It took me longer to graduate at that point, but it was mostly because I was expected to do work and I never did before. I hated learning in a structured manner and being forced to do things. In fact, my lack of focus is what led me to learn about things on my own. I was reading calculus textbooks when I was 10 years old. I struggled with it, but it was fun. Then I'd read some physics instead because I felt like it.

Maybe successful people have lazer focus. But not all talented people are focused.

>I was reading calculus textbooks when I was 10 years old.

I suggest that you, indeed, spent effort on your studies.

A 10 year old child who can enjoy them must have some gift that makes it easier for them to understand the difficult parts quickly and get straight to the rewarding part.

Or what?

The rest of us are dumb?

It could have been a good teacher, who found a way to make it make sense, or some other series of positive reinforcement that shaped them and prepared them, to be thinking about mathematics clearly. It doesn't have to be the luck of the draw.

I don't want anyone to give up, thinking they just didn't get the gift, so they should be content with playing with the ball. If you don't get mathematics, you might just haven't had the right circumstances to get it yet.

Whether or not it would have worked to teach it that way in the original circumstances (perhaps there were other things that needed to fall into place first), it's very clear that the right motivation and the right context have a huge impact on people's eagerness to learn and their ability to grok a concept.

Just because most people will never be Olympic medalists doesn't mean they shouldn't play sports and exercise. Lots of people do those things even when they don't have a particular gift.

If you want to be an olympic medalist, you need to work as hard as an olympic medalist.

If you do not want to be an olympic medalist, you do not work more hard than an olympic medalist.

And indeed, if you actually did work as hard as an olympic medalist, you could possibly receive an olympic medal.

Edit: typo

After this I didn't really rely on her help anymore.

I know of a specific technique for teaching algebra - write down the principle used to justify each step in a derivation/solution - that will teach algebra cold but it "costs" too much so we don't do that.

I've heard at least one "officer" ( like dean ) level academic say "We use calculus class to keep the stupid people outta med school."

I used to HATE the language subjects. Now that I'm not being forced to do it, I enjoy linguistics.

> But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests.

While you then go on to say that that is exactly what you yourself did. That you don't like being forced to learn is besides the point, but also sort of confirms it. You spend time (learning) on things you enjoy. That's how you become "gifted". The trick is having kids be engaged with something productive and not spending time on [insert subjective detrimental activity here]. Whether parents can influence that or it's down to luck is debatable, but I definitely lean towards the former.

Whether you call them hobbies or studies, the fact that you were intrinsically motivated to pour effort into them is why you got so good at them.

Then your case does not contradict the OC's view that "Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you."

I would sit in class and play games (which I'd programmed) on my TI-83, or read books. I would drift my attention to the teacher's lecture occasionally, just enough to convince myself I understood what was being taught, then back to my game.

I never took notes, nor did I study for tests, even through my undergrad in computer science. I got an A+ in multivariable calculus just by listening to the prof talk, and piecing together my comprehension on the fly.

As far as focus goes, often my focus is laser guided but I'm not in control of the laser. When something catches my interest, it becomes all I can think about for weeks. I'll obsess over it and learn everything I can about it, until my interest wanes.

I'm left with really deep knowledge of really obscure topics, and shallow-to-nonexistent knowledge of many common topics, which makes me a surprising conversation partner.

And yet you also told us:

I was reading calculus textbooks when I was 10 years old.

I scored in the 99th percentile in math on the California high school exit exam.

I transferred to a university as a junior at 17.

Regardless of the nature/nurture debate, if you can achieve those things at those ages with any amount of work then you are clearly far smarter than most people, at least when it comes to mathematics.

Not being a genius means that he is merely 2 standard deviations smarter than the mean (think "there's a few of those in every high school class") rather than 4 standard deviations smarter like the kids in the SMPY.

Rather a few of those in every high school. 2 standard deviations means 2.5% per side. This is one in 40 people, so probably on average 2-3 people per year in an average high school.

Of course, pre selection can lead to higher values, but having several children outside of 2std dev in a class won't be average in the vast majority of schools.

