In basketball, rudeness is a two-pronged trait: It's being good enough to make a hard game look easy, but more than that, it's being good enough to make your opponent's hard work seem like a waste. It's strutting into a department store, knocking over a stack of neatly folded sweaters, and heading home. What you feel when you watch a defender stay in front of Booker, only for her to rise up and nail a midrange jumper over their head, is overwhelming pity.
You may have a leg up on the child prodigies who made you feel inadequate as a school kid. Despite outliers like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a new analysis based on 19 studies involving 34,000 high achievers across multiple disciplines - including Nobel laureates, top chess players, Olympic champions, and elite musicians - found that individuals who achieved peak performance early in life were not always the same people to reach high success in adulthood.
Imagine this scenario: Nicola is an athlete who wants to go to the Olympics in 2028. She couldn't be more motivated and is optimizing her whole life around it. In all aspects of training, sleep, diet, and mindset, she's aiming to make every marginal improvement she can. But already, three years out, she's beginning to unravel. When she doesn't set a personal best each race, underperforming her expectations results in crushing depression, anxiety, and second-guessing her every move.