My daughter is being treated for Leukemia by some amazing doctors at Boston Children's Hospital. To my knowledge, none of the health care professionals at this world-class institution have won Nobel Prizes in medicine. All the same, for my daughter's sake, I'm still glad they hit the books for a couple decades.
There are great honor and value in doing an important job consistently and well. This idea that a life is wasted if you don't remake a field in your image seems hollow when these prodigies often end up with the power to save lives.
Our profession is moving toward identifying these doctors and promoting their behavior to the entire field.
There's a study that showed lower heart attack mortality when all the "top" cardiologists were out of the hospital attending a cardiology meeting. Too many confounders to make any real conclusions from that, but it lines up with my point.
Of course, if your child has a serious life-threatening and/or rare disease, then you want her to be treated at a vanguard institution like the one you took yours to. No dispute from me on that one.
But in the system as a whole, we make the most difference reducing complications of cardiovascular disease, sepsis, pneumonia, COPD, and kidney disease (which are orders of magnitude more common). And we're starting to find out how to identify doctors that do it better, with fewer complications, and with much higher efficiency than others. I think those are the best doctors and it's what I'm striving to be.
This. I think I've even posted about this here before. This has been my wife's experience too (surgeon). She trained with highly regarded academic surgeons that set the treatment recommendations and standards for her field. Then during her job search she went to a center with, well, surgeons not at all academic and she had a life changing moment because she realized their operations and outcomes (utilization, efficiency etc.) are far far better. At the academic centers you are recognized based on your research and publications, not on your surgical skills. These academic surgeons with relatively little experience are setting the standards for how the operation should be done and what the treatments should be. This is not at all recognized in her field unfortunately and is quite literally harming patients every day because of substandard treatment standards.
the "best doctors" in my eyes are the ones with the best outcomes,
lowest utilization, highest efficiency and highest patient
satisfaction.
I think those are the best doctors and it's what I'm striving to be.
Also, have you seen this article? It might interest you: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/03/personal-best
There is some name for this apparent statistical paradox, but I forget what it is. In any case, the main problem with your criteria is that the "best" doctor would be one that treated only the healthiest patients. They would have low utilization, high satisfaction, good outcomes, and very good efficiency.
Knowing that my daughter wouldn't be here today without ECMO, I take issue with this assertion.
Edit: She was born with severe MAS and her lungs were practically non-functional. ECMO was the only way she had time to fight the infections and start breathing. She spent 12 terrifying days on ECMO and then 2 more weeks on ventilators.
I think that this is truly what made my father be not just "technically good", but a physician who could solve his patients' problems: he made an effort to understand their perspective, and adjust his treatment accordingly.
I've observed him interact with patients sometimes, and his effort at creating empathy was quite noticeable. It's particularly fascinating to watch with children.
I agree with you though that efficiency, and also just honing one's internal sense of what's going on inside a patient's body is important. My dad was department head at a first-world hospital. But every year he would go on a charity mission to some third-world place for two weeks and treat patients there. With essentially no modern technology (in fact, operations might have to performed in the shine of a flashlight), you are really forced to work with your instincts. I think these trips benefited his first-world patients just as much as his third-world ones.
If the standard of success for a gifted grade school kid is to be a Nobel laureate, that's a little warped.
My grandfather was one of the smartest guys I ever met. Through the circumstances of fate, he couldn't get education beyond the 8th grade. Yet he tutored my mom in calculus and did all sorts of good things for people. By any standard of mine, he lived a long, fruitful and successful life... yet he's a failure in the debate of an article like this.
I wish her, you, and the rest of your family the best.
I grew up in a household where compliance to parental authority was the prevailing rule. This made me fairly compliant as an adult (which opens you up for exploitation by peers and authority figures), but this wasn't too difficult to unravel with a few dozen sessions of therapy.
As a result, I pass down very few rules as a parent, and it's been a joy to watch my daughter's creativity blossom. We've done what the article suggests - provided moral guidelines to live by, rather than any strict set of rules.
