Let us start by looking at a modern 'genius', Maryam Mirzakhani, who died at the early age of 40. She was the only woman to win the Fields Medal – the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel prize. It would be easy to assume that someone as special as Mirzakhani must have been one of those 'gifted' children, those who have an extraordinary ability in a specific sphere of activity or knowledge. But look closer and a different story emerges. Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, Iran. She went to a highly selective girls' school but maths wasn't her interest – reading was. She loved novels and would read anything she could lay her hands on. As for maths, she did rather poorly at it for the first couple of years in her middle school, but became interested when her elder brother told her about what he'd learned. He shared a famous maths problem from a magazine that fascinated her – and she was hooked.

让我们先来看一位现代的“天才”，玛丽安·米尔扎哈尼，她去世时才40岁。她是唯一一位获得菲尔兹奖的女性，这是数学上的诺贝尔奖。人们很容易认为，像米尔扎哈尼这样特别的人一定是那些“天才”孩子中的一员，他们在特定的活动或知识领域拥有非凡的能力。但仔细观察，就会发现一个不同的故事。米尔扎哈尼出生于伊朗德黑兰。她上的是一所精挑细选的女子学校，但她的兴趣不是数学，而是阅读。她喜欢小说，能找到什么就读什么。至于数学，在她上中学的头几年里，她学得很差，但当她哥哥告诉她他学到的东西时，她开始感兴趣了。他分享了一本杂志上的一个著名的数学问题，让她着迷——她被迷住了。

In adult life it is clear that she was curious, excited by what she did and also resolute in the face of setbacks. One of her comments sums it up. 'Of course, the most rewarding part is the “Aha” moment, the excitement of discovery and enjoyment of understanding something new . . . But most of the time, doing mathematics for me is like being on a long hike with no trail and no end in sight.' That trail took her to the heights of original research into mathematics.

在成年后的生活中，很明显，她对自己所做的事情充满好奇和兴奋，面对挫折也很坚决。她的一条评论总结了这一点。当然，最有意义的部分是“啊哈”的时刻，发现新事物的兴奋和理解新事物的享受……但大多数时候，做数学对我来说就像一次没有路也看不到尽头的长途徒步旅行。”这条路把她带到了数学原创性研究的高度。

Is her background unusual? Apparently not. Most Nobel prize winners were unexceptional in childhood. Einstein was slow to talk as a baby. He failed the general part of the entry test to Zurich Polytechnic – though they let him in because of high physics and maths scores. He struggled at work initially, but he kept plugging away and eventually rewrote the laws of Newtonian mechanics with his theory of relativity.

她的背景不寻常吗?显然不是。大多数诺贝尔奖得主的童年都很平凡。爱因斯坦小时候说话很慢。他在苏黎世理工大学的入学考试中没有通过普通考试，但由于他的物理和数学成绩很高，他被录取了。他最初在工作中遇到了困难，但他坚持不懈，最终用他的相对论重写了牛顿力学定律。

There has been a considerable amount of research on high performance over the last century that suggests it goes way beyond tested intelligence. On top of that, research is clear that brains are flexible, new neural pathways can be created, and IQ isn't fixed. For example, just because you can read stories with hundreds of pages at the age of five doesn't mean you will still be ahead of your contemporaries in your teens.

在过去的一个世纪里，有大量关于高绩效的研究表明，它远远超出了测试智力的范畴。最重要的是，研究清楚地表明，大脑是灵活的，可以创造新的神经通路，智商也不是固定的。例如，仅仅因为你在五岁的时候能读几百页的故事，并不意味着你在十几岁的时候仍然领先于同龄人。

While the jury is out on giftedness being innate and other factors potentially making the difference, what is certain is that the behaviours associated with high levels of performance are replicable and most can be taught – even traits such as curiosity. According to my colleague Prof Deborah Eyre, with whom I've collaborated on the book Great Minds and How to Grow Them, the latest neuroscience and psychological research suggests most individuals can reach levels of performance associated in school with the gifted and talented. However, they must be taught the right attitudes and approaches to their learning and develop the attributes of high performers – curiosity, persistence and hard work, for example – an approach Eyre calls 'high performance learning'. Critically, they need the right support in developing those approaches at home as well as at school.

虽然目前还不清楚天赋是天生的，还是其他因素可能造成了差异，但可以肯定的是，与高水平表现相关的行为是可以复制的，而且大多数是可以教授的——甚至包括好奇心这样的特征。据我的同事黛博拉·艾尔教授(Deborah Eyre)说，最新的神经科学和心理学研究表明，大多数人在学校的表现都能达到与天才和天才相关的水平。我和黛博拉·艾尔教授合著了《伟大的心灵和如何培养它们》(Great Minds and How to Grow Them)一书。然而，他们必须被教导正确的学习态度和方法，并培养优秀学生的特质——例如好奇心、毅力和勤奋——艾尔称之为“高效学习”的方法。至关重要的是，他们需要在家庭和学校发展这些方法的正确支持。

According to my colleague Prof Deborah Eyre, with whom I've collaborated on the book Great Minds and How to Grow Them, the latest neuroscience and psychological research suggests most individuals can reach levels of performance associated in school with the gifted and talented. However, they must be taught the right attitudes and approaches to their learning and develop the attributes of high performers – curiosity, persistence and hard work, for example – an approach Eyre calls 'high performance learning'. Critically, they need the right support in developing those approaches at home as well as at school.

