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

by Rich Karlgaard

Chapter 3 reveals how the latest neuroscience and cognition research supports the concept of blooming—not just in our teens and young adult years but throughout our lives. That means our current obsession with early blooming is a human construct, not supported by science.

Here is the really important thing to remember about Binet and his 1905 test: He saw it as a snapshot in time. The test would reveal where a child stood on the scale of mental capability relative to that child’s peers—at a moment in time. Nowhere did Binet write or imply that his IQ test, given once to a child between three and thirteen, would project that child’s intelligence over his or her entire lifetime. It was an American who made that unfortunate leap.

Campbell’s Law, which asserts that “the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social process it is intended to monitor.”

And the British economist Charles Goodhart formulated Goodhart’s Law, which states, “Any measure used for control is unreliable.” Put another way: Once attaining a high score becomes the goal of a measurement, the measurement is no longer valid. Put even more simply, and crassly: Anything that is measured and rewarded will be gamed.

It’s common knowledge that we all learn in different ways. Learning is a cumulative process that involves neurological, physiological, and emotional development. This means we all absorb, incorporate, and apply knowledge at different paces. Some people start applying knowledge as soon as they’re exposed to the foundations. Others, late bloomers in particular (myself included), apply that knowledge only after the final piece clicks into place.

Standardized tests simply can’t measure students’ critical thinking skills or true engagement with a topic. And forcing teachers to address only content that can be measured in standardized tests, while avoiding more analytical material, hinders learning. It also devalues the profession of teaching, the way that Taylor’s theories devalued the role of skilled craftspeople in factories. Reducing education to test preparation jeopardizes the quality of curricula and the craft of teaching. It drains education of humanity.

What “bits” companies mostly don’t do is make physical products. They use their clever algorithms to create markets, not products.

Our prefrontal cortex is massive compared to that of other species. In the human adult, the prefrontal cortex constitutes nearly one-third of the neocortex, which is the entire part of the brain involved in higher-order brain functions. By comparison, the prefrontal cortex makes up just 17 percent of the neocortex in a chimpanzee, 13 percent in a dog, and 4 percent in a cat.

Psychologists use another term for neurological maturity: executive function. The lack of executive function is what led to Ashley’s compulsive cutting and running streak and my own raging immaturity. Executive function has nothing to do with IQ, potential, or talent. It is simply the ability to see ahead and plan effectively, to connect actions to possible consequences, to see the probabilities of risk and reward. It includes developing a sense of self (self-identity, individual beliefs, and personal values), regulating emotions, and setting goals.

Think about it this way: Most eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds are literally incapable of making responsible judgments, paying sufficient attention, or managing their emotions. Yet at this age they’re being measured and fitted (via tests, grades, and job interviews) for the

These two trends—the later onset of adult maturity, and the earlier testing of children’s abilities—are in clear opposition. Only a small percentage of those under twenty-five thrive in this race for early blooming.

It takes longer for each successive generation to finish school, become financially independent, get married, and have children. A large-scale national study conducted since the late 1970s found that today’s twenty-five-year-olds, compared with their parents’ generation at the same age, are twice as likely to still be in school, 50 percent more likely to be taking money from their parents, and only half as likely to have a spouse.

Jeffrey Arnett, a psychology professor at Clark University, is urging society to recognize what he calls “emerging adulthood” as a distinct life stage. Arnett believes that social and economic changes have caused the need for a new, distinct stage between the ages of eighteen and thirty. Among the cultural changes that have led to Arnett’s concept of emerging adulthood are the need for more education, the availability of fewer entry-level jobs, and less of a cultural rush to marry while young.

The evidence is clear: Exposure to novelty and challenge while the brain’s frontal cortex is still plastic leads to greater long-term career success.

A kinder human development clock would allow for a period in which young adults have the chance to do something challenging and different: an exploratory period to open up paths of discovery both in the outside world and to their inner capabilities.

Fluid intelligence is our capacity to reason and solve novel problems, independent of knowledge from the past. It’s the ability to identify abstract patterns, use logic, and apply inductive and deductive reasoning. Gf peaks earlier in life. Crystallized intelligence, on the other hand, is the ability to use skills, knowledge, and experience.

