All roads lead to Rome? Talent narratives of elite athletes, musicians, and mathematicians

Abstract

ABSTRACT Public accounts about world-class athletes, musicians, and mathematicians often include notions of the highly talented child that then develops into a successful performer in a more or less straightforward manner. However, a large corpus of scientific literature indicates that talent development trajectories are highly diverse and idiosyncratic. Analysing the experiences of the high-achieving individuals themselves might add an additional perspective to our understanding of how talent develops over time. In this regard, the stories that individuals tell about their talent development can provide in-depth accounts of their experiences but also of individual and societal beliefs about talent and its development. The current study intends to examine the talent development stories of athletes, musicians, and mathematicians. Cross-domain talent research might help to culturally contextualise developmental processes. In this regard, our aims are twofold. First, we aim to examine how high-achieving individuals story their talent development pathways. Second, we aim to identify cultural ideas about talent in the individual stories. In total, we interviewed ten elite athletes, ten professional musicians, and ten elite mathematicians. We employed a thematic narrative analysis and a structural narrative analysis. We identified five types of talent narratives on developmental pathways: searching for the spotlight, straightforward career, overcoming obstacles, riding the waves, and applying effort. These types of narratives were observable across performance domains. Despite the idiosyncratic nature of developmental pathways, athletes, musicians, and mathematicians appeared to be impacted by similar sociocultural narratives about talent and its development when constructing their personal talent development stories.