Decoding High Performance Trajectories
A large new study on peak performance concluded that early specialization can be a trap, and the road to greatness is long and varied.
The study, Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance, included 34,000 international top performers, including Nobel laureates, renowned classical music composers, Olympic champions, and the world’s best chess players. The study evaluated their performance trajectories over time.
The main finding: stressing out and trying to be the best as a kid can make you less successful as an adult.
From the study: “Most top achievers demonstrated lower performance than many peers during their early years.”
The study went viral on most social media platforms and caused a stir on the internet: Another win for delayed specialization. Gladwell's 10,000 rule is proven wrong yet again!
However, it's not that simple. Let's break it down.
In sport, knowledge work, and academia, the results seem clear.
In each of those domains, the sample sizes included in the study were large (thousands), and the findings consistently showed that over 90 percent of top performers as adults were not top performers in their youth. (Depending on the domain, "youth" ranged from under 14 years old to under 22 years old). A quick perusal of youth athletic records backs these claims. The under-14 state, national, and world records are a who's who of kids who didn't go on to improve much as adults.
The same is true in academics. Kids who attended select schools didn't end up with a higher proportion of elite jobs later in life. Those who were super specialized academically didn't win nearly as many Nobel prizes as those who weren't.
This doesn't mean that the best, most specialized kids weren't high performers as adults. In most cases, they were very good—but they weren't world-class. And it doesn't mean that world-class adults weren't very good as kids; they just weren't the best. This is a key distinction that's often missed in the public discourse. It's not that those who end up as the best adults show zero talent or potential before they become superstars. It's that they show talent, but aren't the youth superstars.
In chess and music, the study massively overstates the findings.
Indeed, the top performers as adults were not the same as the top performers as kids, but the range was restricted to the top 10 and 3 in the world (for chess) and the top 59 in the world (for music). It's still fascinating, but far too small a sample to draw sweeping conclusions.
For example, in this study, the number 11 chess prodigy in the world wasn't included as an "early elite performer." However, that kid undoubtedly specialized, played chess all the time, and may have ended up as the top-ranked player as an adult. Every kid in the top 100 in the world (and probably top 1000) was playing tons of chess, and from that broader sample came nearly all the world beaters as adults.
When Brad tweeted about the study, Gary Kasparov, the most dominant chess player of all time, responded: "I have no idea about their methodology or what they define as specialization, but if they can show more than one or two top 10 players from the last 50 years who was not elite and dedicated from very early I’d be shocked, because I know most of them! Most were GMs in teens."
The same is likely true in classical music.
What to make of all this?
The study's findings (and its flaws) mirror one of the main arguments in David Epstein's excellent book Range: In kind environments (where the rules stay the same and the variables are numbered and controlled), early specialization may prove useful. Chess and musical composition are textbook examples of kind environments. However, in wicked environments (where the rules are subject to change and there are hundreds of interacting variables) then early specialization often gets in the way of later performance. Sport, academics, and science are great examples of wicked environments.
One of the biggest traps in performance in wicked environments is confusing being the best 11-year-old with being the best during your peak years. The study pretty clearly busts this myth.
It's important because it takes on a tale as old as time:
- Pushing a kid super hard to specialize in sports or school at a young age.
- Having that kid dominate his or her sport, game, or subject from ages 8-15.
- The same kid stagnates, burns out, and never reaches his or her potential as an adult.
If you want the highest performing child, you should push him or her to specialize and be super-disciplined from a very early age. But if you want to raise the highest performing adult, you should encourage them to explore, not take anything too seriously, and play.
The researchers found a performance paradox: youth stars and world-class adults tended to take two different paths.
The youth stars had:
- Early specialization
- More domain-specific practice
- Less multidisciplinary practice
- Faster initial progress
Those who were world-class as adults tended to have:
- Less domain-specific practice
- More multidisciplinary practice
- Gradual initial progress in their domain
It's similar to the athlete who decides to crank up the intensity of their training quickly, looks great in early-season competitions, but plateaus and fades when it matters. They might look more "promising" initially, but the athlete who took the long view and gradually increased their training load over time eventually reaches a higher peak. It's no different from the investor who borrows heavily from big gains years from now for a small payoff today, versus the patient one who relies on compounding gains over time.
If you are parenting, teaching, or coaching young people with the sole goal of making them a world-class chess player or classical music composer, then sure, specialization may help. But it's important to remember that just because you specialize as a kid (and perhaps even become a prodigy), it doesn't ensure you'll be world-class as an adult. Odds are, you still won't be. It's a huge gamble, with potential negative repercussions for mental health and adult performance in all other domains.
It's why research on prodigies shows that those who tend to make it have supportive, but not overbearing, parents—because the kid's intrinsic motivation still has to steer the ship. So even in fields like music composition and chess, you've got to tread lightly and let the kid's obsession propel the path, not yours.
If you are parenting, teaching, or coaching young people who want to become great athletes, thinkers, scientists, doctors, attorneys, or pretty much anything outside of pursuits in chess and classical music, then it seems likely that specialization gets in the way.
Do not push kids too hard, too early, to do one thing great. Be patient in development. It’s totally okay to emphasize a certain sport or activity, but do not make it the only thing. That will backfire. Encourage kids to try many pursuits. Develop well-roundedness. Worry about specializing later.
This requires letting kids explore and have fun. And it requires patience and discipline from adults. Don’t make the mistake of reversing this.
-- Brad and Steve
Listen🎧: New Year, Same BS: How to Build Habits That Actually Stick SPOTIFY/APPLE/YOUTUBE)
The overwhelming majority of New Year’s Resolutions fail. That’s because behavior change is really hard! Which means that the only real way to make new habits stick is to build them in the right way. Today, on “excellence, actually”, we’re giving you a few ideas on how to do just that, exploring why values-driven goals beat outcome-based ones, how to design your environment for success rather than relying on motivation or willpower, and why starting small (really small) is the secret key to reinvention. We talk using your phone less, moving more, and allowing yourself to keep procrastinating (sometimes).
— Clay
Thank you for reading this week's edition of The Growth Equation newsletter. We hope you found it valuable. Don't forget to get your order in for The Way of Excellence today!
- Order the book today: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop
- Fill out THIS FORM for bonuses
- Receive the book on your doorstep ASAP