It's probably more fun or compulsive than laser focus. One savant was described as a calendar addict. He'd ask when you were born first thing when he met you. He developed an ability to calculate the day of the week for any given date in seconds.

according to who? The best I can find is that a particular IQ test (the Stanford-Binet test) used that definition from 1916 to 1937[1]. Might be time to update your sources :P

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius#IQ_and_genius

As compared to other people trying things for the first time I'm usually a very quick learner. I think being a quick learner is innate. I've had the ability to learn things quickly since early childhood.

> Reading is not understanding - maybe you just enjoyed the attention that you got from it.

I didn't get any attention from this, I tried to hide it from other kids so I don't stand out too much. When I placed first in the math Olympiad they kind of resented me and said "oh, he studies like a grade ahead of the rest of us". I was actually much further ahead. Calculus is NOT that hard. It's not a super power to be able to understand calculus. It's just a little bit more abstract (limits and so forth are not intuitive for some people).

> This contextually implies you consider yourself talented

I think I'm talented. I just don't actually do anything useful with my life. The last course I had to complete to finish college was a technical writing course. It was 100% busywork and presentations and posters and BSing. It was the worst.

mmh ... what a calm and measured response. and now I feel a bit bad for having responded so harsh - though honestly more tongue in cheek.

actually I can relate to what you said. also read calculus and algebra books as a teenager, wrote a book about JavaScript when I was fifteen, later studied math, most of my teachers in high school told me on a regular basis that I'm a genius and our gifted.

now, I wouldn't say that I didn't do anything useful with my life ... though nothing useful of the academic or technological kind. I rather lost respect for intelligence, the focus on IQ, status symbols and success in general. instead i try to become a happier and inspired person which brings something good to the world and into the life of the people surrounding me.

You know, I think you might be a genius dude.

If you understand that a human being has a higher cognitive function than a sea slug, a wasp, a mouse, a dog, a dolphin, an ape, by our genetics alone, then you have to accept that there is a degree of genetic variance between individual humans. It's not like the moment we all qualify as the same species all genetic variance in every regard goes away. Some people are taller than others, some people are better at abstract thought, some people are better at linear calculation.

Of course nurturing these talents is incredibly important, nobody is denying that. But the more studies that come out, the more it seems to suggest that the ability to produce exceptional results with the nurturing of specific practices is hugely magnified by genetic predisposition.

We are pretty sure that learning & hard work is important for everyone, no matter how genius.

We suspect that focusing on innate aptitude encourages laziness and/or learned helplessness.

And of course, lastly, you can't change it.

It just doesn't seem that productive to worry about how genetically gifted you are, one way or the other. Potentially even detrimental.

A human infant at birth has a brain size similar to a chimpanzee, but the human's brain grows much, much larger and more complex over the next decade of two. Human brains also grow to support the cognitive burdens they're directed to: people who study music intensively rather than baseball will grow distinctive brain folds, for example.

Can't play football? That's genetics!! Knows math? More genetics!!

Are actually there studies that claim a special ability is due to genetics only?

Not "only", but yes, there are studies attributing variation in intelligence in significant part to genetics.

https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/traits/intelligence

> These studies suggest that genetic factors underlie about 50 percent of the difference in intelligence among individuals.

Whether it's higher endurance, a tiny difference in bone structure, longer arms, greater height, etc. - that's all mostly genetics with a bit of environmental factors mixed in (like childhood nutrition)

But cognitive abilities and intelligence are far less understood, because you simply can't measure it as well as physical achievements (in fact, some of the top comments here gripe about using a PhD degree as a benchmark for achievement; or patents; or publications; or even income level)

Are you really suggesting that genetics don't play a role in who can successfully play football? If I'm 6'5", is that because I practiced at my height for 10,000 hours?

By the way, to act like genetics are "suddenly" king because of some pop-science trend is ridiculous. Genetics have always been king, it's how we evolved from a single celled organism to what we are now.

That said, where exactly is the genetic factor that determines whether a person is more intelligent than other? Is it more neurons? More connections among them? the ability to process information quicker?

Again, what's that evidence? Is it a genome? some sort of better brain capacity?

I'm saying that were there a dearth of evidence either way, the argument for a genetic basis would still be valid based on the premise that the brain is a physical structure (among other things). In actuality, there's a good bit of evidence that its at least partially, and perhaps mostly, genetic.

> Again, what's that evidence? Is it a genome? some sort of better brain capacity?

