Lessons from a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children
&gt; Such results contradict long-established ideas suggesting that expert performance is built mainly through practice—that anyone can get to the top with enough focused effort of the right kind.<p>Actually the claim is the other way around - that the people at the top got there through focused effort of the right kind.<p>Finding &quot;gifted&quot; children does not contradict this. Nobody pops out of the womb a math genius.<p>Gifted children are &quot;gifted&quot; 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.<p>I was one of these kids, I played with geometric objects, with music, etc. Sure I  was weird sometimes. I didn&#x27;t have anybody to share my interests with.<p>Anyway, point is, when people point to &quot;gifted&quot; talent, this is just another cop-out. They don&#x27;t have an explanation. They are appealing to everybody&#x27;s shared sense of magical outcomes.<p>But it boils down to the hours that kids put into their interests.