Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance
by Arne Güllich, Michael Barth, David Z. Hambrick, and Brooke N. Macnamara
The authors analyze the career trajectories of top performers across multiple domains, including Nobel laureates, elite chess players, Olympic gold medalists, and more. Their central finding challenges a common belief. Intensive, single-discipline training at a young age does confer an early advantage, but this advantage fades over time. By contrast, individuals exposed to multidisciplinary practice early in life tend to start more slowly. Yet, over the long run, they are more likely to reach world-class performance, eventually overtaking early specialists, who often plateau just below the very top.
Editor’s summary
From athletes like Simone Biles and Michael Phelps to scientists like Marie Curie and Albert Einstein, identifying exceptional talent is essential in the science of innovation. But how does talent originate? Did the most talented athletes, scientists, and musicians reach peak performance relatively early or late in their career? Did they forgo mastering multiple sports, academic subjects, and musical instruments to reach world-class performance in only one? In an Analytical Review, Güllich et al. looked at published research in science, music, chess, and sports and found two patterns: Exceptional young performers reached their peak quickly but narrowly mastered only one interest (e.g., one sport). By contrast, exceptional adults reached peak performance gradually with broader, multidisciplinary practice. However, elite programs are designed to nurture younger talent. —Ekeoma Uzogara
Exceptional performers push the boundaries of human capability, drive innovation, and help solve the world’s most pressing problems. For decades, research on the acquisition of human performance across domains (e.g., science, academia, music, sports, and chess) has primarily been conducted with young and sub-elite performers. This research suggested that, within these populations, higher early performance and larger amounts of discipline-specific practice generally are predictors of better later performance. Correspondingly, many elite schools, universities, conservatories, and youth sport academies around the world typically aim to select the top-performing young people and then seek to further accelerate their performance through intensified discipline-specific practice. Given that previous expertise research largely focused on young performers and that many elite training programs aim to select the top-performing young people, two critical questions arise: (i) Are exceptional performers at young ages and at later peak performance age largely the same individuals? And (ii) do predictors of young exceptional performance also predict later exceptional peak performance? Until recently, these questions were not systematically investigated among the world’s best performers across domains.
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