This article is for parents, youth, and practitioners interested in the latest academic research regarding the deliberate practice debt.
If you thought studying the universe was complicated, try studying human greatness. Güllich, Barth, Hambrick, and Macnamara’s article, Recent Discoveries on the Acquisition of the Highest Levels of Human Performance (2025), does precisely that—and in doing so exposes the cosmic joke lurking at the heart of expertise research.
The authors review over 34,000 adult world-class performers across domains as diverse as chess, music, science, and sport. Their findings are both elegant and maddening: tomorrow’s stars rarely shine today; early exceptional performance is negatively correlated with adult peak performance; and predictors of early achievement are almost diametrically opposed to predictors of long-term excellence.
That is why Anders Ericsson’s deliberate practice hypothesis—whispered into existence fifteen years ago by Gladwell—deserves scorn, not accolades. Practice has not transformed the pursuit of greatness into science; it has condemned a generation to a Sisyphean pursuit of excellence at the expense of self-awareness, happiness, and perspective. At the heart of these follies are fundamentally unfalsifiable concepts. They pay tribute, perversely, to Kuhn’s notion of paradigms: practice is one of those elegant theories, immune to challenge yet misaligned with anything other than scholarly references.
Occam’s razor, however, cuts through with Sartre’s insight: existence precedes essence. Greatness is not encoded in a genome or a practice log; it emerges contingently, unpredictably, and in dialogue with the world. Stephen Hawking might add a cosmological shrug: asking what precedes greatness is as silly as asking what preceded the Big Bang. The idea that one can extrapolate from junior performance to adult world-class achievement is, as the authors demonstrate, a category error: the populations are almost entirely discrete. If the universe of physics refuses to bend, the world of performance should expect no different.
My take is that it is the work of charlatans masquerading as scientists. In fact, we already possess more than a century of relevant data. Enter the Somerville Youth Study, begun in the 1930s by Dr. Cabot, which asked a deceptively simple question: Do adolescents benefit most from a mentor, no mentor, or a mix of both? Modern obsession with practice has closed our eyes to the answer: adolescents without mentors often prosper. Why? Because they, as the Dixie Chicks so eloquently put it, need “wide open spaces”—room to make big mistakes, fail spectacularly, stumble, and learn on their own.
This leads to a profound, existential insight: the study of excellence is inherently absurd. We spend decades tracking practice hours, tournament wins, grades, and publications, only to discover that the highest performers do not follow the script. Deliberate practice, talent pipelines, early selection, and hyper-specialization may foster early stars—but adult top performers laugh at our models. The quest to predict, measure, or manufacture greatness is like trying to catch lightning in a jar with a ruler: we may glimpse it, we may admire it, but we cannot control it.
Indeed, the 2025 study undermines the very notion of “glory” in the pursuit of sport, art, or science. The arena—the stage, the lab, the concert hall—is the last true meritocracy. It is where daring souls may proceed unfiltered, where performance reveals not only skill but the very ways we conduct ourselves and what we value. It demands reverence, not reduction to metrics or spreadsheets.
Güllich et al.’s review is yet another attempt to make the critic count—but it doesn’t. Existence precedes essence. No spreadsheet, no practice schedule, no early-selection algorithm will manufacture a Beethoven, a Jordan, or a Marie Curie.
The best we can do is provide breadth, autonomy, and occasional serendipity—and marvel at the absurdity of the enterprise itself.
