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So you make your son practice the violin for two hours every day after school.  Your daughter takes tennis lessons four times a week.  And you've done the Iron Man twice but still can't run a mile faster than nine minutes. A new study has found, alas, that you can practice all you want, but if you don't have it, you'll never be the next Nadal.   Or even the next Djokovic.  "Some people are really just naturals who have the capacity to make the leap from good to great," writes David Worthington at smartplanet.com. "The evidence is quite clear that some people do reach an elite level of performance without copious practice, while other people fail to do so despite copious practice," Michigan State psychology professor Zach Hambrick said in a  press release . Hambrick found, studying chess players and musicians, that rigorous practice only accounted for a third of skill level differences, while innate ability, age and intelligence helped people mak...

For the longest time, I thought my son was a prodigy. Then I began reading about kids who wrote and passed around newsletters on how truly un-nutritious their cafeteria food really was -- in fourth grade!  And won spelling bees by correctly spelling kneidel (a Hebrew word for matzoh balls but who knew?).  And invented a test for breast cancer (she was in high school, but still). And my son began getting B's. Christie McNicholson reports at smartplanet.com that there's actually a child who spoke his first word at three months (mine's first was "squirrel"  -- go figure!), learned the entire alphabet by eight months, went to college at nine, developed a new form of mathematics and by age 13 had written a research paper accepted by a math journal. Now that's a prodigy.  Apparently there's just one trait shared by all prodigies .  Guess what it is?  Sounds a little too crazy to be true but it's a good working memory, not IQ.  And it's actually one...