I enjoyed this piece in The Atlantic by David Brooks. The idea that there is a whole class of people, who view their life as iterated experiments, may show lower success early in life, but do their life’s work as a “second act,” has great appeal to me, as that feels like the path I am on.
Finally, there are the people Galenson calls “the masters.” In his book
“You Might be a Late Bloomer,” David Brooks
Old Masters and Young Geniuses, he writes about people like Cézanne or Alfred Hitchcock or Charles Darwin, who were not all that successful—and in some cases just not even very good at what they did—when they were young. This could have been discouraging, but they just kept improving.
These people don’t do as much advanced planning as the conceptual geniuses, but they regard their entire lives as experiments. They try something and learn, and then they try something else and learn more. Their focus is not on their finished work, which they often toss away haphazardly. Their focus is on the process of learning itself:
Am I closer to understanding, to mastering? They live their lives as a long period of trial and error, trying this and trying that, a slow process of accumulation and elaboration, so the quality of their work peaks late in life.
Another compelling line of thought in the article is that the people who earn the rewards of early success, who are rewarded extrinsically, have less opportunity to discover and develop the intrinsic motivation that the late bloomers find rewarding. “A 2009 London School of Economics study that looked at 51 corporate pay-for-performance plans found that financial incentives “can have a negative impact on overall performance.”
I once asked a group of students on their final day at their prestigious university what book had changed their life over the previous four years. A long, awkward silence followed. Finally a student said, “You have to understand, we don’t read like that. We only sample enough of each book to get through class.” These students were hurrying to be good enough to get their merit badges, but not getting deep enough into any subject to be transformed. They didn’t love the process of learning itself, which is what you need if you’re going to keep educating yourself decade after decade—which, in turn, is what you need to keep advancing when the world isn’t rewarding you with impressive grades and prizes.
“You Might be a Late Bloomer,” David Brooks
Intrinsically motivated people, by contrast, are self-directed and often obsessed, burying themselves deep into some subject or task. They find learning about a subject or doing an activity to be their own reward, so they are less likely to cut corners. As Vincent van Gogh—a kind of early late bloomer, who struggled to find his way and didn’t create most of his signature works until the last two years of his life before dying at 37—wrote to his brother, “I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.”
Eric Frankl.in 