Individual differences, even among elite performers, are closely related to assessed amounts of deliberate practice. Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years. Analysis of expert performance provides unique evidence on the potential and limits of extreme environmental adaptation and learning.
Six years later, psychologist Michael Howe in his book Genius Explained, asserted that Mozart had no special talent and that his “genius” was really little more than hard work over a prolonged period:
By the standards of mature composers, Mozart’s early works are not outstanding. The earliest pieces were probably written down by his father, and perhaps improved in the process. Many of Wolfgang’s childhood compositions, such as the first seven of his concertos for piano and orchestra, are largely arrangements of works by other composers. Of those concertos that only contain music original to Mozart, the earliest that is now regarded as a masterwork (No. 9, K. 271) was not composed until he was twenty-one: by that time Mozart had already been composing concertos for ten years.
In 2008, journalist Malcolm Gladwell In his bestselling book Outliers: The Story of Success, popularized Ericssons’ research asserting that talent is a myth and exceptional performance is merely the result of about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice–a conversion of Ericsson’s 10-year criterion with the assertion “Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.” To establish his claim for excellence in chess, he asserted:
No one has yet found a case in which true world class expertise was accomplished in less time…To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about 10 years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fischer got to that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him 9 years.) And what’s 10 years? It’s roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice. Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.
(Gladwell’s assertion was not quite accurate. Outliers was published in 2008, and at that time, not only Bobby Fischer, but several others, including Judit Polgár, had reached chess Grandmaster status in significantly less than 10 years. In 1994, Peter Leko became a Grandmaster at the age of 14 years, 4 months and 22 days, having learned chess from his father just before his 7th birthday.)
However, other researchers point to child prodigies as examples of those who rise to the top of their domain before they were old enough to log that. many hours of practice. Drawing upon research from MRI scans, Elizabeth Winner, psychologist at Boston College states:
Indirect evidence indicates that gifted children and savants have atypical brain organization (whether as a result of genetics, the in utero environment, or after-birth trauma). First, giftedness in mathematics, visual arts, and music is associated with superior visual-spatial abilities, and children with mathematical gifts show enhanced brain activity in their right hemisphere when asked to recognize faces, a task known to involve the right hemisphere.
As someone in the field of education, I have seen people of all ages entering the classroom, from grades 1 through university and there are substantial differences in the speed at which they learn, process information, and acquire concepts. As Justice Potter Stewart of the US Supreme Court said in 1964, Intelligence is like porn, difficult to define, but you know it when you see it.