Elkhonon Goldberg, a neuropsychologist and cognitive neuroscientist at New York University and author of the 2018 book Creativity, says our creative yield increases with age. Dr. Goldberg thinks the brain’s right and left hemispheres are connected by a “salience network” that helps us evaluate novel perceptions from the right side by comparing them to the stored images and patterns on our left side. Thus a child will have more novel perceptions than a middle-aged adult but will lack the context that turns novel perceptions into useful creative insights, or creative yield. But

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation published a study recently that claims that peak innovation age is, in fact, even later—in our late forties, almost a decade older than the Northwestern study suggests. A late-forties peak period of innovation is supported by the average age of U.S. patent applicants, which is forty-seven.

The worst thing a company can do is kill off the creative energy of its young and talented people. The second-worst thing is to allow young people to blindly walk into avoidable traps that a wise senior employee can help them foresee.

Empathy is the ability to feel the emotions that another person experiences, but compassion goes beyond empathy to generate action to help the other person.

In facing the ups and downs of life, many late bloomers gain a greater sense of compassion. They show greater reflective thinking, diminished ego-centeredness, and a deeper appreciation of others’ challenges—what psychologists call greater prosocial behavior.

Some mistakenly believe having compassion for others implies that we’re weak or overly emotional. It may offer a tangible benefit for artists and writers like Brown, they say dismissively—people who make their living re-creating the human experience—but not in the bare-knuckle world of business. But the reality is that compassion is hard. It takes courage. Demonstrating true compassion often requires making difficult decisions and facing tough realities.

Captain Shults was fifty-six when she managed her feat of calm bravado. Sully was fifty-eight. Their stories illustrate another late bloomer strength. The best descriptor I can think of is equanimity. Equanimity means a “mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation.”

UCLA and Stanford psychologists Cassie Mogilner, Sepandar Kamvar, and Jennifer Aaker report that excitement and elation are emotions that move the happiness needle for younger people, while peacefulness, calm, and relief drive it for those who are older.

Put another way, children, teenagers, and young adults may have more novel perceptions than they will later in life, but their ability to discern which novel perceptions are useful or salient, and which are just ephemeral and fun, is not fully developed. Turn a six-year-old loose at Disneyland to see how that works; meanwhile Mom and Dad are looking at the Disneyland map, calculating the most efficient trek through the park, and judging what rides and theme areas are most likely to interest their kids.

“Based on all of those [brain imaging studies], we suggested there is a neurocircuitry of wisdom,” said Jeste. The circuit involves different parts of the prefrontal cortex (which controls our higher functions), the anterior cingulate (which mediates conflicts between parts of the prefrontal cortex), and the striatum with amygdala (part of the reward circuitry). Wisdom, says Jeste, comes from a balance of activity in these regions. “In some way, wisdom is balance. If you are very prosocial, you give everything to other people, you won’t survive. But of course, if you don’t give anything to others, the species won’t survive. You have to have balance.”

the dominant social culture can create self-doubt, or even self-loathing, among those who do not conform. We feel we don’t fit in. The twenty-year-old virgin is made to feel like he or she has something to hide from friends and peers. The twenty-five-year-old late bloomer working odd jobs while figuring out his or her career path is made to feel like a loser. Our value as a person can be thrown into question when we follow a slower or unconventional path. Today’s media wildly overcelebrate youthful success. It is hard to overstate the influence this exerts on our children, our peers, and ourselves. Commenting on this darker side of society, the French psychologist Adolphe Quetelet famously said, “Society prepares the crime, and the guilty are only the instrument by which it is executed.”

The amygdala, which is associated with negative emotions, was activated when participants sought to break off from the influence of the majority. In other words, resisting normative social influence—even when the majority opinion is clearly wrong—can lead to negative physiological consequences. Put another way, it shows that we’re cognitively hardwired to conform to group opinion, no matter how erroneous that opinion may be.

I ended the previous chapter by asking, “How can the curious and creative, the searchers and explorers, jump off the dominant culture’s conveyor belt and begin shaping our own fates?” We do it by quitting. Quit the path we’re on. Quit the lousy job. Quit the class we hate. Quit the friends and associates who hurt us more than help. Quit the life we regret.

