Tiger Woods is the classic example of a child prodigy, but it turns out his path is unusual for superstars. Roger Federer’s (who played a wide range of sports growing up until he specialized in tennis as a teen) is more common.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/base-rate-fallacy.html
> For example, given a choice of the two categories, people might categorize a woman as a politician rather than a banker if they heard that she enjoyed social activism at school—even if they knew that she was drawn from a population consisting of 90% bankers and 10% politicians (APA).
The general population is much larger than the population of child prodigies.
Spoiler: I got into computers as a teenager and my piano career took a nosedive, from Carnegie Hall and Juilliard to like… playing for friends at a house party :)
Take violinists, for example. Essentially every single world renowned soloist was "some sort" of child prodigy. Now, I've heard some soloists argue that they were not, in fact, child prodigies. For example, may favorite violinist, Hilary Hahn, has said this. She still debuted with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra when she was 12, and here she is performing as a soloist at 15: https://youtu.be/upkP46nvqVI. Nathan Milstein, one of the greatest violinists of all time, said he was "not very good until his teens" - he still started playing at the age of 5, and at the age of 11 Leopold Auer, a great violin teacher, invited him to become one of his students, so he clearly saw his potential.
I have no doubt lots of prodigies burn out. But, at least in the world of violins, essentially every great soloist was playing at an extremely high level by the time they were in middle school.
One can enhance cognitive functions by strength training: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8534220/
Aside from time travel, the best way to improve in very important things is through strength training.
You should have learned roughly what is in this book at grade 7, it includes algebraic expressions, angles, ratios, unit conversions, statistical concepts like mean, mode, bar graphs, probability of dice and coins and so on.
https://archive.org/details/newenjoyingmathe0000jose/page/4/...
Then in grade 8 you'd go on to do those kind of things but a bit more advanced. Most people just forget how much math they learned and think they learned all that in high school.
I had a friend who could play all the Chopin Etudes at age 9. Some of the best art simply requires a virtuoso to bring it to life.