For centuries, the question of how exceptional performers emerge has captivated scientists, educators, and parents alike. What transforms a child into a Nobel laureate, an Olympic champion, or a virtuoso musician? The conventional wisdom has long suggested a simple formula: identify talented youngsters early, then drill them relentlessly in their chosen discipline. But a sweeping new analysis published in Science suggests this approach may be fundamentally flawed.

An international research team examined the developmental patterns of more than 34,000 world-class performers across science, sports, music, and chess—including Nobel Prize winners, Olympic medalists, and the most renowned classical composers. Their findings challenge decades of assumptions about talent development and raise provocative questions about how society nurtures its most promising young people.

“Traditional research into giftedness and expertise did not sufficiently consider the question of how world-class performers at peak performance age developed in their early years,” said Arne Güllich, professor of sports science at RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau, who led the study.

The research team, which included Michael Barth of the University of Innsbruck, D. Zach Hambrick of Michigan State University, and Brooke N. Macnamara of Purdue University, uncovered three striking patterns that held consistent across disciplines.

First, and perhaps most surprisingly, the best young performers and the best adult performers are largely different people. The study found that nearly 90 percent of international-level junior athletes and later international-level senior athletes are different individuals. Similarly, around 90 percent of top secondary school students and later top university students turn out to be different people. The same pattern emerged in chess, where the world’s top-ranked under-14 players and later top-ranked adult players were almost entirely separate populations.

Second, those who eventually reached world-class status typically showed gradual, rather than meteoric, early progress. Nobel laureates, for instance, had slower publication impact in their early careers compared to nominees who never won the prize. World-class athletes performed below many peers during their youth. The senior chess players ranked in the top three globally over the past decade had actually scored lower at age 14 than their 4th-through-10th-ranked counterparts.

Third, adult peak performers did not specialize narrowly in childhood but instead engaged in multiple disciplines. World-class athletes, on average, participated in two additional sports during childhood and adolescence. Nobel laureates similarly engaged in roughly two additional avocations—activities ranging from music to artisanship—compared to national-level award winners who never reached the Nobel tier.

“And a common pattern emerges across the different disciplines,” Güllich emphasized. The best at a young age and the best later in life are mostly different individuals, those reaching world-class status showed gradual development and were not among the best of their age group early on, and those achieving peak performance did not specialize in a single discipline at an early age.

These findings stand in stark contrast to the influential “10,000-hour rule” popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers, which suggested that extraordinary performance in any field required roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate, focused practice. That concept, drawn from psychologist Anders Ericsson’s research on musicians, fueled a generation of intensive youth training programs and contributed to what many researchers have called an epidemic of early specialization. Meta-analyses conducted over the past decade have found that deliberate practice accounts for only about 12 to 26 percent of individual differences in performance across various domains—important, but far from the whole story.

The current study goes further, suggesting that the very strategies proven to accelerate early success may actually impede long-term excellence. Higher-performing junior athletes started their main sport at younger ages, entered talent programs earlier, and accumulated more sport-specific practice while engaging in fewer other activities. But the pattern flipped entirely for senior world-class athletes, who started later, reached milestones at older ages, accumulated less discipline-specific practice, and engaged in significantly more multidisciplinary activity.

The researchers propose three hypotheses to explain these counterintuitive findings. The “search-and-match” hypothesis suggests that experiences across multiple disciplines increase the odds of finding an optimal fit for one’s particular talents and preferences. The “enhanced-learning-capital” hypothesis posits that varied learning experiences expand one’s capacity for long-term learning by developing flexible thinking, pattern recognition, and adaptability. The “limited-risks” hypothesis argues that multidisciplinary engagement reduces career-ending factors like burnout, overuse injuries, and psychological exhaustion.

“Those who find an optimal discipline for themselves, develop enhanced potential for long-term learning, and have reduced risks of career-hampering factors, have improved chances of developing world-class performance,” Güllich explained.

The implications extend far beyond sports fields and concert halls. Elite schools, universities, conservatories, and youth academies around the world typically select top-performing young people and accelerate their discipline-specific training. The new evidence suggests such practices may foster impressive young achievers while inadvertently screening out—or burning out—many future world-class performers.

“Don’t specialize in just one discipline too early,” Güllich advised. “Encourage young people and provide them opportunities to pursue different areas of interest. And promote them in two or three disciplines.” He noted these need not be related fields, citing Albert Einstein’s lifelong passion for the violin alongside his revolutionary physics.

The study’s findings resonate with growing concerns about early sports specialization. Research has consistently linked narrow, intensive youth training to higher rates of overuse injuries, psychological burnout, and early dropout from athletic participation. Medical organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics have recommended against single-sport specialization before age 15 for most sports.

For policymakers and program managers, the message is clear: evaluating talent programs based on short-term youth performance may create perverse incentives that undermine long-term excellence. Güllich concluded that embracing evidence-based approaches “may enhance opportunities for the development of world-class performers—in science, sports, music, and other fields.”

The path to greatness, it seems, runs not through narrow early focus but through exploration, patience, and the courage to let exceptional talent reveal itself in its own time.

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Sources:

1. Güllich, A., Barth, M., Hambrick, D. Z., & Macnamara, B. N. (2025). Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance. Science, 390, eadt7790. DOI: 10.1126/science.adt7790
2. EurekAlert! Press Release: “Is talented youth nurtured the wrong way? New study shows: top performers develop differently than assumed.” Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität Kaiserslautern-Landau. December 18, 2025. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1110493
3. Macnamara, B. N., Hambrick, D. Z., & Oswald, F. L. (2014). Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: A meta-analysis. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1608-1618.
4. Jayanthi, N., Pinkham, C., Dugas, L., Patrick, B., & LaBella, C. (2013). Sports specialization in young athletes: Evidence-based recommendations. Sports Health, 5(3), 251-257.