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