She loves real estate - specifically interior design, but also analyzing neighborhoods, improving curb appeal, and understanding what makes a good school district. I think the seeds were planted when I was taking her with me in the evenings to do various handyman tasks at our rental property. We would stop for ice cream and she would sit there and eat it while I put together furniture or changed light bulbs or swept common areas.
And while our lax rules have certainly inspired creativity and fed into her individuality, it hasn't done a great deal to build work ethic. I'm aware of the stereotype of parents believing their kids are lazy, so I'm open to being wrong here.
Striking a balance between giving a kid a framework to discover herself but also emphasizing the importance of work ethic is probably my greatest concern as a parent. I don't want to stifle her from dreaming, but I want her to do what's necessary to accomplish those dreams too.
My big question is this: when the time comes to put in the work the accomplish what she wants, is she going to be ready to put down the ice cream spoon and pick up a screw driver?
I don't know. But I'm going to continue with the light touch and hope for the best.
> Backing off will no more produce a creative genius than pushing your child. Neither strategy makes the slightest difference to what is essentially an autonomous process. Beethoven's father did not back off. And Lars von Trier's parents left him to his own devices. Both are geniuses and both hated their childhood.
> My guess is that most parents who follow Adam Grant's spurious advice (one rule or none is better than six) will end up with the rude obnoxious brats whom you can see bouncing off the waiting room walls of any upscale Manhattan pediatrician's office. Maybe one of a million such brats will spontaneously become a creative genius as an adult but so will one out of a million drones who win spelling bees and piano competitions.
> But guess what, a large proportion of the remaining brats will be all attitude and no skill while the drones will at least become doctors and corporate lawyers. By using creativity as the ultimate-and perhaps only-benchmark, Mr. Grant falls into the same trap as the Tiger Moms he so despises.
> Enjoying a thing does make it more likely that a child will own it. But sometimes the initial drudgery is necessary to make the breakthrough to find something worth enjoying.
> When it comes to raising children the golden rule is that there is no golden rule. The greatest scientific creative genius of recent memory, Richard Feynman realized this when he tried to teach his children and discovered that what worked for his son did not work for his daughter.
Feynman's son was his biological offspring, while the daughter was adopted.
I think this is relevant information that was left out.
Edit: Also, Feynman's son chose to pursuit philosophy, much to Feynman's dismay.
Proof that genetics has some effect, his daughter was adopted.
I don't know anything about their respective childhoods, and I have greatly enjoyed some of Mr Trier's films, but I fear this is a dangerously egalitarian notion of "genius."
I was going to pick apart the whole comment, but then this stuck out at me. WTF? The Feynman cult truly knows no shame or rational bounds.
I guess fuck all the parents who think their kids deserve more than an economically-optimized future?
Seriously with the future of humans doing work so utterly in question right now, especially work that can be done by "drones," this advice is fucking archaic. The days when you acquired some base skill, got good at it, and worked at it for 60 years till retirement are gone. I'd rather be broke and happy.
The thing I was most disappointed about in my own schooling was that I got very little support or time to do serious medium- or large-scale projects, and I got very little mentorship or instruction about the subjects I most cared about personally.
Even in a very good public school district, and then at a very good college, most of what I learned about my own research interests was learned entirely from books and my own experimenting, while most of the work I did felt like pure make-work for the convenience of my teachers.
I feel that it was partly because school only ever provided bite-sized assignments with prescribed subject and scope that I still don’t feel like I have mastered the skill of motivating myself to keep working bit by bit at larger-scale projects.
I wound up with lots of creative ideas, and a fine ability to do specific narrow small tasks, or to do tedious polishing work, but a serious “writer’s block” kind of problem when it comes to diving into the meat of large projects.
The best advice I can give is to support their interests and get involved in activities they enjoy, sure. But also allow them to get interested and involved in the things you enjoy. Kids go through a phase from 2 to 6 or so where they love to help and love to find out about everything adults do. They will help do housework, help do shopping, watch you do whatever you are doing. Talk to them and answer their questions. Pitch your answers to their level without being condescending (google maps on your phone works because a satellite floating no up in space can see where you are), spend the extra time it takes. Letting them help will make the job take twice as long, and that's fine. Invest that time and be patient, it's well worth it and will pay dividends for the rest of your life.
