Precocious Kids and Successful Adults
Another offering from Malcolm Gladwell, this time his talk at the 2006 New Yorker Festival. Gladwell works from the assumption that parents and citizens are interested in kids who display early aptitude for a given skill -- who are, in short, precocious. We are not only interested in identifying and nurturing and praising such talents, but we expend resources on them on the assumption that they are more likely to innovate and excel in these fields later in life than their non-precocious peers. Examples of this include child prodigy musicians, young track stars, or early readers.But does early excellence really predict future success? Not according to Gladwell, who summons a diverse host of studies suggesting that precocious kids tend to fall off the proverbial map later in life, and similarly, highly successful adults (not just physicists but Nobel Prize-winning physicists) did not tend to be precocious kids. There are always exceptions to this, but the complexity of real life and growing up remove any real correlation between precociousness as a kid and pathbreaking as an adult. (He suggests, at one point, that young kids who excel are gifted learners or gifted consumers of knowledge; stellar adults are gifted doers or gifted producers of knowledge.)
Gladwell suggests two factors that, in combination, are much better predictors of excellence than precociousness per se:
1) Your attitude about your own intelligence (known, apparently, as your "explanatory style"). People who are optimistic about thenselves AND who see their intelligence as malleable are likely to actively pursue knowledge and address challenges constructively, as opposed to those who are always told they are brilliant and thus crumble under the first challenge.
2) Your capacity for hard, focused work at something. Though not all diligent workers are tomorrow's Nobel prize winners, Mozart's capacity on the violin likely had a lot to do with the unprecedented practice regimine he is thought to have undertaken from such a young age, whether or not native ability is still a prerequisite of excellence.
Labels: education, gladwell, talent
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posted by Burke Scarbrough at
09:06
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1 Comments:
I believe that behind every sucessful and precocious kid is some sort of adult. The adult may not always be successful though. It is my understanding that it is the power of the adult to provide the necissary skills to encourage the child to become successful. Not all adults know how to use the "powers" that they know about. It takes someone who understands these ideas and can put them into play in order to become successful.
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