Güllich et al (2025) published an interesting study this year. It revealed that world class youth performers and world class adult performers tend to be discrete groups of people, with only about 10% of outstanding youth performers going on to occupy the outstanding adult performer category later in their life. This applies across many disciplines, such as sports, chess, music and academia. (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt7790).
The obvious thing to ask is “why is this the case?”
Of course, motivation is one explainer; when young people excel, it tends to be parent-mediated, whereas adult success tends to be self-motivated. But, the study suggests that there may be a causal relationship between why the circumstances that predict outstanding childhood performance negatively correlate with adult excellence. The primary element being that childhood high-performance tends to come from a very intensive and unidimensional approach, yet those who excel in adulthood tend to have had a more multidisciplinary childhood, and may even sometimes underperform some of their peers initially. Their ascension to the apex of human functioning comes later.
This phenomenon might help explain the admissions methodology of top secondary schools like Westminster, St Paul’s, or Wycombe Abbey. The final decision happens in the interview room, where the schools look for the spark of a rounded child who has lived a life beyond the desk, not simply a rehearsed exam machine.
For the question of “how to excel at the interview?”, a leaf can be taken out of this study’s book, and that is that there is no substitute for honest life experience to foster interests, maturity and that twinkle that schools are looking for. Mock interviews can help get students used to the format, so that they are more relaxed on the day and able to give a better account of themselves, but this is not the same as trying to coach a performance, which interviewers can see right through. With a balanced and varied childhood, most of the interview preparation takes care of itself!