Being there and giving a shit is 90% of the battle.
I think it then follows, if this turns out to be the case, that people who are raised in rule "free" environments learn more independent thought and reasoning and more creativity than people who are raised in highly restrictive environments where their internal thought processes may be less developed, and their tasking and behavior needs to be externally supplied.
However, I think this is a very difficult idea to use for child rearing. The balance and thought that needs to go into teaching good principals is much harder than simply making a list of rules. In the worst case, a child will get neither.
I think the work ethic thing has less to do with rules, and more to do with how you approach small adversities. For a lot of people, if something is hard it's not worth doing. I think kids pick up on that.
Is struggling with something difficult bad, or good?
My daughter is three years old and for the past year or so, whenever she becomes frustrated that she can't do something—whistle, pronounce a word, build a lego set, draw a letter—I calm her down and remind her that not being able to do it is part of learning how to do it. I often use the example of how she didn't always know how to walk or talk, that she failed lots of times but she tried and tried and tried and eventually she got it, that after falling down so many times now she's running around the room and talking non-stop.
I've been blown away by how that reframing of difficulty has made her seemingly unstoppable. Sure, she still gets frustrated and overwhelmed, but when she starts whistling—full on whistling at three years old—and she tells me, "Daddy! I tried and tried and tried and eventually I got it!", I can't help but think that there's something to this. When she doesn't know I'm watching, I've observed that she seems a lot more determined to do things even when she's repeatedly failing—she doesn't give up as quickly as she did (often quickly followed by a tantrum) before I started explaining to her that learning requires challenge.
You can't guarantee any outcome. I don't know what level of influence you can even have, there are so many variables involved. All you can do is what you think is right, and react to circumstances as you go along.
This is something I've thought a lot about. I have an (almost) 2 year old, so I'm not speaking from experience exactly.
I know that growing up, I wish someone was more involved in talking to me about my dreams and goals, and asking me the tough questions about how to achieve them.
I'm planning on doing that with my daughter; not telling her what to do, or giving her strict rules for accomplishing things, but asking her to come up with her own rules and her own plans for how she'll accomplish things both big and small.
It's that conversation with her that I hope will be what she needs.
(I think this relates to the idea of encouragement vs. praise that you often see in parenting books.)
I have a daughter who reminds me of myself, and I (like you) try to take a gentler approach with her. I hope she can tap her intrinsic motivation and skip a lot of the needless misery I endured. Or at least always know her parents supported her as she spread her wings (whereas mine did not). I too worry about how to develop grit a work ethic for her, but I think that's the key: I CAN'T do any such thing. I can help expose her to things which might engage her interest (arts, inventing, medicine, engineering, etc...) but I don't dictate how the story ends. Stepping back, to me, means honoring the fact that it is their life to make something of, or not. I know until my parents adopted that strategy with me, in my mid-twenties, I was going nowhere fast. Suddenly they behaved like they didn't care if I worked, went to college, dropped out, or whatever. They told me they loved me, but otherwise would just pretty much grunt when I'd tell them what I was up to. So I think we have to communicate to our children that we're not going to try and make them some form of what we think they should be, and that if they want to do anything with their life that will be on them.
With my daughter that means lots of conversations about things like "oh, you want to play guitar, but you're frustrated because you're not good at it right away. Hmmm, well you know the only way to get good at something is to practice, work at it, spend time with it." Somehow she has the completely baseless idea that she should just know how to do everything, and beats herself up for all her perceived inadequacies.
So yeah, as you can tell, I too don't know if this is the best way... I'm just trying to find my way in the dark as best as I can, just as you are. Hopefully as long as we're operating from a place of unconditional love, understanding, patience, and kindness ultimately things will turn out for the best.
