Lesson 3 Gift and Achievement
Child Prodigies: Myths and Misunderstandings
Do you think ____ would be happy being a child prodigy, someone who is truly gifted in something at a very young age?
Maybe you would, ____ maybe you wouldn’t.
However, we live in a society that generally accepts the idea that giftedness leads to success, and success guarantees a life full of ____
Does giftedness guarantee future ____
There are two ways to answer this question.
One is simply to track the achievements ____ precocious kids.
There is a 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 ____ 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 Hunter graduates were all doing pretty well ____ 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 corporations, prominent politicians, well-known writers, or Nobel Prize winners; there were no people who were nationally known ____ their fields.
They were genius kids, but they were not genius ____
A ____ pattern emerged in Ontario, Canada, in the 1970s. There was an elementary school with a team of elite runners.
At that time, there were 15 nationally-ranked runners who were 13 ____ 14 years old.
According to research done ten ____ later, only one runner from that group became a top runner at the age of 24.
In fact, the number-one runner at the ____ of 24 was someone known as a poor runner when he was young, Doug Consiglio.
Doug was thought ____ be an awkward kid.
When he was 14, all the other kids asked, ____ does he even bother?”
Another way
Another way to look at precocity ____ to work backwards—to look at adult geniuses and see what they were like as kids.
A number of studies have taken this approach, and they found a similar ____
A study of 200 highly accomplished adults found that just ____ 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, ____ Beethoven, Kant, and Leonardo da Vinci.
None of these geniuses would have made it into Hunter College ____ School.
As ____ can see from these studies, precocity is a trickier subject than people may ordinarily think.
The benefits of earlier mastery are ____ overestimated.
There are ____ people who either started out good and went bad 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 ____ success.
____ we call a child precocious, we have a very inaccurate definition of what we mean.
Generally, what we mean is that a person has an unusual level of intellectual or physical ____ for his or her age.
Adult success has a lot to do with more ____ that.
In our ____ with precocity, we are exaggerating the importance of being talented.
Rather, deliberate practice toward a goal is much more important ____ natural-born ability.
For example, when we say that a great musician is naturally gifted, does that tell us that he or she ____ a lot, wants to practice a lot, or likes to practice a lot?
People often cite
People ____ cite Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a child prodigy, someone who acquired his musical skills very early.
He started to compose ____ at the age of four.
By six, he traveled around Europe ____ special performances with his father, Leopold.
He ____ therefore, the perfect example of a precocious child.
However, ____ are faults in the Mozart myth.
First of all, the music he ____ at four isn’t any good.
His childhood works ____ basically arrangements of works by other composers.
____ rather suspiciously, they were written down by his father.
Leopold was the 18th-century version of a modern day parent who goes all ____ to make his or her child a star.
Indeed Wolfgang’s legendary precocity was exaggerated ____ by his father’s probable lying about his age.
Young Mozart’s incredible musical ability might better be attributed ____ practice, practice, practice.
Compelled to ____ three hours 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 ____ as his ability to work 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 ____ intellectual late-bloomer, Einstein.
According to one biographer’s description of the future physicist, Einstein displayed ____ remarkable native intelligence as a child.
His success seems ____ have come from certain habits and personality traits—curiosity, resolve, and determination.
No doubt, these ____ are not particularly fascinating, but they are, perhaps, the more essential components of genius.
As seen from studies of ____ 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 ____ early acquisition of skills.
Instead, many of the traits that really matter in predicting adult success are variable traits ____ creativity, determination, and leadership.
Thus, if you want to know whether a 14-year-old runner will be a good runner when he or ____ is 24, you must simply wait ten years to find out how truly successful he or she has become.