Its polygenetic and at least partially influenced by the environment. Its unlikely that higher brain capacity plays a large role (in the difference between humans). Identical twins separated at birth provide the best evidence

> yet you're down voting my comment

Wasn't me :)

I wholeheartedly disagree with your opening statement, the two are not very different in all likelihood.

In most sports, we have clear rules about who is better at it. Let's say long jump. It's clear that a person with larger limbs (genetics) will have an advantage above one that has shorter limbs. How do we translate this in cognitive ability?

A person is more intelligent than other because they passed a test? because they can draw better? Everything is loosely defined.

We have widely-accepted manners in which to gauge intelligence. If you dispute them, that's another matter.

It's well-established that the measures show a genetic correlation.

If you were to find another measure of intelligence, besides the standard ones, we can use our experience and facts to surmise with a high confidence that those, too, would prove to be influenced by genetics.

Of course there are, like tetrachromacy [1]. Or even more mundane: XY chromosomes prevent men from having the ability to give birth.

I also think you're vastly underappreciating the results from genetic studies. Twin studies have repeatedly shown that identical twins separated at birth and growing up in wildly differing conditions, still largely end up with similar temperaments, similar world views, and similar intelligence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy

Certainly nurturing an ability will enhance performance, but there's an inherent upper limit to everything. Just like eating right and exercising won't make you grow taller than some max threshold, so studying and solving riddles won't make you more intelligent than some upper bound dictated by your genes. We don't know how to measure that yet, for either height or intelligence, but that bound is there.

I just can't.

Sorry to say, there is already plenty of evidence of direct genetic impact on cognitive ability that you can see with your own eyes, even ignoring the twin studies that all but prove that cognitive functions are largely heritable. For instance, down syndrome, Tay-Sachs disease and Leukodystrophies.

The scientific case is in: given comparable nutrition and a standard education, your intelligence as compared to your peers is determined by your genetic makeup.

This says nothing about your work ethic or your determination of course, and thus what you can achieve if you put in enough effort. Intelligence is merely a metric stating that given the same amount of work expended on cognitive problems, those with higher intelligence will do better on average.

For various special abilities, including intelligence, there are studies that establish the degree to which they are heritable, as well as the effect of particular environmental and other factors in determining the non-inherited portion of the variability.

Chess is a good example. I've seen a 12 year old kid at a chess competition wipe the floor with dozens of much older players (people in their 40's, 50's, and up), who've been playing chess -- obsessively -- their whole lives.

This 12 year old kid has been playing chess for maybe 6 years (let's say 8 years maximum), but he totally crushes others who've played 40 or 50 years or more. Chess can be very addictive, and a lot of people spend virtually all their waking time playing it, for decades on end, studying, competing, yet that's not enough, and they can be easily beaten by someone much, much younger than them, who's put in only a tiny fraction of the time and effort they have.

I've also seen a 10 year old kid, who was really hyperactive and distracted when he played, always looking around him at everything but the chessboard, apparently interested in anything but chess. His mother sat next to him, and had to struggle to get his attention back to the board whenever it was his move. Yet he played at a high level against people much older than him. Again, he really couldn't have put that much time in to it, no matter how interested he was in it.. and he clearly wasn't that interested.

Chess is one of those fields where prodigies are relatively common, especially compared to fields like poetry that really do require a lot of life experience to be effective. The kids I've described are not that rare. It happens even at the highest levels, with Bobby Fischer being the archetypical example (becoming the youngest grandmaster at 15 and winning the US championship at 14). These days chess prodigies are even more common than in Fisher's time, thanks to computers and the internet. Still, whatever happens with them is not explained by the hours they put in to the game alone, as many people put in many more hours and much more effort than they do and still fail miserably.

Golf seems to be fairly similar. Lots of players spend every weekend at the range and take endless lessons and workshops, but never manage to get their handicap down to single figures.

It seems that there's a critical age when one's mind is better able to assimilate and make sense of the patterns in chess, and to memorize moves and positions. Chess requires a lot of pattern recognition and memorization, and if one does not train those early enough, it may be too late.

It would be a very interesting study to find out how many of those old, weak players actually did have a lot of exposure to and training in chess when they were young.. my bet is not a lot.

Also, I wouldn't expect to find a lot of highly achieving chess players who started playing chess later in life (let's say past their teens), no matter how brilliant and talented they are in other fields, or how well they perform on IQ tests or SATs. They'll probably be beaten by much younger players, no matter how much time and effort they put in to chess.

