But while the abilities are extraordinary, there is no mystery at all about how these people developed them. They practiced. A lot. The world-record time in the marathon wasn’t cut by 30 percent over the course of a century because people were being born with a greater talent for running long distances. Nor did the second half of the twentieth century see some sudden surge in the births of people with a gift for playing Chopin or Rachmaninoff or for memorizing tens of thousands of random digits. What the second half of the twentieth century did see was a steady increase in the amount of time
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