I'm talking about reaching levels of genius in particular fields like music, sports etc. The very best appear to have been working hard since they were at a very young age. But why is starting a particular skill from a young age more of an advantage than starting when you are say, in your 20's?
Work pattern, study patterns, practice patterns are much easier to establish in younger kids than in 20 year old people. And those very work habits are what's needed to learn and to excel in those studies. Baron Max
Because the people who start really really early at being gifted have a silver spoon in their mouth, or are helped by people with silver spoons in their mouths. The rest of us are doomed to never get a chance because we're poor and therefore unworthy to live.
The younger you are when developing new skills, the more you can incorporate it into your brain's development while it is still growing and evolving: the more it gets hardwired into the final outcome.
you have a larger amount of spread out living brain matter when you are young; as soon as you are born, your brain cells begin dying. when you learn something, your brain 'recruits' brain cells to remember actions and effects of what you are learning. when you are young, you have very many unused brain cells from which to recruit. but the older you get, the more recruited brain cells you have, which makes it harder to switch them over, as well as having less to choose from.
Erm... Kenny? You seem to be putting the cart before the horse here - protégés express their inclinations towards a given pursuit at an early age simply because they discover their abilities lie in that given direction and find some form of fulfilment out of first trying out the pursuit in the first instance - thus becoming inclined towards following through with it and therefore mastering it early on in life. They don't exactly begin as geniuses - they just demonstrate both a degree of aptitude for something by electing to try whatever discipline out in the first place and enjoy doing it - likely progressing faster because a: children don't actually get all hung up about how a thing should be done rather get on with finding out simply how to do it and b: simply because adults reward children demonstrating aptitude with positive attention and have very little other distractions in their lives they are in the perfect environment to progress far faster and more flexibly than an adult learning how to take up a given subject at a later age. That being the case however, my mother is a woman now in her early 60's. She's never picked up a paintbrush to paint anything except the the woodwork in her entire life, yet immediately upon making her first attempt at a watercolour painting after just the second go she was already demonstrating the ability to paint photo-realistically - this is quite without any form of formal art training whatsoever. If you've actually got ability, no matter how latent, actually you're never to old to learn. In short - children allow their actual abilities to find them. Adults, on the other hand, generally tend to pursue things which mealy interest them irrespective of weather or not nature has seen fit to actually provide them with any particular aptitude for whatever the pursuit in the first place. To give a personal example: I've always liked the idea of being able to play the piano. In practice, despite my liking the notion, in the presence of an actual piano I've never demonstrated the slightest aptitude for playing the wretched thing. I could, of course, apply myself to that and over come that difficulty with perseverance - but at the end of the day, I'll never be a pianist, just someone who might demonstrate the ability to knock out the odd note.... The guitar, on the other hand, I can play without thinking about it. Always could.