Learning to play chess well seems to be somewhat similar to becoming fluent in a foreign language, which children also usually excel in compared to adults.

Many amateurs never get good because they they don't practice the right things(e.g. putting and short game). Drive for show, putt for dough.

I've been labeled a genius as a kid and e.g. loved to beat the best chess computers at that time, Mephisto III on the highest level in the 80ies. I loved to play blind also, but stopped that when I couldn't get to sleep or would not stop dreaming about tricky moves. But I never had a chance against humans on lower levels.

The problem was the time constraint and nervousness. In tournaments and chess clubs deep thinking is not valued, only experience. Folks in the chess club mainly do train speed chess, and simple tournaments limit the time to 30mins.

But the good parts of my chess start when I can concentrate deeper than that, to the 2.5 hrs mark. As with playing against the computer those times. With time constraints I got nervous, didn't calculate through, took too high risks, or when playing against girls just made stupid mistakes. I usually was the last or 2nd to last in club tournaments (30min). I didn't like playing chess against humans at all, that's why I stopped playing it. And nowadays I could never beat a good chess computer. Because they are too fast and force me to play too fast also. It's not fun anymore.

But blitz tournaments are not the only, or even the most popular type of tournament. When you see someone's chess rating (ie. 1700, 2000, etc), those are ratings at slow time controls. When someone is referred to as a "grandmaster", it refers to a title that is earned at slow time controls. The world chess championship is played at slow time controls. There are blitz tournaments, but they are not as popular. Blitz is very popular in clubs, though. You're right there.

My guess is that you couldn't leverage your superior slow chess skills to blitz because you just didn't practice much blitz (ie. short time controls or fast games) on your computer, or against human players. This is understandable, and is quite common. It takes some practice to get used to playing blitz. I'd bet you would have made a fine blitz player if you'd put in some time practicing it, and your slow chess skills would have helped you in blitz, as blitz and slow chess aren't different games, but blitz relies more on intuition as opposed to deep analysis. But both blitz and slow chess require good pattern recognition and memorization, so your aptitude in the slow chess would have helped you in blitz, once you got enough practice in playing more intuitively at faster speeds.

Finally, as far as chess computer these days go: just because the computer moves fast doesn't mean you have to move fast. You can set whatever time controls you want when you play against a computer -- hours, days, weeks, or even turn the clock off altogether. On the other hand, chess computers have gotten so good these days that unless you're a world class player, you're just not going to beat them at their highest difficulty settings, no matter how much time you have (unless you cheat). They're still good to practice with, and you can still play slow chess (even correspondence chess, where you mail or email moves to each other and take a long time to reply) against humans. I think if you look, you'll find plenty of slow chess fans around the world that you can play.

  >In certain areas, hours might be enough,

I learnt recently that Chess computers/programs are pre-seeded with standard moves and apparently do very badly if they're set to play without using the traditional openings. This seems to move against your analysis of what is needed to play chess well. Study of stock openings also appears to be required to perform well.

Gifted children have the gift of being interested in things that are useful, that can give them money or high status like art, math, chess, technology...

A child who has an obsessive interest with candy or playing tag or watching TV (or just normal stuff that normal children do) will have to work harder to resist more temptations and focus on schoolwork and useful things.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinat...

So yes she worked hard really really hard. But, those hours where simply worth more than other peoples.

In the end the nature vs. nurture debate is silly as it takes both to succeed. The minimums simply increase as you go up the scale. There are a few short people in the NBA, but nobody is below 5' tall. The top women are vastly better than the average man, but the classic men's vs women's sports has a core basis in biology.

*Shorthand for wanted to work for Disney as a kid, now has actual movie credits and words for Disney. That's about as concrete a form of success as you get for such a subjective field.

Definitely, but people don't get good at drawing without spending hours at it.

You may be stuck at a local maximum, and it may take a good or different coach to get you around it, but generally you can always improve.

But just trying harder is ineffective. You have to diagnose your problem, and how to fix it. Maybe you need a coach.

I remember having to "invent" all kinds of ways of looking at my drawings to get better. To get them to the next level. After a while you can't look at them objectively ... so you look at them in a mirror. You squint, to get a better sense of the balance. Upside down. You get the idea. It's problem solving.