据我的同事黛博拉·艾尔教授(Deborah Eyre)说，最新的神经科学和心理学研究表明，大多数人在学校的表现都能达到与天才和天才相关的水平。我和黛博拉·艾尔教授合著了《伟大的心灵和如何培养它们》(Great Minds and How to Grow Them)一书。然而，他们必须被教导正确的学习态度和方法，并培养优秀学生的特质——例如好奇心、毅力和勤奋——艾尔称之为“高效学习”的方法。至关重要的是，他们需要在家庭和学校发展这些方法的正确支持。

Prof Anders Ericsson, an eminent education psychologist at Florida State University, US, is the co-author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. After research going back to 1980 into diverse achievements, from music to memory to sport, he doesn't think unique and innate talents are at the heart of performance. Deliberate practice, that stretches you every step of the way, and around 10,000 hours of it, is what produces the goods. It's not a magic number – the highest performers move on to doing a whole lot more, of course. Ericsson's memory research is particularly interesting because random students, trained in memory techniques for the study, went on to outperform others thought to have innately superior memories – those who you might call gifted.

美国佛罗里达州立大学著名教育心理学家安德斯·埃里克森教授是《顶峰:新科学的秘密》一书的合著者。从1980年开始，他研究了从音乐到记忆再到体育的各种成就，他认为表演的核心并不是独特和天生的才能。刻意练习，每一步都让你伸展，大约一万个小时的练习，才会产生好的效果。这不是一个神奇的数字——当然，表现最好的人会继续做更多的事情。埃里克森的记忆研究特别有趣，因为随机挑选的学生，在研究中接受了记忆技巧的训练，他们的表现比那些被认为天生记忆力出众的人——那些你可能称之为天才的人——要好得多。

But it is perhaps the work of Benjamin Bloom, another distinguished American educationist working in the 1980s, that gives the most pause for thought. Bloom's team looked at a group of extraordinarily high achieving people in disciplines as varied as ballet, swimming, piano, tennis, maths, sculpture and neurology. He found a pattern of parents encouraging and supporting their children, often in areas they enjoyed themselves. Bloom's outstanding people had worked very hard and consistently at something they had become hooked on when at a young age, and their parents all emerged as having strong work ethics themselves.

但或许是另一位杰出的美国教育家本杰明•布鲁姆(Benjamin Bloom)在20世纪80年代的研究成果，最让人深思。布鲁姆的研究小组研究了一组在芭蕾、游泳、钢琴、网球、数学、雕塑和神经学等不同学科中取得非凡成就的人。他发现了一种父母鼓励和支持孩子的模式，通常是在他们喜欢的领域。布鲁姆的优秀员工在年轻时就对某件事着迷，他们一直非常努力地工作，他们的父母也都有很强的职业道德。

Eyre says we know how high performers learn. From that she has developed a high performing learning approach. She is working on this with a group of schools, both in Britain and abroad. Some spin-off research, which looked in detail at 24 of the 3,000 children being studied who were succeeding despite difficult circumstances, found something remarkable. Half were getting free school meals because of poverty, more than half were living with a single parent, and four in five were living in disadvantaged areas. Interviews uncovered strong evidence of an adult or adults in the child's life who valued and supported education, either in the immediate or extended family or in the child's wider community. Children talked about the need to work hard at school, to listen in class and keep trying.

艾尔说我们知道高绩效者是如何学习的。由此，她发展出了一种高效的学习方法。她正在与英国和国外的一些学校合作。一些衍生研究详细观察了3000名在困难环境下取得成功的儿童中的24名，发现了一些值得注意的事情。其中一半的孩子因为贫困而获得免费校餐，一半以上的孩子与单亲父母生活在一起，五分之四的孩子生活在贫困地区。采访发现了强有力的证据，表明在孩子的生活中有一个或多个成年人重视和支持教育，无论是在直系亲属或大家庭中，还是在孩子更广泛的社区中。孩子们谈到了在学校努力学习、听课和不断尝试的必要性。

Let us end with Einstein, the epitome of a genius. He clearly had curiosity, character and determination. He struggled against rejection in early life but was undeterred. Did he think he was a genius or even gifted? He once wrote: 'It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer. Most people say it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.'

让我们以天才的缩影爱因斯坦作为结束。他显然有好奇心、个性和决心。他早年曾与拒绝作斗争，但没有被吓倒。他认为自己是个天才，甚至有天赋吗?他曾写道:“这并不是说我有多聪明，只是我能更长久地面对问题。”大多数人说，是智力造就了伟大的科学家。他们错了，这是性格。”