Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement

by Rich Karlgaard

Worse, this conformity has blinded us to a universal, profound truth that hides in plain sight—that human potential is wonderfully wide-ranging. Some people are lucky that their skills are noticed early in their school years, that their best talents get discovered through one-dimensional, standardized tests. They are the fortunate ones. For the unfortunate majority, however, our latent skills are neither discovered nor recognized nor encouraged until much later, if ever. As a result, most of us are falsely labeled as having less talent or ambition; we’re written off as lazy or apathetic. But in reality, the light simply isn’t shining on our true abilities, on the things we can do uniquely well. The toxic combination of early pressure and conformity is turning us into machines.

In Inc., the global marketing consultant Don Peppers went further: People should consider it a moral obligation to be curious about things. Not being curious is not only intellectually lazy, but it shows a willful contempt for the facts. If you don’t want to know the truth about something, then how moral can you claim to be?

Our brains are driven to seek calmness as we age. Columbia University social psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson claims that calmness is central to happiness. As we age, she says, “happiness becomes less the high-energy, totally-psyched experience of a teenager partying while his parents are out of town, and more the peaceful, relaxing experience of an overworked mom who’s been dreaming of that hot bath all day. The latter isn’t less ‘happy’ than the former—it’s a different way of understanding what happiness is.”

Don’t compare your inside to other people’s outside.

As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

I accomplish the most not when I set out to prove something, but when I set out to discover something.