Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice. Matthew Syed

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       2 Miraculous Children?

      The Myth of the Child Prodigy

      Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a sensation in the courts of eighteenth-century Europe. At the age of just six, he was enchanting members of the aristocracy with his skills on the piano, often with his sister Maria Anna playing alongside him. He began composing pieces for the violin and piano at the age of five, going on to produce many works before his tenth birthday. Pretty impressive stuff for a boy in short trousers.

      How do you solve a conundrum like Mozart? Even those sympathetic to the idea that excellence emerges over the course of ten thousand hours of practice are stumped when attempting to explain the timeless genius of one of history’s greatest composers, a man who has changed lives with his artistic insight and intricate creativity.

      Surely this is an example of a man who was born with his sublime abilities intact, a man who came into the world stamped with the mark of genius? After all, Mozart had scarcely even lived ten thousand hours by the time he was getting to grips with the piano and his early compositions.

      But is that the whole story? Here is Mozart’s early life, told in a little more detail by the journalist and author Geoff Colvin:

      Mozart’s father was of course Leopold Mozart, a famous composer and performer in his own right. He was also a domineering parent who started his son on a programme of intensive training in composition and performing at age three. Leopold was well qualified for his role as little Wolfgang’s teacher by more than just his own eminence; he was deeply interested in how music was taught to children.

      While Leopold was only so-so as a musician, he was highly accomplished as a pedagogue. His authoritative book on violin instruction, published the same year Wolfgang was born, remained influential for decades. So, from the earliest age, Wolfgang was receiving heavy instruction from an expert teacher who lived with him…

      Mozart’s first work regarded today as a masterpiece, with its status confirmed by the number of recordings available, is his Piano Concerto No. 9, composed when he was twenty-one. That’s certainly an early age, but we must remember that by then Wolfgang had been through eighteen years of extremely hard, expert training.

      The extraordinary dedication of the young Mozart, under the guidance of his father, is perhaps most powerfully articulated by Michael Howe, a psychologist at the University of Exeter, in his book Genius Explained. He estimates that Mozart had clocked up an eye-watering 3,500 hours of practice even before his sixth birthday.

      Seen in this context, Mozart’s achievements suddenly seem rather different. He no longer looks like a musician zapped with special powers that enabled him to circumvent practice; rather, he looks like somebody who embodies the rigours of practice. He set out on the road to excellence very early in life, but now we can see why.

      It is only by starting at an unusually young age and by practising with such ferocious devotion that it is possible to accumulate ten thousand hours while still in adolescence. Far from being an exception to the ten-thousand-hour rule, Mozart is a shining testament to it.

      Child prodigies amaze us because we compare them not with other performers who have practised for the same length of time, but with children of the same age who have not dedicated their lives in the same way. We delude ourselves into thinking they possess miraculous talents because we assess their skills in a context that misses the essential point. We see their little bodies and cute faces and forget that, hidden within their skulls, their brains have been sculpted – and their knowledge deepened – by practice that few people accumulate until well into adulthood, if then. Had the six-year-old Mozart been compared with musicians who had clocked up 3,500 hours of practice, rather than with other children of the same age, he would not have seemed exceptional at all.

      What about Mozart the child composer rather than Mozart the child performer? The facts follow the same logic. Sure, he wrote compositions as a young boy, but they had nothing in common with the sublime creations of his later years. His first four piano concertos, written at the age of eleven, and his next three, written at sixteen, contain no original music: they are simply rearrangements of the music of other composers.

      ‘There is nothing distinctively “Mozartian” about them,’ writes Robert Weisberg, a psychologist specializing in creativity and problem-solving. In this context, it is not surprising that music insiders rarely describe Mozart as a prodigy. Indeed, the critic Harold Schonberg argues that Mozart ‘developed late’, as his greatest works did not emerge until he had been composing for two decades.

      Of course, none of this explains why Mozart eventually managed to produce compositions that are considered among the greatest artistic creations in human history, but it ought to dispel the myth that they emerged from on high, like gifts from the gods. Mozart was one of the hardest-working composers in history, and without that deep and sustained application he would have got nowhere.

      The same essential truth is revealed when looking at child prodigies in sport.

      When Tiger Woods became the youngest-ever winner of the US Masters golf championship in 1997, he was hailed by many experts as the most naturally gifted golfer to play the game. This was understandable given his audacious stroke-making around the hallowed Augusta course. But dig down into his past, and an entirely different explanation reveals itself – and, once again, it starts with a highly motivated father. Here is a flavour of Tiger’s early years:

      Earl Woods was a former baseball player and Green Beret who was obsessed with the idea that practice creates greatness. He started his son at what he himself describes as an ‘unthinkably early age’, before he could even walk or talk. ‘Early practice is vital so that performances became totally ingrained and flow from the subconscious,’ Woods Senior would later say.

      Placed in his highchair in the garage at home, so he could watch as Earl hit balls into the net, little Tiger was given a golf club at Christmas – five days before his first birthday – and at eighteen months had his first golf outing. He couldn’t yet count to five, but little Tiger already knew a par 5 from a par 4.

      By the age of two years and eight months Woods was familiar with bunker play, and by his third year he had developed his preshot routine. Soon his practice sessions were taking place on the driving range and putting green, where he would hone his skills for hours at a time.

      At the age of two Woods entered his first pitch-and-putt tournament at the Navy Golf Course in Cypress, California. He could already hit the ball eighty yards with his 2.5 wood and pitch accurately from forty yards. When Tiger was four, Earl hired the services of a professional to accelerate his development. Tiger won his first national major tournament at thirteen.

      Practice sessions would typically end with a competitive drill, like placing the ball three feet from the hole to see how many consecutive putts Tiger could make. After seventy in a row, Earl would still be standing there.