I think of drawing as learning to see.

I took every elective I could in school, and would have taken more if AP and college prep classes weren't a priority for my parents. I used how-to books, and I still look up techniques from time to time. I've had lots and lots of practice: I went for years drawing and painting daily. That was probably my biggest increase in quality. I used to wish for art school.

My current liking is doing surrealist and visionary art in watercolor and ink: I've currently 3 canvases waiting on acrylic.

And through it all, I truly think it is a combination of talent plus practice plus interest/focus in some form. Most folks with enough practice can make beautiful landscapes and still life pictures, just like folks can learn to take a basic excellent picture most times. Everyone can learn basics.

Not everyone can bend their minds in ways to incorporate subdued symbolism in surrealist work - not everyone can look at a canvas in that way. Some of the really great photography is because the person thought to take the picture - not everyone does that in that way. Not everyone can create. That is where the talent bit comes in.

However, if art didn't interest me, I very much doubt I would have filled my time with it to get better.

I think this works similarly for math and other things, for the majority of us.

My observations from a year of drafting in high school (Future engineers need to be able to make and read blueprints was a fad a couple decades ago) and work with people in the field, there are people who can do three dimensional transforms and manipulations in their head with little effort beyond the mere mechanics of pencil on paper (or fingers on CAD workstation). There are also those who cannot visualize complex shapes in three dimensions. Just like you can't verbally tell people to train harder to grow taller it does not appear possible to learn how to visualize. I've observed those who can't visualize have all kinds of interesting coping mechanisms ranging from simply asking for help to leaving the field entirely to really elaborate memorized heuristics. Either you can, or cannot, visualize a basic transmission for a crane complete with which direction the gears rotate. No amount of staring at a blank sheet of paper will help, and practice does not help those people who can't and merely wastes the time of those who can.

Apparently you can train creativity and style, but the mental act of three dimensional visualization is either functional or absent.

So you're saying she did have a single-minded focus on school?

Considering she wanted to be an artist and mostly did that on the side, school was a net loss of time. It's one thing to scrape a C and doodle in all your classes, it's another to find time to draw on the side in the middle of a hectic schedule. Getting a 5 in AP calculus is hard for most people who want to use it, for someone who has little interest in math that's a huge time investment.

AKA if you do one thing well then you can argue it's a time investment, when you do everything well that takes something more.

>has an IMDB page

is a funny metric for success.

It's a surprisingly brutal world. She got into CalArts which has a 27.5% acceptance rate and the application takes a lot of time, so I suspect they scare off a lot of people.

But I failed the other criteria in the article, inventions (even if I invented a certain computer-game-as-artform category in the 90ies), PhD, scientific success, ...

Yes, it's a funny metric. And even if e.g. Cannes states that you can attend the festival if you are on IMDB, they never let me in. (Nowadays I wouldn't want to either because of politics) So it's inconsistent also.

Anyone in SAG can have an IMDB page. I know this because I have a child who has one after doing some trivial commercial and short film work...it really isn't a high bar, sorry.

Yea, it's not curing cancer. But, I know a lot more failed artists than successful ones.

People can always add an arbitrary benchmark. But, having reached a major and difficult life goal at mid twenty is further than the vast majority of people out there.

This is obviously untrue. It's been well established that a significant fraction of intelligence is heritable, which means nurture has little to do with innate ability.

Further, there are plenty of examples of true geniuses, like Mozart for music and Ramanujan for mathematics, where they almost immediately grasped their subject and became experts rivaling their contemporaries with very little practice.

But genius is clearly not a binary quality, it's a continuum. There exist people slightly less adept than Ramanujan, and so had to put in more work to become experts, but still far less work than an average person would. You didn't have anyone to share your interests because your age group just couldn't naturally see the beauty you saw in your interests. Not wouldn't, couldn't without some serious coaching.

At the end to the day, hard work is what allows one to push the limits. A gift/talent is just a good kickstart that makes the owner's life easier, but people with talent are quickly limited if they don't work hard. the biggest issues are that people counting on their gift are afraid of exposing their limitation and become more and more shy of taking risk, they also often don't get into the habit of working.

Finding "gifted" children does not contradict this. Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius.

