Are prodigies real?

Before tackling this question, let's take a step back and discuss the topic of prodigies. Because whenever someone thinks that a certain group of individuals are born with superhuman-like talent, they're essentially saying that these special people are prodigies.

The Mozart case study

But are prodigies real? Let's take a look at one of the most famous prodigies of all time, Mozart. At the age of 5, Mozart was playing concert grade music to the royal family. Surely, this would qualify Mozart as a prodigy, right?

In his book, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, researcher Anders Ericsson dispels a number of commonly held prodigy myths. He had this to say about Mozart:

"If you compare the kind of music pieces that Mozart can play at various ages to today's Suzuki-trained children, he is not exceptional. If anything, he's relatively average."

In his book, Ericsson dedicates a full chapter to debunking the concept of prodigies. And in each case, he illustrates that the individuals achieved their respective levels of success through massage amounts of work.

Are developers born or made?

Extending the Mozart case study, let's discuss how this applies to developers. Whenever we see a skilled coder it's easy to think that they were born with the innate ability to build applications and that learning new languages and frameworks comes easy to them.

However, nothing could be further from the truth. Over the years I've known more developers than I can count and I have yet to find a single one that was a born developer. I know programmers that work for Google and Amazon, along with computer science professors who specialize in research that boggles my mind to think about. And as amazing as all of these individuals are, each one of them became a great developer through hard work and dedication.

The tipping point

In Chapter 1, Discovering the Tipping Point for Developers I've discussed the tipping point for developers. The longer I teach and the more I work on my own coding skills, the more I'm convinced that the key to excellence is as straightforward as focused practice.

If you want to become a skilled developer badly enough, and you're willing to:

• Dedicate the time
• Learn from experienced teachers
• Fight through frustrating challenges
• Continually build projects with features you've never developed before

You're going to wake up one day and realize that everything is clicking and that you've become a professional programmer.