Die meisten leistungsstärksten Erwachsenen waren im Kindesalter keine Elite-Spezialisten, so das Ergebnis einer neuen Studie
https://www.wsj.com/science/elite-high-performance-adults-children-sports-study-ae8d6bed?st=ABsKTF&mod=wsjreddit
Die meisten leistungsstärksten Erwachsenen waren im Kindesalter keine Elite-Spezialisten, so das Ergebnis einer neuen Studie
https://www.wsj.com/science/elite-high-performance-adults-children-sports-study-ae8d6bed?st=ABsKTF&mod=wsjreddit
12 Kommentare
An examination of thousands of adults across fields including sports, music, academia and chess found that world-class performers—Olympic champions, renowned composers, Nobel laureates—often don’t excel early.
Full story here (free link): [https://www.wsj.com/science/elite-high-performance-adults-children-sports-study-ae8d6bed?st=ABsKTF&mod=wsjreddit](https://www.wsj.com/science/elite-high-performance-adults-children-sports-study-ae8d6bed?st=ABsKTF&mod=wsjreddit)
Study here: [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt7790#editor-abstract](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt7790#editor-abstract)
I can’t read this through the paywall. I’m trying to figure out what exactly an “elite specialist” child means?
I can’t read it, so I’m just gonna say, that MANY really successful business owners and entrepreneurs, are really shining examples of ‚right time, right place‘, more so than ‚brilliant strategist‘.
Fake it till you make it, is also a common story in those types.
Mostly matches my own experience as a competitive/club/academy soccer coach over past 10 years.
It’s so incredibly hard to predict (I’d say near impossible) which pre-adolescent players will continue to develop into adulthood
A wide base in movement and skills always works best, they taught that in uni around 99 so its fairly well established.
For every tiger woods is a million burnt out kids who never play that sport again
Hard to generalize across disciplines, but typically the most successful adults are the ones with the more advanced social and organizational skills. This is because most endeavors nowadays are team efforts. Yes having great math skills is helpful for an engineer but even more helpful is the ability to persuade and organize individuals and groups into supporting your projects. These kinds of social skills typically are less noticeable in childhood than „elite specialist“ kids.
The most interesting part of the study is the „delayed payoff“ effect. Early specialists often show higher performance in the short term, which tricks parents into thinking it’s working, but they burnout or plateau just as the samplers start their exponential growth phase in late adolescence.
In my experience, the most successful people were generalists when they were young. They came from households where conscientious in all things were expected and excellence was rewarded. They were the kids who cared enough to put effort into all every task, not just the stuff they were interested in as a kid. These skills served them well when they self-specialized later.
It’s because success takes well roundedness, being capable in many different things and adapting. To be allowed to specialize, in most fields, you have to already mastered the general and fundamentals. But some lucky few have the means to skip all that, due to mostly support system, not talent.
Specialization is a farce amplified by people from well off families that supported their success journey without the consequences of real failure that comes from only being good at one thing (Trump,Elon, Bezos, Gates, Zuck, Most pop-singers and producers in entertainment, etc.)
when I was a kid I barely had access to technology, computers, etc.
as a teenager I did and that became my career. I know lots of people who were exposed to tech at a young age who are not that technically proficient.
your teenage years is when you have enough reasoning skills and motor skills to learn advanced skillsets.
I can only find a „structured abstract“ (ugh, is that AI or something?)… but it says that there’s „only“ a 10% overlap in high performing specialists when young, and eventual elites.
On the back of the envelope, 10% seems like… a stunningly high percentage of young specialists that become elite adults, compared to the percentage of normal young people becoming elite adults.
This looks, at first glance, based on no *mention* of correcting for this in the abstract, to have a high change of being an *egregious* case of base rate fallacy.
The book “range” talks about this, good read