Genius/prodigy and discipline?

[Louise NM]

A bored, squirming 9-year-old wasting time in a mandolin class is no one's definition of a prodigy.

Violinist Sarah Chang was a child prodigy. She played concertos with the NY Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra—two of the best in the world—when she was eight years old. Eight. Yo-Yo Ma began performing in public before he turned five. These are child prodigies. So are the occasional children you hear about that are in grad school for physics before they hit adolescence.

To be a child prodigy takes immense talent, immense drive and determination, and an immense amount of resources to get where you need to go: ambitious parents, scads of money, the right teachers at the right time, the ability for the family to drop everything to serve the needs of a remarkable child. They don't come around very often, and they are not just kids that are kind of good at something, or kids who get a lot of encouragement and advantages at home. They are hyperfocused, as dwc says, with vast reserves of talent.