Childhoods of Exceptional People
High Point of 2023
Who are the professionals and writers who get my attention and sing to my heart and intellect with clear tones that cut through all of the noise of online writers?
Out of thousands who created Substack newsletters, only 10 connect so strongly that I want to learn more from them and introduce them to my community—the people who always get the best of everything from me.
It took only two of the essays by Henrik Karlsson in his Escaping Flatland newsletter to hook me. His essays are longer than most and always a complex search query to find fascinating people, then deliver to my inbox. He’s a top 10. He is Henrik born in July 1989 and not the other Swedish Henrik, the professional hockey player.
Like any great piece of writing, I can’t put it down once I start into one of his essays. When I want fresh points of view for my daily writing into the interests and hearts of gifted professionals and communicators, I go to the Escaping Flatland archives and read them again.
One high point of 2023 for Henrik is his essay on the Childhoods of Exceptional People.
Henrik is a Swedish researcher and writer. He studied more than 42 biographies and wrote on what did the childhoods of exceptional writers and scientists looked like, and can we replicate that in society?
I'm super intrigued by the story of the everyday genius before they decided to become a professional. I hope you enjoy his essay as much as I do.
His essay starts with my favorite anthem, The Art of the Painfully Obvious. I strongly agree with his first paragraph which says “…if you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of your field. If you want to learn writing, read great writers…”
In his next breath, Henrik captures the vibe of the community for Gifted Professionals and Communicators when he says, “But this is not what parents usually do when they think about how to educate their kids. The default for a parent is rather to imitate their peers and outsource the big decisions to bureaucracies. But what would we learn if we studied the highest achievements?”
What Can We Learn From This and What Does It Mean?
Exceptional people grow up in exceptional milieus
Exceptional children are surrounded by the best in the world. Parents of exceptional people had an obsession with creating a rich intellectual milieu. Go deeper into this area by reading First we shape our social graph; then it shapes us.
They had time to roam about and relied heavily on self-directed learning
These exceptional children had freedom from peer pressure and were kept separate from other children. Relative isolation and immersion in boredom are universal in biographies of exceptional people. In today’s world, this may look like a child not tethered to a smartphone or feeling the need for approval from everyone. This looks more like someone who does a lot of self-teaching while seeking out adults who could teach them something further about an area that interested the child.
Why do these gifted children thrive on self-directed projects? In addition to the researched examples including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Albert Einstein, Jane Goodall, Blaise Pascal, and Virginia Woolf, we can think of others with the same pattern and backgrounds of homeschooling or tutors and mentors. Taylor Swift comes to mind immediately.
They were heavily tutored 1-on-1
An important element in formal instruction is tutoring. Research supports the fact that tutoring is a more reliable method to impart knowledge than lectures. It is also faster. The most obvious benefit of a tutor is learning and motivation based totally on the characteristics, abilities, and attention span of the individual. You can’t miss with this method, which then takes the child into free exploration, self-directed learning, and developing meaningful relationships.
Cognitive apprenticeships
90 percent did apprentice themselves at some point. 30 percent did so before turning 14.
This type of intellectual apprenticeship is a recurring pattern in the biographies. At some point in their teenage years—and sometimes earlier—the future geniuses would apprentice themselves intellectually to someone with exceptional capacity in their field.
They were gifted children
An important factor to acknowledge in Henrik’s essay and study of many biographies is that these children did not only receive an exceptional education; they were also exceptionally gifted.
If you want to, you can do this, too.
It’s entirely possible to replicate just about everything found in the childhood of exceptional people if you are willing to do the hard work and dedicate the resources. Karlsson emphasizes that curating an exceptional milieu and providing dedicated tutoring and opportunities for apprenticeship is hard work.
Brain science tells us two big truths: At birth, your brain is exactly what you will have your whole life and you don’t choose giftedness or not. What matters most is how the human brain programs and that is from experiences, senses, and massive inputs of information every moment, every day, every month, and throughout your life. Only human brains are this way. All other species have come with pre-programming and you might have noticed this in a newborn chicken, duck, or horse.
If our children are the future, what does this mean?
Henrik writes, “It is just a way of viewing children: as capable of competence, as craving meaningful work, as worthy to be included in serious discussions. We can learn to view them like that, but it is a subtle and profound shift in perception, a shift away from the way we are taught to view children.”
For us in the community of Gifted Professionals and Communicators, this essay provides a point of view and solid research that aligns with our core beliefs:
Professionals—Some children will choose a life of professionalism for their work, interests, and passion. Professionalism is a path, a choice, and an adult life of continuing education, tutoring, mentoring, and showing up with measurable expertise to advance society.
Communicators—Some children find communication strengths early and this has nothing to do with introverts or extroverts. Communication skills include reading, writing, storytelling, and visualization through photography, art, and music. Some adults are good communicators and not necessarily professional or gifted.
Gifted adults have a brain that was that way from the start and they process information from the world (external) and meanings (internal) differently and faster than other kinds of minds. For purposes of our community and this article, we focus our attention and stories on the adults, with wonder and curiosity about their childhood and where that may have been the same or very different from our own childhood or our children's.
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Fascinating -- gave me much to contemplate about. my own childhood, and more importantly, critical information for leaders in education.