If my kids can grow up to be capable of creating their own meaningful lives then I'll be satisfied, no matter what that looks like.
You absolutely can. Praise effort instead of talent.
One of the mistakes my parents made when I was younger was to call me talented in things. It resulted in a tremendous amount of stress, and did not make me more likely to try. I felt like I should automatically know how to do things (because that's what talented people do, right?), and hated that I didn't. It made me more resistant to pushing past my comfort zone, because I knew I wouldn't be good at doing so, and I didn't want to disappoint.
There were times they pulled me out of after-school language or music classes, because again, I was stressed out and miserable. But it wasn't because I didn't enjoy the subjects- I just had unrealistic expectations of my own abilities.
I eventually figured out that hard work brings its own rewards, but it wasn't an easy path, and I only found it thanks to other family members who pushed/encouraged me in their own way.
Now, I do not have any children of my own, but I'm uncle to a lot of friends & family. I do my best to encourage the younger ones' efforts, making sure that they know that I see them trying hard. And it really seems to work. Kids need guidance. They do not yet have enough experience to know what they would enjoy. And that sometimes means making decisions for them, and that is OK.
[edit] I want to be very clear, overall I loved my childhood, and I feel very lucky to have had the parents I did. We had (and have) a great relationship. It is simply that with the benefit of hindsight, I can identify choices that I would make differently. I do not expect my parents (or me) to be perfect. The best we can do is try to improve things for the next generation, until it is their turn to do the same.
I love the idea that you have your own rules, different than your parents, therefore better. And thus you will completely ignorant of the mistake you will be making, and focusing on the mistakes that your parents made.
I'm not sure how much of an outlier I am, but our education system is not built for creative types. It's too hard to get placed in anything significantly above your grade level, especially if your brilliance is restricted to a single subject. I remember showing an bistable flipflop design to my science teacher in 5th grade and getting a puzzled "that's nice Johnny" type look when I wanted help figuring out why my breadboard version wouldn't oscillate. A few of my skills were so beyond what anyone expected that they didn't know what to do with me, or what they were even looking at, so they did nothing.
It took another eleven years before I had contact with any teachers that matched my experience level with programming and circuit design. During that time I advanced my skills slightly, but not having any peers made me an outcast and certainly left me far behind where I could have been.
Backing off is a bad idea. You need to take your child's curiousity and do everything you can to keep it alive. I'm sure a lot of kids started out like me but eventually let their dreams die.
This. Once past maybe grade 2-3, classes should be per-subject with mixed ages. Throw the 7 year olds together with the 12 year olds who are on the same level for any given subject. At some point, we need to find a way to tailor education to each individual student. Lumping kids together based solely on their age is ridiculous. Letting only very few children skip entire grades across all subjects rather than by level per subject is not the right solution.
I would have given anything to have been 3-5 years ahead in math while at school. I dropped out in grade 11 because the subjects I cared about were so mind-numbingly unchallenging that I lost all interest in what education had to offer me. I make as much today as a software developer as I would with a degree at most companies, so any incentive to go for a Bachelor's or Master's would be for purely personal growth. Of course my high school transcripts are incomplete, so I couldn't even register for university without going back and doing the prerequisite high school equivalency classes.
The depressing part is that the schools our kids go to entirely fail to take this into account and are, in essence, unchanged from what they were in our childhood, except maybe that they're now playing Math Blaster on iPads instead of desktops.
I remember my parents trying to get me into advanced classes in sixth grade but the school rules said it needed to be done by third grade. I couldn't skip a year either, it was too late.
The second (harder) way into double advanced classes was to pass a test going into high school. That test contained math that only those already in advanced classes had been taught. I aced the reading portion, scoring at 11th grade reading level, but it wasn't enough.
The same year I was sponsored to be an exchange student to Europe but my family couldn't afford the plane tickets. A year later, bored out of my skull and disappointed, I gave up completely on public school.
I embraced mediocrity because I figured out I could get by with no real effort. I concentrated my creativity outside of school and learned more programming languages and electronics. I never got above a C average again until college.
