Lesson 3 Gift and Achievement
Child Prodigies: Myths and Misunderstandings
Do you think you ____ be happy being a child prodigy, someone who is truly gifted in something at a very young age?
Maybe you would, and maybe ____ wouldn’t.
However, we live in a society that generally accepts the idea that giftedness ____ to success, and success guarantees a life full of happiness.
____ giftedness guarantee future success?
There are two ways to answer this question.
One ____ simply to track the achievements of precocious kids.
There is ____ mid-1980s study of adults who attended New York City’s highly regarded Hunter College Elementary School, which was founded in the 1920s as a training ground for America’s future intellectual elite and only admitted children with an IQ of 155 or above.
Yet the fate of ____ Hunter College child geniuses in the study was not greatness; it was simply being okay.
Thirty years down the ____ the Hunter graduates were all doing pretty well and were reasonably well adjusted and happy.
Most of them had good jobs ____ many had advanced degrees.
But surprisingly, none of the Hunter graduates became CEOs of world-famous corporations, ____ politicians, well-known writers, or Nobel Prize winners; there were no people who were nationally known in their fields.
They were genius kids, but they ____ not genius adults.
A similar pattern emerged in Ontario, Canada, ____ the 1970s. There was an elementary school with a team of elite runners.
At that time, there were 15 ____ runners who were 13 and 14 years old.
According to research done ten years later, ____ one runner from that group became a top runner at the age of 24.
In fact, the number-one runner ____ the age of 24 was someone known as a poor runner when he was young, Doug Consiglio.
Doug was ____ to be an awkward kid.
When he was 14, all the ____ kids asked, “Why does he even bother?”
Another way
Another way to look ____ precocity is to work backwards—to look at adult geniuses and see what they were like as kids.
____ number of studies have taken this approach, and they found a similar pattern.
A ____ of 200 highly accomplished adults found that just 34 percent had been considered precocious as children.
There is also a long list of historical geniuses who were quite ordinary as children; the list includes Copernicus, Rembrandt, Bach, Newton, ____ Kant, and Leonardo da Vinci.
None of these geniuses would have ____ it into Hunter College Elementary School.
As you can see from these ____ precocity is a trickier subject than people may ordinarily think.
The benefits of earlier mastery are ____ overestimated.
There are many people who either started out good and went ____ or started bad and ended up good.
Early acquisition of skills — which is often what we mean by precocity ____ may be a misleading indicator of later success.
When we ____ a child precocious, we have a very inaccurate definition of what we mean.
Generally, what we mean is that a person has ____ unusual level of intellectual or physical ability for his or her age.
Adult success has a lot ____ do with more than that.
In our ____ with precocity, we are exaggerating the importance of being talented.
Rather, deliberate ____ toward a goal is much more important than natural-born ability.
For example, when we say that a great musician is naturally gifted, does that tell us that he or she practices a lot, wants to practice a lot, or likes ____ practice a lot?
People often cite
People often cite Wolfgang ____ Mozart as a child prodigy, someone who acquired his musical skills very early.
He ____ to compose music at the age of four.
By six, he traveled around Europe giving special performances with ____ father, Leopold.
He is, therefore, the perfect example of a precocious ____
However, there are faults in the ____ myth.
First of all, the music he composed at ____ isn’t any good.
His childhood works are basically arrangements of works by other ____
Also, rather suspiciously, they were written down by his ____
Leopold was ____ 18th-century version of a modern day parent who goes all out to make his or her child a star.
Indeed Wolfgang’s legendary precocity was exaggerated somewhat by ____ father’s probable lying about his age.
Young Mozart’s incredible musical ____ might better be attributed to practice, practice, practice.
Compelled to practice three ____ a day from age three on, by age six, the young Wolfgang had practiced an astonishing 3,500 hours — three times more than anybody else in his peer group.
Mozart’s famous precocity as a musician was not so much natural musical ability as his ability to work hard, his ____ and a father that pushed him to do so.
A better example
A better ____ for what precocity really is may be the famous intellectual late-bloomer, Einstein.
According to one biographer’s description of ____ future physicist, Einstein displayed no remarkable native intelligence as a child.
His success seems to have come from certain habits and personality traits—curiosity, ____ and determination.
No doubt, these traits are not ____ fascinating, but they are, perhaps, the more essential components of genius.
As ____ from studies of precocity, a precocious child may not become a talented adult.
Furthermore, a ____ adult may not have been a precocious child.
Predictions from childhood about adult performance cannot be made based on relatively fixed traits such as IQ and early acquisition of ____
Instead, many of the traits that really matter in predicting adult success ____ variable traits like creativity, determination, and leadership.
Thus, if you want to know whether a 14-year-old runner will be a good runner when he or she ____ 24, you must simply wait ten years to find out how truly successful he or she has become.