So a couple of weeks ago I introduced the idea of late bloomers, people whose development is slower and less immediately obvious than that of the prodigies amongst our population, and how we, as a society, might make room for their development.
This is a pressing question because, well, prodigies are rare. Nature doles out the gift of genius unevenly. However, a lot of people grow in skill, sport, or art over time. There are far more late bloomers in any given society than early bloomers. Moreover, there is a natural attrition rate in the early bloomer world. Many early bloomers get discouraged because their development is not as frenetic and curve-shattering as it appeared it would be when they were younger. Often, early bloomers do not enjoy the activity for itself but for the applause and esteem their success merited; when the novelty or volume of that applause abates, their desire for the activity wanes. Late bloomers are more likely to be amateurs, a word whose roots include the Latin word for lover (amator).
Therefore, it is a good thing for a culture to develop late bloomers, to give people time and space to find their gifts. Really obviously, this is what school is for! School is a time when children are not made to work for their living. We sacrifice enormously as a culture in resources and time to educate our children. It would make sense for us to privilege an education that covers as many possible bases and provides a broad swathe of experiences for our children1. In this manner, students would best be able to discern where their natural gifting lies but also if they possess any hidden passions. Well I remember being bored stiff by all my finance classes as an undergrad, my putative major, and absolutely thrilled by a History elective on the early church I took (taught by a geriatric professor who often mumbled incoherently for minutes at a time)2.
Today, we tend to strip away that time of accidental/serendipitous discovery. We place kids on specific tracks fairly early and discourage them from branching too far away from the main line. Education is less a matter of self-discovery than of getting the right answer so I can move on to the next thing.
In a recent article on this topic, David Brooks cited the work of Rich Karlgaard. Here is Brooks’s summary of the late bloomer archetype:
It turns out that late bloomers are not simply early bloomers on a delayed timetable—they didn’t just do the things early bloomers did but at a later age. Late bloomers tend to be qualitatively different, possessing a different set of abilities that are mostly invisible to or discouraged by our current education system. They usually have to invent their own paths. Late bloomers “fulfill their potential frequently in novel and unexpected ways,” Karlgaard writes, “surprising even those closest to them.”
Karlgaard’s point here is vital: if we expect late bloomers to match the profile of early bloomers with a slower fuse we will be mistaken. They operate entirely differently. Late bloomers might well look like dabblers. They probably are not monomaniacally focusing on anything when they are younger. Rather, it is likely that they are casting a wider net and patching disparate interests together.
Brooks notes that it is likely that late bloomers are screw-ups. They probably do not fit well within our current system, designed as it is for compliant and focused people who know exactly what they want to do when they are, like, seven.
Partially, this is because our current system is set up, as I noted above, to reward extrinsic motivation. The young violin prodigy is probably not asked by her teacher or parents whether she loves the violin and feels a burning passion to play the instrument for four hours a day. She’s just on the violin track—conservatories, summer programs, perhaps the scholarship to that elite institution.
Brooks cites the importance of intrinsic motivation to late bloomers’ success. People with intrinsic motivation don’t care about the socially expected path. They will blaze their own trail because they love what they are doing and will not have their progress dictated to them by the demanding standards of today’s world.
One of my favorite books of the past decade is David Epstein’s Range. In fact, I ought to read it again and if you have never read it, you most certainly should. The book is a chapter-by-chapter evisceration of the idea that the only path to success in life is early specialization. More than just late blooming, though, Epstein argues that success hits differently when people possess a broader range of skills and experiences. Epstein calls this a “sampling period” and the book begins with a comparison between Tiger Woods—the ubermensch of early specialization—and Roger Federer—the best tennis player of all-time (ish) and a dabbler who refused to commit to tennis for a long time. Our world has privileged the Tigers; it is time to make room for the Rogers.
One way to do this is to cast a wide net for our children. As I mentioned, school ought to be a time of dabbling. Students should be exposed to a wide range of reading material and experiences. They should read, write, code, turn a wrench, pluck at an instrument, run a saw, shoot hoops, and sing in the choir.
But even in adulthood, we need to resist the push for immediate specialization. So few of us really know what we want to do when we’re 22, let alone 18. Our horizons are small; our bank of options, paltry. We need to encourage kids to work hard at what they are given to do without overly committing themselves to a particular route.
And, at least as importantly, we need to encourage them even when they have picked that path to follow some rabbit trails. One of the most interesting statistics in Range is when Epstein cites the fact that Nobel Prize-winning scientists are 22x more likely than non-Nobel winners to pursue some performative art (music, acting, magician) in addition to their scientific work. Gone should be the days of 100-hour work weeks and sleep-deprived medical students. The idea that the best fill-in-the-blank will do that thing and only that thing ad infinitum, world without end amen is exploded by the facts of the matter.
Finally, we need to change the way we think about what success looks like. Here is what we imagine a successful path looks like:
Here is what the actual path looks like:
And that’s a smoothed-over image, neglecting the time you might spend doing nothing at all for your passion (raising kids, working a pays-the-bills job, etc.). Most of you reading this who have attained career success (or success of any kind) can probably attest to the flow of the second graph. There is an upward trajectory, but it is anything but linear.
Most people who become successful follow a path that looks like the second image. One of the chief gifts of progress, as depicted in the second graph, is that the troughs on our trajectory usually provide opportunities for humility and wisdom. We come to realize the contingency of our success and how easily it could have gone another way. We learn that everything is a gift and nothing is a given. Thus, the success we experience at the other end of the bumpy curve is a useful success, one that helps others and invites them into their own fragmented growth.
There’s a reason every Olympic athlete in the ski jump or downhill lives in Lake Placid or Apsen. Those are the places that contain the resources required to foster any latent skill in those activities. You might have the genetic material required to be a world-shattering speed skater, but if you’re born in rural Kansas, good luck!
The man was a genius, just past his prime by the time I took a class with him.