Some teachers saw promise but I let them down because I didn't show up to class and was always in trouble. I knew I had missed the boat to the good classes that led to good scholarships and onto good colleges, and I was bitter and didn't give a shit anymore. To get into the caliber of school I dreamed about I would have needed more than just good grades in regular classes, and all the windows except sports closed before highschool even started.
There's been some articles about "lost diamonds", which may explain why smart people do better as a whole but the large majority still end up living average lives and doing nothing of note. I might not have been any smarter than average, but I definitely feel like I was one of those kids who the system left behind. I knew many others I considered smart that shared my company at the troublemaking fringe of highschool society, definitely a pile of wasted potential at the bottom.
8 out of 2000 is a lot higher than most any other sample group.
The article is missing this point.
You pick 2000 teenagers, and 8 go on to win a Nobel Prize, and you're still not satisfied? High expectations much...
First the author laments only 8 novel prizes of the batch. Then in the next sentence goes on to praise Lisa Randall for revolutionising physics, and notes that for every Lisa Randall there are dozens that fall short of their potential.
Ironic because Lisa Randall didn't win a Nobel Prize in physics. Yet.....
And given her current work and experimental results there is no reasonable prospect she ever will, unlike people that you know that would win sooner or later (unless they died)
> For every Lisa Randall who revolutionizes theoretical physics
She did not revolutionize Physics. Not even close. She barely made a dent.
I'd bet money that the only group to perform better over the same timeframe is the list Nobel Prize winners themselves.
Edit: I stand corrected. Solvay Conference had 15/29 one year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference#Fifth_Confer...
>Gifted children who have a noticeable head start and whose skill development begins remarkably early _do not_ usually end up being game changing professionals in their respective fields.
Really now?
>Developing a skill set early on leads to competence in what is learned but stumps creativity and chances of innovation.
So having an deep, innate, intuitive grasp of a certain set of knowledge, made possible by said early exposure and disciplined training, has nothing to do with genius and potential inventive achievement in later life? But rather, it only allows for uncreative competence in what is learned and practiced, that and only that?
Really?
Is this man serious? How does something like this even pass for an article? How much thinking goes into writing something like this? Christ almighty.
I love it because the very things that Mr. Grant here paints as inhibitory to creativity are exactly the essential components of creative genius! His information is not only incorrect, it is the exact opposite of how things do work in real life.
It's not a zero sum game. Both of aspects in question - Disciplined skill development as well as Creativity - are essential for intellectual success and are interdependent.
Structure, discipline, strong parent engagement and emphasis on learning and skill development, AS WELL AS creative undertakings, play, leisurely engagement, passionate tinkering / creation - both aspects are crucial.
In order to be able to create, the child has to imitate first. In order to fall in love with a pursuit, it has to be exposed to it first. And in order to be creatively successful in a pursuit, the child has to be very skilled in it first. And parents' intervention, guidance and support are very important in this regard.
>Really now?
Um, yes? Are you challenging the article's claim here? Depending on how strictly we're defining "game changing", only a small handful of people, even those who were "gifted" as children, ever accomplish anything really notable.
You can look at this [1] followup of "mathematically precocious" youth, for example. Around 10% ended up tenured at a top-50 university or became CEO of a Fortune 500 company. It is unlikely that anyone in the other ~90% is doing anything "game changing". Not even everyone in that 10% group is doing something "game changing".
[1] https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/01/Article-PS-Lubi...
1. You're defining "gifted" in a much narrower way than the article's arguments. Being a high achiever in math doesn't really encapsulate the meaning the article assigns when it creates a gifted vs. creative dichotomy.
2. It's pretty pointless to talk about the achievement of one group without comparing it to your control group. Do you think 10% of the general public is tenured at a top-50 university or a CEO of a Fortune 500 company? What about 10% of the creatives the article lauds? You know, without seatbelts there's only around 25 deaths per billion vehicle miles in the US. Nevermind that seatbelts cut that rate in half. . .
