A team of sports scientists and psychologists led by Brooke Macnamara collected and reviewed data from hundreds of previous research papers and looked at 34839 top-performing individuals across many different fields. Some of these top performers include Nobel Prize winners, Olympic medalists, world-class chess players, and renowned classical music composers. They found that exceptional young performers and later world-class adults are largely two different groups.
The Prodigy Paradox: Why Early Stars Rarely Become Adult Legends and How Those Who Start Behind the Rest Become Top Performers
A look into more than 35000 individuals reveals that the secret to world-class performance in adulthood is not early specialization, but the accumulation of learning capital through diverse interests and experience.
Challenging the Standard Model of Talent Development
Scientists have long debated how exceptional human achievements develop. The standard model of talent development suggests early specialization and intense and narrow training. This assumes that the best way to become a world-class or top performer in a particular field or discipline is to start as early as possible and focus on one thing with laser-like intensity.
The aforesaid idea influences how schools, elite programs, sports academies, and gifted programs select and train young talent. However, for Macnamara and her team, they sought to challenge and update this assumption by reviewing a large body of evidence from thousands of elite performers across disciplines and comparing how their careers developed over time.
Nevertheless, based on the large-scale comparison and pattern-finding across real-world career histories, the researchers found that young stars and adult top performers are not the same people. Only a small minority of those who excelled as youth remain at the top later in life. This means that early exceptional performance rarely results in later world-class success.
From Average Beginnings to Extraordinary Achievements
Specific details of the findings show that there was a very low overlap among junior international athletes and later senior international athletes. This pattern can be seen in other fields. Adolescents who were top chess players rarely become top players as adults. Early top students seldom become the top achievers in their later academic careers or in advanced education.
The researchers found two distinct talent developmental patterns. These are early specialists or fast starters and later world-class performers or slow builders. The faster starters excel early and often in a single discipline. They accumulate a large volume of discipline-specific practice at a young age, show rapid progress in the field, and achieve early peaks in performance.
However, although most of these early specialists are put into elite talent programs, and despite excelling in their chosen field or discipline at a young age due to practice and exposure, these advantages do not translate to the highest adult achievement. The researchers found that many of these early specialists actually plateaued before reaching the top echelon.
Slow builders show gradual and slower improvement in the early years. They were not among the top performers when they were young. A lot of them also engage in multidisciplinary practice instead of pursuing a single or narrow focus. World-class athletes often played two or more sports in their childhood. Nobel laureates typically had diverse interests.
The researchers propose that multidisciplinary experience plays an important role in developing world-class talents or performers. Three hypotheses help explain why. The first is called the search-and-match hypothesis. It suggests that broad experience early in life helps increase the probability of finding the right long-term fit between talents and a particular discipline.
Another hypothesis is called enhance-learning-capital. This states that early exposure to different domains builds learning flexibility, pattern recognition, and problem-solving skills that benefit later specialization. The limited-risk hypothesis suggests that diversified early practice reduces risks like burnout or overuse injuries associated with intense early focus.
Key Takeaways and Talent Development Implications
Macnamara and her team essentially argue that early specialization can be a trap. Their research reframes how parents and communities think about talent and achievement at the highest levels. This is because exceptional adult performance is not a simple result of an acceleration of the early performance curve but a product of diverse experience and gradual mastery.
The findings inform how society approaches education, sports training, talent programs, and even coaching practices. The results encourage students to explore a broad range of subjects rather than early specialization. They also advise against early and single-sport specialization and instead promote and encourage varied athletic pursuits and sports participation.
Moreover, for talent programs, the findings propose the need for a reassessment of selection criteria that favor early and visible performance gains at the expense of long-term excellence. Teachers, like educators in academic settings and coaches or trainers, are encouraged to adopt strategies that cultivate multidisciplinary skills and avoid risks like burnout.
FURTHER READING AND REFERENCE
- Güllich, A., Barth, M., Hambrick, D. Z., and Macnamara, B. N. 2025. “Recent Discoveries on the Acquisition of the Highest Levels of Human Performance.” Science. 390(6779). DOI: 1126/science.adt7790