What does it take to become the best at something? The answer may not lie in early childhood excellence or in lifelong, laser-focused dedication. Instead the path to becoming exceptional at a skill might involve a lot more meandering.
That’s according to recent research published in Science that seeks to untangle what it takes to excel in different performance areas, from sports to chess to classical music. Somewhat counterintuitively, the study authors learned, people who showed the greatest promise in their discipline as children rarely went on to reach the pinnacle of their field as adults.
The findings blow up the “10,000-hour rule,” the idea that if someone spends 10,000 hours deliberately practicing a skill, they will master it, says Purdue University psychologist Brooke Macnamara, who co-authored the analysis. The rule, which was popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers, is based on a 1993 study of top-performing violin students. These students had each accumulated an average of 10,000 hours of practice by age 20. Yet they were not world-class performers, Macnamara points out.
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“Compared with their national-class counterparts, those who are very good but not the best, world-class performers often started their discipline later,” Macnamara explains. These people tend to engage in multiple activities early on and don’t shine in one thing at a particularly young age. “They accumulate less practice in their discipline and more practice in other disciplines and then rise to the top relatively late,” she says.
“This pattern doesn’t follow the idea of the deliberate practice theory or the 10,000-hour rule, which both suggest that starting early and maximizing deliberate practice is the path to elite performance,” Macnamara adds.
The results came as a surprise to David Z. Hambrick, a co-author of the new paper and a psychologist at Michigan State University. “I remember thinking, ‘This is crazy,’” he says. “I had never thought about the relative benefits of training in one discipline versus training in multiple disciplines. Expertise is, by definition, specific.”
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The researchers highlight that the findings aren’t suggesting people don’t need to practice or put in effort to become a chess grandmaster or a Wimbledon winner. Instead they show that top adult performers tend to be “late bloomers,” Macnamara says.
In sports, for instance, world-class athletes peak later than national-class athletes. Those who peak early reach a level that is the best for their age but that isn’t as high as what the other group will eventually achieve when older.
The findings are intriguing, says Edson Filho, who researches sport, exercise and performance psychology at Boston University and wasn’t involved in the study. He notes that athletes in certain sports, such as gymnastics, hit peak performance far earlier in life than others. And this analysis, he adds, doesn’t get into other factors such as money and coaching that can influence who becomes the cream of the crop.
The research emphasizes that people change. Children can get burned out or simply lose interest. To become an expert, you need to consistently perform at a high level under the most challenging of conditions, Filho says. “That’s a long journey.”
The findings matter for institutions and coaches who might be biased toward directing resources at the kids who show the most promise in a given field early on, because those children might not be the ones with the most potential to reach a world-class level. The research holds a message, too, for people who want to pursue a skill or dream but didn’t win their school competition or make it to the top of their youth league: do not despair, Macnamara says.
“For people who didn’t follow the prodigy route, know you are in good company!” Macnamara says. “Most world-class performers didn’t, either.”
