Developing Talent in Young People

"This book reports an in-depth study of 120 people across different fields – from music and art to science and sports – who reached the highest level of accomplishment. Bloom and his colleagues set out to understand how these people were able to develop their capacities so fully. Did they achieve because of some rare, innate qualities or did they achieve as a result of training and encouragement? Or both? His conclusions were surprising, to say the least. What he found was that exceptional achievement seemed to come from training and perseverance, and not really from genetic endowment. In fact, he found very little relationship between early signs of aptitude and later success. Few of the great achievers studied were considered child prodigies. Very few, even by 12 years of age, showed signs that they would be the ones who went to the top. So he asked: What commonality can you identify in their backgrounds? And he found that a key factor was the home environment. Their home environments developed a work ethic and focused on the importance of doing your best at whatever you do, across the board. Nowadays, we think we need to tell our kids that everything they do is great and that we need to make sure they aren’t struggling. But the homes that produced the really high achievers focused on work ethic and pride in doing your best. They were not pushing the child every minute or pushing them towards greatness, but they taught the child to set high standards and persevere. The other critical thing was at least a decade of commitment to increasingly complex learning. Bloom identified stages of learning that become more and more demanding, and that take more and more commitment on the part of the individual and the people surrounding him or her. Early on it’s the parents and the mentors who support the child in approaching demanding tasks, but ultimately the individual has to assume that commitment. Bloom also studied normal academic achievement and came to a radical conclusion. He said that after 40 years of intensive research on schools and learning he believed that “what any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn with appropriate prior and current conditions of learning”. He’s not including people with severe learning disabilities and he is acknowledging that there are people with extraordinary abilities. But other than a few percent at the top and bottom, he concluded from his research that what anyone can learn everyone can learn. That is a radical and thrilling idea. I don’t know if it’s true, but I really hope it is. This book and subsequent work by researchers like Geoffrey Cohen shows that setting high standards and mentoring people to reach those standards is critical. My work suggests this needs to be done in the context of valuing the learning process and incremental improvement, not just pushing kids for the end product. Lavishly praising kids has almost become synonymous with good parenting, and in some cases good coaching. Parents believe that if they tell their kids they’re great they are equipping them with confidence and setting them up for the good life. My research shows that the wrong kind of praise – praise for intelligence – actually makes children fragile. I’ve done some work with professional sports coaches and one of them told me recently that his biggest shock in coaching was discovering how fragile professional athletes are. They’re vulnerable because their talent has been hyped. They feel they shouldn’t make mistakes and they shouldn’t need to struggle. A few years back, a compelling magazine article came out about our research on praise. Panicked parents started forming support groups to help each other break the habit of bad praise and to help each other redefine good parenting as parenting that acknowledged, encouraged and praised kids for choosing hard tasks, working hard, overcoming obstacles and mastering new things. I tell parents to sit around the dinner table and ask, “Who’s had a fabulous struggle today?” “Who tried something really hard and learned something new?” What this does, over time, is create a new value system. Being brilliant and perfect is not a good value system. Encouraging kids to take on challenges and work hard to achieve things is better. Teach kids that when they struggle and stretch out of their comfort zone to learn new things, that’s when their brain makes new connections, that’s when they become smarter. In a fixed mindset struggling makes you feel dumb, but in a growth mindset if you visualise your brain making all these new connections it has a dramatically different feeling."