When is your birthday?
If you took everybody in the European Union and recorded the month of their birth, the split would look like this…
The pattern is virtually flat. There are some interesting exceptions. My wife’s birthday is the 28th February and her sister’s is the 5th March. I will leave the rest to your imagination. However, despite the odd anomaly, birthdays are fairly evenly distributed.
Exceptions to the rule
Not every population plays nicely. If you look at the birthdays of players in UEFA youth tournaments the pattern looks like this…
In many countries the school year runs from 1st January. When five-year-olds get picked for their first school football team then the eldest in the year have a significant advantage. They are bigger, stronger and faster then their classmates who can be almost a year younger. By the time they are twenty this advantage has dwindled away to nothing, but in the intervening fifteen years those lucky five-year-olds had the best of the opportunities. They were the kids who got picked for the A team. They had the most coaching, training and feedback. They outpaced their younger classmates relentlessly.
Who do you think got picked for the A team when they were 6?
This phenomenon is common enough to have earned itself a couple of names. To some academics it is the “relative age effect”, systems thinkers call the reinforcing loop “success to the successful”.
You don’t have to be born in January to be successful
Not every country’s academic year starts in January. In the U.K. the school year starts in September right after the summer holidays. The relative age effect is every bit as pronounced here — just pushed back a bit in the year — and it is not confined to the sports field.
A study by the BBC looked at the birth dates of undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge (Britain’s premier universities).
In seasonal terms, compared to the summer-born applicants, autumn births were 25% more likely to get an Oxbridge place, while for winter and spring births the figures were 17% and 15% more likely respectively.
Martin Rosenbaum
What does this mean for you?
My youngest daughter was born in July. In the UK system that is about as bad as it gets. She loves to play hockey, but rarely plays for the A team. Maybe she lacks talent, maybe she was just born late.
I’m not a rabid sports Dad, I hate spending my Saturday mornings on rain swept sports fields. There is no point in crying over spilt milk. She does have a talent for art and maths, so I make sure that she gets every chance to follow those interests. The earlier she gets opportunities to build her skills and get feedback, the better. We should play to our strengths and then capitalise on them.
Besides, architects earn more than hockey players.
Management development
Once somebody becomes competent then they mop up opportunities and resources. They will learn, practice, get feedback and become more competent still. This dynamic is allied to the pygmalion effect. If you believe somebody is good at something, then they will be.
The virtuous cycle is easy to see in businesses. Graduate trainees get the best opportunities to develop their skills and move into management roles. In the last gasps of the 80’s I managed to fool somebody into hiring me onto the “Unilever Companies’ Management Development Scheme”. If it wasn’t for that I’d be stacking shelves now.
Success to the succesful plays out well for organisations. They can invest their money in their best and brightest. Once you have found some talent develop it for all it is worth.
The ugly side
Unfortunately it is as easy to spiral down as up. Just as there is a clear pattern of over representation of the “early born” in elite sports and education, there is also a disproportionately high number of the “late born” amongst sufferers of ADHD, Schizophrenia and Obesity.
So whilst it is good to identify and nurture talent, beware that your process isn’t toxic to everybody else. It is one thing to give out opportunities, it is another thing altogether to take them away.
My little girl won’t thank you for that.
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Nice work as always Mr Lawther. The book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell also talks about this topic and is worth a read.
Thanks, I will give it a go
As an August born this is clearly why my sporting prowess was never spotted…
You could have been a contender Jill
A good summary. ‘Bounce’ is a good read on how hard work and the environment you are in make a vast difference.
Thanks for the tip, I will give it a go