You might have an advantage over the child prodigies who made you feel inferior during your school years.
Despite exceptions such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a study based on 19 research projects involving 34,000 high-achieving individuals across various fields — including Nobel Prize winners, top chess players, Olympic champions, and elite musicians — discovered that those who excelled early in life were not consistently the same people who achieved significant success in adulthood.
“Among the highest levels of adult performance, peak performance is inversely related to early performance,” stated the report, published in the journal Science.
The research team, led by Arne Güllich from RPTU Kaiserlautern-Landau in Germany, observed that child prodigies frequently focused on a single area, limiting themselves to a specific field at a young age. In contrast, late bloomers achieved success across multiple disciplines.
The study offers crucial insights into long-contested scientific questions about the origins of exceptional expertise. While numerous parents might believe that encouraging their children to specialize early sets them up for career success, the latest findings indicate the opposite. Early, field-specific development can lead to short-term achievements, but long-term success is more prevalent among late bloomers.
“Nearly 90% of the individuals in the world’s top-10 youth chess players are different from those in the world’s top-10 adult chess players over time,” the researchers wrote, implying that early achievers typically do not reach the pinnacle of their success at the same point when late bloomers thrive. This also means that child prodigies and late bloomers develop in distinct ways and grow into fundamentally different adults.
To be clear, talented children generally achieve success in adulthood. In fact, a study found that child prodigies tend to earn higher incomes and experience greater career success than the average individual.
Güllich and his colleagues also acknowledge that their study has methodological limitations. The research examined data from two types of studies: prospective studies, which track high-performing children over time, and retrospective studies, which look back at the childhood development of high-achieving adults. The researchers noted that it is not feasible to assign children to random careers, and additional research is needed to understand how early development connects to later success.
Nonetheless, the study’s results challenge the focus on early indicators of high performance that elite schools, conservatories, and youth sports academies frequently prioritize when scouting for talent.
In fact, earlier research suggests that such training could be harmful, leading to burnout. A study found that “gifted” children had negative perceptions of their physical health and were more likely to experience poor mental health compared to non-gifted children.
“All the findings from this study indicate that gifted children are at risk regarding their mental health,” it cautioned.