

A number of studies have taken this approach, Gladwell said, and they find a similar pattern. The other way to look at precocity is of course to work backward - to look at adult geniuses and see what they were like as kids. “There are surprising numbers of people who either start good and go bad or start bad and end up good.” And the benefits of earlier mastery are overstated. Precociousness is a slipperier subject than we ordinarily think, Gladwell said. Indeed, the number-one miler at age 24 was someone Gladwell had known as one of the poorer runners when they were young - Doug Consiglio, a “gawky kid” of whom all the other kids asked “Why does he even bother?” Of the 15 nationally ranked runners in his age class at age 13 or 14, only one of that group had been a top runner in his running prime, at age 24. “These were genius kids but they were not genius adults.”Ī similar pattern emerged when Gladwell examined his own cohort of elite teen runners in Ontario. But Gladwell was struck by what he called the “disappointed tone of the book”: None of the Hunter alums were superstars or Nobel- or Pulitzer-prize winners there were no people who were nationally known in their fields. Yet the fate of its child-geniuses was, well, “simply okay.” Thirty years down the road, the Hunter alums in the study were all doing pretty well, were reasonably well adjusted and happy, and most had good jobs and many had graduate degrees. Hunter College was founded in the 1920s to be a training ground for the country’s future intellectual elite. Gladwell cited a mid-1980s study (Genius Revisited) of adults who had attended New York City’s prestigious Hunter College Elementary School, which only admits children with an IQ of 155 or above. One is simply to track the achievements of precocious kids. There are two ways of answering these questions. “But is that really true? And what is the evidence for it? And what exactly is the meaning and value of mastering a particular skill very early on in your life?” “I think we take it as an article of faith in our society that great ability in any given field is invariably manifested early on, that to be precocious at something is important because it’s a predictor of future success,” Gladwell said. The fall from childhood greatness to a middling state of “simply okay” is, Gladwell suggested, a recurring theme when the cherished notion of precocity is subjected to real scrutiny.

Taking it up again in college - with the same dedication as before - he faced a disappointing truth: “I realized I wasn’t one of the best in the country … I was simply okay.” After losing a major race at age 15, then enduring other setbacks and loss of interest, Gladwell said, he gave up running for a few years. But - and this “but” sounded the theme of his talk to the rapt audience filling the Marquis Marriott’s Broadway Ballroom - being a prodigy didn’t forecast future success in running. “I was a running prodigy,” he said bluntly. Precocity was the subject of Gladwell’s “Bring the Family Address” at this year’s APS Convention, and the account of his own early athletic success served as a springboard.

He was encouraged to dream of Olympic gold, and indeed was flown to special training camps with the other elite runners of his generation - on the assumption that creating future world-class athletes meant recognizing and nurturing youthful talent. But not the way you imagined.Īs a teenager growing up in rural Ontario, the bestselling author of Blink and The Tipping Point was a champion runner, the number-one Canadian runner of his age. Judging from his boyish appearance and his voracious curiosity, it’s easy to imagine Malcolm Gladwell as some sort of child prodigy.
