How can high potential in childhood be transformed into outstanding adult accomplishment? Research indicates that individuals who become outstanding performers and producers have more than just raw talent in the domain or opportunities to develop their talent—they have the will, drive, and focus to take advantage of the opportunities with which they are presented, and the capacity to persist through failures even as the bar for success gets higher. Despite the importance of these psychosocial facilitators, they are among the least well understood in the field of gifted and talented research. In this study, we reviewed existing literature in order to build comprehensive list of the psychosocial variables associated with talent development across domains (visual art, dance, sports, academics, music, acting, medicine, and software engineering). With the help of psychologists with expertise in these domains, we completed an initial categorization of these skills and asked the experts to indicate at which of the three stages in talent development—the transition of abilities into competencies, competencies into expertise, and expertise to creative productivity or eminence—each psychosocial skill was important. We found promising general patterns of commonality as well as variation by domain and stage of talent development, and discuss the implications of this study on future research into psychosocial skill development.

The Summer 2023 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and now provides readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares "the Triton among minnows." The Summer 2023 Issue, guest-edited by Tom Perrotta, features poetry and prose by Marianne Leone, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Andre Dubus III, Fabio Morabito, Jen Trynin, Olufunke Grace Bankole, and Jess Walter, among others.