Some advice can feel like career suicide, and what follows fits that description.

We are taught from an early age that success belongs to those who commit young, specialize fast, and hone their chosen craft with relentless zeal.

This logic shapes everything about how we approach schooling and our careers, to the point where even suggesting that early specialization might be a mistake feels like heresy.

And yet, a sweeping new review published in Science gives us reason to do exactly that.

Drawing on data from more than 34,000 world-class adult performers across domains including science, music, chess, and elite athletics, Güllich et al. (2025) reach a striking conclusion. While early specialization predicts early success, it does not predict who ultimately reaches the highest levels of performance.

More than that, the authors find that across domains, early stars and later world-class performers are largely different people. Roughly 90 percent of top youth performers are not the same individuals who dominate at peak adult performance. Even more counterintuitive, when comparing adults at the very top, those who eventually reach the highest level often performed worse than their peers early on.

To understand why this pattern repeats across domains, we need to reconsider what early success is really measuring to begin with.

Modern careers are nothing if not institutional products.

From childhood onward, we are coached into coherence. Career counselors nudge us toward “fit” just like admissions essays are........

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