In certain fields of human endeavor, such as music, chess, and some athletic activities, the performance of the best practitioners is so outstanding, so superior even to the performance of other highly experienced individuals in the field, that some people believe some notion of innate talent must be invoked to account for this highest level of performance.
Topic
Superior performance (the super elite athletes, performers, specialists, in any given field).
Frameworks
Answer a Question What causes elite performance? Some people - innate talent Author -- Nah, mostly acquired skills
Old / New Old - we used to assume elite performance came from innate talent. New - now we think it comes from mostly acquired skills
Challenge a Position Position -- some notion of innate talent must be invoked to explain why elite performers are so much better than their peers. Author's Challenge -- no, the real difference-makers are motivation and practice. The elite performers had all the necessary traits and just added 10+ years of intense training.
Main Point
Superior performance is probably less about innate talent and more about skills / physiological changes acquired through long, intense training, for which motivation may be the best predictor.
P1 - Intro to Topic, Position 1 (Old)
This paragraph introduces the concept of superior performance, then introduces the Position that the passage will be challenging: innate talent must be part of what explains elite performance. This view is supplemented with some data.
P2 - Pivot to New, Evidence against Old
We get a doubleheader Purpose Pivot (but, yet, however, recently). This introduces the New position, which the Author will ultimately endorse: acquired skills are the bigger part of elite performance,
The author shows evidence against the idea that the magic abilities of elite performers are innate gifts, rather than specialized capacities gained through training.
P3 - Evidence Supporting New
Here the author talks about how all these elite performers had over a decade of intense training. The paragraph suggests that training brings about these superpowers. You can get the chess master's mind or you can get the fast twitch fibers of whatever sporting action you're perfecting, if you train hard for at least a decade. Only some traits like height are beyond the reach of being acquired through training.
P4 - Summary of Challenge
The author makes more explicit that she accepts this New explanation (elite performance comes mainly through acquired factors) as the truth and then she speculates on an implication of that view: if elite performance is mainly based on how much you practice, then motivation is really the special sauce of the masters.