Why Brilliant Children Rarely Become World-Class Adults

Novak Djokovic first picked up a tennis racket at the age of four. By twelve, he had left his home in Serbia for a tennis academy in Germany. He won his first major title—the 2008 Australian Open—at twenty. Today, he holds 24 major titles and has spent more time ranked number one in the world than any other player in history.

Djokovic's career fits a familiar story about human talent: a child prodigy, trained intensely from a young age, grows up to dominate his field. But a new paper in the journal Science suggests he may be the exception, not the rule. In many fields, the very best adults followed a very different path.

The study, led by Arne Güllich, a sports scientist at RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau in Germany, examined data on more than 34,000 elite performers in sport, chess, classical music, and academia. The finding was striking. The teenagers who trained the hardest and performed best as children rarely became true superstars as adults. The adults who did reach the top tended not to stand out early. They took longer to reach their peak, and they kept a wider range of interests for longer.

The received wisdom—on which most sports academies are built—is that the best way to grow talent is to spot it early and drill it hard. But the research behind that idea had only looked at school and university athletes. It had not followed them into adult careers. More recent studies that did track adults all reached the same conclusion: early performance is a poor guide to adult success.

Güllich extended this kind of analysis to other fields. Chess was easy, because players have Elo ratings. Academics could be ranked using citation databases and prizes such as the Nobels or the Fields medal. Music was the hardest, but the team used a study from UC Davis that ranked composers by expert opinion and how often their works were performed in opera houses.

The pattern was reliable across every field. Elite young performers and elite adults turned out to be almost completely different groups. Around 90% of adult superstars had not been superstars as children, while only 10% of top-level children went on to become exceptional adults. In fact, childhood and adult excellence were slightly negatively correlated. The adults who did reach the top had kept broader interests. The best sportsmen and women had played several sports at a fairly high level for longer than their more focused peers. They were behind early on, but once they specialised, they improved much faster—they had better training efficiency. Even Nobel-winning scientists were less likely than their nominees to have won academic scholarships as students.

Why does this pattern keep repeating? The researchers offer three possible explanations. The first comes from labour-market economics and is called search and match: trying many things first helps you find the field that fits you best (Rafael Nadal, for example, played football seriously before choosing tennis). The second is “enhanced learning”: learning is itself a skill, and exploring variety sharpens it. The third is the limited-risk hypothesis—avoiding the hothouse may stop young people from burning out or losing interest entirely.

Güllich is careful with his conclusions. The hothouse model still works, he says. It produces highly competent people—just not the world's very best. But selective schools, sports academies and music conservatoires may want to think again about how they train their youngest stars.