Henrik Karlsson's essay looks at the childhoods of exceptional people, to see if a common pattern lay in their upbringing.
I sampled writers (Virginia Woolf, Lev Tolstoy), mathematicians (John von Neumann, Blaise Pascal, Alan Turing), philosophers (Bertrand Russell, René Descartes), and composers (Mozart, Bach), trying to get a diverse sample.
In this essay, I am going to detail a few of the patterns that have struck me after having skimmed 42 biographies. I will sort the claims so that I start with more universal patterns and end with patterns that are less common.
(Read Henrik's full essay via this link. )
In summary:
1. Exceptional people grow up in exceptional milieus.
This seems to be true for >95 percent of the people I looked at.
As children, they were integrated with exceptional adults—and were taken seriously by them. The adults had high expectations of the children; they assumed they had the capacity to understand complex topics, and therefore invited them into serious conversations and meaningful work, believing them capable of growing competent rapidly.
Not everyone who grew to be exceptional was this lucky. There are a few cases of people who rose to greatness despite their non-ideal circumstances they just had to summon it themselves. How did they do that? First, they did this by reading books, by self-teaching. Second, when they grew more skilled they started reaching out to exceptional people, trying to convince them to bring them into their milieu.
Books can, in other words, be a good stand-in for a social milieu, up to a point, but eventually, you need direct access to exceptional people. And having access to them from a young age greatly increases the likelihood that you will be shaped by them.
2. They had time to roam about and relied heavily on self-directed learning
~95 percent.
This immersion in boredom is also a universal in the biographies of exceptional people. A substantial fraction were completely kept apart from other children, either because their guardians decided so or because they were bedridden with various illnesses during childhood (like Descartes). A spicy hypothesis raised by this is that socialising too much with children is simply not good for your intellectual development. (I’m not going to test that hypothesis!)
A common theme in the biographies is that the area of study which would eventually give them fame came to them almost like a wild hallucination induced by overdosing on boredom. They would be overcome by an obsession arising from within.
A lot of care went into curating the environment around the children—fascinating guests were invited, libraries were built, machines were brought home and disassembled
but the children were left with a lot of time to freely explore the interests that arose within these milieus.
A qualified guess is that they spent between one and four hours daily in formal studies, and the rest on self-directed projects. Unlike children today, they had little access to entertainment, and so were often bored, unless they figured out a way to keep their minds occupied; the intellectual obsessions that grew into their life’s work often grew out of this boredom.
3. They were heavily tutored 1-on-1
All were likely tutored at some point; ~70 percent were tutored for more than an hour a day growing up. I’m basically making these numbers up; it is an informed guess.
Simply put, if you tailor your instruction to a single individual, you can make it fit so much better to their minds, so that the average person, if tutored, would become top two in a class of a hundred. The truth is a little bit more complicated than that (and I recommend Nintil’s systematic review of the research if you want to get into the weeds), but the effect is nevertheless real and big.
Tutoring is a more reliable method to impart knowledge than lectures. It is also faster.
When I worked as a teacher, I had students who were disruptive in a way that made them rarely learn anything during class. To make sure they didn’t fall behind, I would tutor them 1-on-1. And, though these were children with deep emotional problems, I found I could usually progress two to four times faster with them alone than I could with the class.
If you do this for 1-4 hours daily, you can go much deeper earlier, even more so if the child is uncommonly motivated and gifted. This also means more time for free exploration, self-directed learning and developing meaningful relationships.
4. Cognitive apprenticeships
~90 percent did apprentice themselves at some point. ~30 percent did so before turning 14.
Learning through apprenticeship is one of the most powerful ways of growing skilled—but if the skills are cognitive, you have to find ways to make the thoughts visible so the apprentice can imitate them.
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 not only learning, but also doing real intellectual work.
5. They were gifted children
An important factor to acknowledge is that these children did not only receive an exceptional education; they were also exceptionally gifted. This is not to say that the peculiarities of their education were not important and (in whatever regard it fits the lives of you and your child) worth emulating. Access to exceptional role models, and dedicated, personalised education is transformational.
If you want to, you can do this, too
Doing all of this—curating an exceptional milieu, providing dedicated tutoring and opportunities for apprenticeship—is hard work. You could pull it off if you put your mind to it, I trust. Though, like everything pursued to excellence, it would demand serious sacrifices. Particularly of time. It is ok not to want that.
A lot of it does not require sacrifices, though. 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. When I read the biographies, it feels a little bit like getting new peers. Their way of being works on me. Gradually, I raise my aspirations.
There is a moving scene in John Stuart Mill's biography, when John Stuart is about to set out into the world and his father for the first time lets him know that his education had been . . . a bit particular. He would discover that others his age did not know as much as he did. But, his father said, he mustn’t feel proud about that. He’d just been lucky.
Let’s make more people lucky.
Warmly,
Henrik
For Henrik Karlsson's full essay with quotes from the many biographies that support his findings please visit : https://escapingflatland.substack.com/p/childhoods