The reason why the article is interesting is because it goes against the common wisdom "you need to know the rules to break em", and backs its claim up with peer-reviewed science. And while you may find the findings unpalatable, isn't this how progress is made?
For all the author's dressing up a horrid argument with strained "statistics," he misses a key fact. True breakthroughs in most fields come around rarely, in time frames usually measured in decades. In the meantime, the market for high-end practitioners is evergreen.
For every Mozart, there are thousands of musicians to play in world-class orchestras. For every Jonas Salk, there are hundreds of thousands of doctors. On a risk-adjusted scale, shooting for competent if slightly less creative seems like a much wiser bet.
Performing music and writing music are really very different art forms. I'm surprised this NY Times author has conflated the two. Writing music is not the next step after learning to play music.
I remember reading some of László Polgár work after becoming interested in how he raised three daughters, two became chess prodigies, the third a concert musician. He posited that "that any child has the innate capacity to become a genius in any chosen field, as long as education starts before their third birthday and they begin to specialise at six". This seems at odds with the notion that parents should "back off".
Additionally, as I mentioned in another post. Many parts of the world have some of the most creative children and adults and their parents did the opposite.
Not saying either of these is right or wrong, but I am beginning to think creativity, like anything else, is more affected by culture and the surrounding of a child rather than just parenting. Kids are seen more by their peers and teachers than their parents ffs.
1.) High achievers are used to pushing at things to win. Creativity is like a garden - you have to do some tending, but then you have to back off and let the plants grow. Fiddling doesn't help, in fact you're liable to end up killing the plants.
2.) Smart people actually learn too fast. Creativity requires very broad neural connectivity, and I think fast learning tends to produce neural networks with sparse connectivity to different areas. This is supported to a degree by learning in artificial neural networks. When the learning rate in artificial neural networks is too fast, this can cause the network parameters to converge prematurely. This premature convergence typically results in poor generalization performance. It is also worth noting that human brains mature more slowly than those of previous hominids and great apes.
Anyhow, the point wasn't to say Brains == ANN, rather it was to show how learning too quickly has consequences in other models of learning. This was mostly so people wouldn't just dismiss the idea out of hand as having no justification (which people seem to want to do regardless).
The trappings of intelligence are different, but very high raw intelligence is seen across most walks of life including actors, athletes, and salesmen.
As for your uber race, maybe you want to use the word "talent" instead. The only thing that connect these highly talented peopled is that they seem to excel at pretty much everything they put their minds to. If you tested them you'd find that their IQs have a fairly broad range. The median would certainly be above average but that isn't what makes them different. It is more about learning to focus and apply yourself than having a knack for manipulating symbols in your head.
https://polymatharchives.blogspot.ca/2015/01/the-inappropria...
Another disagreement: Not all intelligent people are highly social. Many are introverted.
Intelligent or introverted kids get bullied the most.
Source? I've never heard of intelligence being correlated with visual attractiveness.
Artificial Neural Networks/DL =! Biological Neural Networks
The repeat after me meme is really condescending by the way, might want to avoid using that.
Conversely, with my children, I try to talk with them as much as I can, and let them talk too. I let them order food themselves and I demand good table manners. That doesn't mean they can't be children, but they are not allowed to climb under or on the table, or be a nuisance. An easy fix for a problem child in a restaurant is to leave. The child must learn that there are consequences. The child wont go? Leave without them and they will freak and catch up. They fail that drag them out. Saying no and sticking with it is important, but equally important is giving the child a chance to catch up, mentally, with decision making and situational awareness.
And then you see a clip of 5-year old Messi (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DWZ0fD64Uk) demolishing the other 5-year old kids who happened to share the same football field as him and realize that "letting your kid be creative" and all this mumbo-jumbo talk doesn't mean anything unless your kid doesn't have the inside genius-like quality. Bonus link, the Maradona childhood tricks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAjQ7NF8Hj0
The best marathon runner is probably sitting on a couch eating a bag of cheetos.
