extra level of ferocity. In fact, he seemed to get more intense with each passing year. As he returned for his sophomore year, fellow players noticed yet another bump in both confidence and zeal. “Even in pickup games,” writes Halberstam, “he had become unusually purposeful. There was a tendency in games like this, when there were no coaches around, for players to resort to what they did best, to reinforce their strengths and avoid going to any part of their game that was essentially weak. But Jordan [was] constantly working on the weaker part of his game trying to bring it up. It [was] one more sign of his desire to be the best.” Coach Smith found that, in practice, Jordan was now winning all the one-on-one games and all the five-on-five games. So he started stacking the deck—giving Jordan weaker and weaker teammates to make him work even harder to win. That seemed to spur him on to even further greatness. After his junior year, Smith realized there was nothing else he could do for him, and he pushed Jordan to leave college ball for the NBA.
One common characteristic in all successful adults is that, at some point in their lives, they come to realize how much the process of improvement is within their own control. That’s also what Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck observed in a series of grade-school studies in the 1990s. In her central experiment, Dweck (who was then at Columbia) asked four hundred seventh graders to complete a relatively easy set of puzzles and then randomly separated them into two groups. Individually, each student in the first group was complimented for his or her innate intelligence with the line, “You must be smart at this!”
Each student in the second group was praised for his or her effort: “You must have worked really hard!”
Then each child was offered a chance to take one of two follow-up tests: either another easy set of puzzles or a much harder set of puzzles that teachers promised would be a great learning experience.
The results:
· More than half of the kids praised for their inborn intelligence chose the easy follow-up puzzle.
· A staggering 90 percent of the kids praised for their hard work chose the more difficult puzzles.
Other Dweck experiments pointed in the same direction, demonstrating irrefutably that people who believe in inborn intelligence and talents are less intellectually adventurous and less successful in school. By contrast, people with an “incremental” theory of intelligence—believing that intelligence is malleable and can be increased through effort—are much more intellectually ambitious and successful.
The lesson is that parents, teachers, and students must take the long and incremental view. Regardless of whether a child seems to be exceptional, mediocre, or even awful at any particular skill at a particular point in time, the potential exists for that person to develop into a high-achieving adult. Because talent is a function of acquired skills rather than innate ability, adult achievement depends completely on long-term attitude and resources and process rather than any particular age-based talent quotient. While childhood achievement is, of course, not irrelevant (it’s often a sign of early interest and determination), it doesn’t rule any particular future success in or out.
Childhood abilities—or lack thereof—are not a crystal ball of future success. No age-related level of achievement is either a golden ticket or a locked gate.