Yes, technically no one pops out knowing trig or calculus, but some are born with the cognitive capacity, which later manifests in life, to readily master abstract and complicated stuff, and others aren't born with that ability so they struggle to understand concepts that smart people grasp easily. Although ability can be lopsided (some are better at math than verbal), the less intelligent tend to have no dominant strengths - they are just average. And that's fine. Most people are that way.

Gifted children are "gifted" with a laser focus on the unusual things that they find fun - math, music, what-have-you. They spend countless hours playing with numbers or with music, while little Johnny is playing with a ball.

Why don't adults play with paste, coloring books, and alphabet letters? Because they are too mentally mature for those activities. Likewise, high-IQ children have a higher mental age, hence they find these tasks tedious and boring, as adults do.

Anyway, point is, when people point to "gifted" talent, this is just another cop-out. They don't have an explanation. They are appealing to everybody's shared sense of magical outcomes. But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests.

Well, there's something called an IQ score, and it does a pretty good job at predicting all sorts of things, such as socioeconomic outcomes, job performance, educational attainment, welfare dependency, and learning ability. The IQ test is one of great achievements of human psychology, is much harder to manipulate than EQ tests, and scores tend to remain stable throughout life.

This is my thinking as well. I was a kid like this. I suspect there's a connection between being asocial and being 'gifted.' If you're happy playing with compilers and such and don't feel the need to run out of the house to play ball, then you're just going to soak up a whole lot of stuff other kids aren't. The laser focus is probably optional as well. Although, I suspect there's a connection with being asocial and being easily and deeply focused on things other than socializing.

As an adult, I'm still asocial. I also am not introverted, which seems to be a common misconception about this personality type. I can be very loud, outgoing and demanding if need be and feel perfectly natural. I just don't like to socialize very often.

That said, I was talking about ordinary children without any selection. After school I went to math faculty in university with similar children. That was cruel, I sometimes felt so stupid.

There's definitely talent. And there's hard work. And sometimes it goes hand-to-hand, sometimes it's not. There are untalented people who's working hard and achieve a lot. There are talented people who doesn't give a damn and yet achieve a lot. And there are talented people who word hard and flying in the sky.

Doesn't really match my experience of gifted children, many of which are not gifted "with a laser focus" on anything, and perform very well at things that they don't spend additional time on.

> But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests.

It pretty clearly does not; people don't get the same results out of putting the same hours into the same things.

I don't dispute that effort is a variable in long term performance, but it's more of a criterion for long term performance than a predictor of raw talent imo.

I will also say that being singled out for special treatment is pretty silly, I think a more constructive use of my time as a child would have been to help peers who were struggling.

Problem solving ability and comprehension levels will only take one so far if they can't bring themselves to bury their head in a book, or sit in front of a piano, or shoot hoops, for the time necessary to master said subject.

If you read Ericsson's papers, he does in fact specifically deny any role to talent and genes, by name, unequivocally. It's not a strawman, it's what he really believes. Deliberate practice is also falsified by Hambrick's meta-analyses: it does not explain much of difference in performance compared to talent. They are not gifted with 'a laser focus', they are gifted with things like intelligence.

in reality, inherent talent clearly plays a very strong role. As a crude illustration, suppose

math_skill = hours_worked * beta, and assume the "quality" of hours_worked is standardized. While beta is positive for most people, beta could vary a lot based on talent (obviously the function is not linear and may also peak / approach an asymptote. or for some people the function increases more slowly but reaches a higher peak. point is that it's complex).

You can preserve your creativity (doing things your own way) if you are prepared to pay the social cost but intelligence is largely inherited.

And intelligent women are having fewer children nowadays...

In the end, I had practiced more and have pretty much programmed everyday for 7 years, while they only did the minimum requirement to pass classes in CS>

Nature versus Nurture.

Nobody pops out a "math" genius. However, it could be supposed that some pop out with a greater ability to quickly recognize and remember patterns of information acquired by their senses. My ad-hoc life experience has shown that some people are good at most things they try to do, and it takes them significantly less time to acquire and use new skills than the norm.

So you believe in the 10 000 hours empirical rule based on "outliers" with very little evidence to support it?

[1] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/peak/

Two thirds of the world's current math researchers can trace lineage to just 23, 17th century mathematicians.

Source: http://www.nature.com/news/majority-of-mathematicians-hail-f...