More than likely, they simply lacked the capacity to be original (as in, world-class historical originality, which is the subject under discussion here), just in the same way that almost all people lack this capacity. It's only particularly surprising that child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses if you confuse genius with the capacity to learn information and acquire skills. Mastering calculus at age 6, though highly unusual, does not in itself constitute original work, and, going off of the data, is not an extremely strong indicator of the presence of the capacity to do original work.
So you can't necessarily expect creativity-focused interventions on child prodigies to produce more revolutionary geniuses than normal.
I think the most important thing, however, is to provide resources for learning, far beyond what is available in our pitiful public education system, which is designed more to cater to the mean and less to allow remarkable students to fully excel.
Digression aside:
> Creativity may be hard to nurture, but it’s easy to thwart.
There are many parents though that do just to opposite by not backing off no? This is sort of generalizing, but kids from Asian countries are a great counterpoint to this. With that in mind, couldn't we also amend that theory, and add culture as a factor?
Furthermore, isn't it also the case that since kids are getting into school earlier than they used to (say 50 or so years ago; random number, don't goto imright.com and disprove it xD), wouldn't they be more susceptible to other kids/teachers? I mean now a days parents see their kids less than their teachers. They basically work 9-5 just like adults.
Addendum: Forgot which famous book this is from: But appraising a child for their hardwork over natural talent is one of the best things we can do. So to that end, creativity should be garnered as something one has to work towards. Man.. I can't wait to test all this shit on my kids.. (obviously joking)
Edit: Change wording and add more meaningful question.
Just?!?
Said differently: slightly less than 1/2% of identified gifted teenagers in this group went on to win Nobel prizes. Given the rarity of Nobel prize winners and the difficulty of predicting future Nobel prize winners (as teenagers) that strikes me is pretty amazing.
As an anecdotal example my toddler was often the smallest kid in a given group of playing children. He was at the mall play area one day and he kept getting knocked down onto the foam floor. I kept thinking man I've got to step in and helicopter a bit. I almost did, but right as another kid was about to bump into him he did something new. He bowed at the legs, leaned and braced with his elbows causing the kid to bounce off harmlessly and they both ran on.
I'm often reminded of that moment now when I see him in safe but precarious situations. I'm always there for him if he needs me, but I have to wonder if I step in am I denying him a life lesson?
My siblings and I had the same imperfect parenting, same resources, similar genetics, etc, and at the end of the day I was the one that went hardcore down creative pursuits during childhood. I could see a similar spark in my siblings, but for whatever reason they put their 10,000 hours elsewhere. It was only during college that one of my brothers picked up writing and the other picked up music. The potential (and opportunity!) was always there, but for whatever reason they didn't capitalize on it in childhood.
Even the best athletes didn’t start out any better than their peers. When Dr. Bloom’s team interviewed tennis players who were ranked in the top 10 in the world, they were not, to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, doing push-ups since they were a fetus. Few of them faced intense pressure to perfect the game as Andre Agassi did. A majority of the tennis stars remembered one thing about their first coaches: They made tennis enjoyable.
All kids are different. Child rearing is as far from "one weird trick" territory as you can get.
In the case where you can't have both. I think it's better to focus on discipline. At least you'd get something tiny done, not just wandering around.
I know some people believe there's a correlation between good engineers and musical study (no idea if that's true, only that I've read it before)
I also know that I've rarely met a child that wants to practice their musical instrument. Usually they have to be made to do it "No TV, no internet, no video games until you've finished your piano practice!" "But Mom!!!!!"
I know lots of adults that are happy they can play a musical instrument or speak a second language (parents sent them to language school as a child) but I know of few children who would chose to do either of them.
I believe that the second step, making things fun, mostly consists of letting young people be with their friends, with no more than some open space, and only the minimum adult involvement needed to maintain safety.
I find this somewhat offensive. Gifted kids should be encouraged (cautiously & organically) - not be turned into a beauty pageant style competition.
Why on earth is that something to 'lament'?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14128052 and marked it off-topic.