Research points to three awkward truths about our determination not to quit: (1) tenacity, or willpower, is a limited resource; (2) quitting can be healthy; and (3) quitting, not doggedness, often produces better results.

Research shows that when we quit pursuing unattainable goals, we’re happier, less stressed, and even get sick less often. That’s right, quitting is actually physically good for you.

Call it a strategic retreat. Think of it as a pivot or a rebirth. For those who are cardplayers, think of it as “knowing when to fold ’em.” The fact is, it’s just as important to know when to drop something and shift direction as it is to know when to stick with something.

Exposed to these types of negative stereotypes, we come to believe them and use them as pretexts to avoid certain topics, challenges, or even careers. For instance, we may view ourselves as “not a math person” or as a bad leader. And rather than working to disprove the stereotype, we avoid any situation that involves math or requires managing people. We give up on ourselves before we have a chance to develop a skill or test our true capabilities.

In 2005 the sociologist Joseph Hermanowicz found the opposite to be true. It turns out that the smartest and most accomplished physicists—the real-world Sheldons and Leonards—have loads of self-doubt. In fact, the more accomplished they were, the more self-doubt they admitted to.

One day I asked him about the role of confidence in a successful career. He snorted. “Confidence,” he said. “In my whole career I’ve been passing men with greater bravado and confidence. Confidence gets you off to a fast start. Confidence gets you that first job and maybe the next two promotions. But confidence stops you from learning. Confidence becomes a caricature after a while. I can’t tell you how many confident blowhards I’ve seen in my coaching career who never get better after the age of forty.”

The key to harnessing self-doubt starts at the very core of our individual beliefs about ourselves, with something psychologists call “self-efficacy.” And understanding self-efficacy begins with Albert Bandura.

self-efficacy—an individual’s confidence in their ability to accomplish what they set out to do.

Bandura has defined self-efficacy as confidence in one’s own ability to develop strategies and complete tasks necessary to succeed in various endeavors. More simply put, it is an individual’s belief about their own capabilities, like their ability to perform specific tasks: Take a test. Launch a business. Close a sale. Give a speech. Complete a marathon. High self-efficacy is good because unless we truly believe we can produce the result we want, we have little incentive to try stuff in the first place or persevere in the face of challenges.

Because of society’s obsession with early achievement, late bloomers are often denied the two primary sources of a strong sense of self-efficacy: mastery experiences and social modeling.

Mastery experiences are instances of mastering a task or achieving a goal. Acing a class or a test, dominating a sport, nailing a job interview—these are all mastery experiences that increase self-efficacy. But many late bloomers have fewer of these types of experiences. Because we don’t fit the mold created by society, we often fail to meet typical milestones.

The other source of self-efficacy, social modeling, refers to seeing people similar to ourselves succeed, which raises our belief that we too possess the capabilities to excel in life. Unfortunately late bloomer success stories garner little attention in our world, which focuses excessive attention on early achievers—the precociously talented and youthfully ambitious.

Put another way, self-doubt is okay. Lack of self-efficacy is not.

Lesson: If you’re frazzled and need a motivational pep talk, consider giving it to yourself in the second or third person. This can help you look at the situation from a logical, objective perspective rather than an emotional, biased one.

If we have the power to choose our frames, then why would we frame events in a way that undermines our efforts? In general, researchers believe that many spontaneous frames like the ones late bloomers use are about self-protection. But self-protective frames dramatically inhibit our opportunities to learn, improve, and bloom: They are the “I’m not good enough” and “I’m going to blow it” thoughts. As late bloomers, accepting our limiting frames rather than challenging them has grave consequences: We end up not achieving our goals, discovering our passions, or living our destinies. Successful late bloomers don’t let themselves default to self-protective framing. Instead, they learn to reframe. The idea is, we’re all free to reframe literally any thought into something more positive, just like the nervous performers who reframed their anxiety as excitement. Reframing doesn’t mean ignoring facts. It means changing our perspective on the facts to give them a more beneficial meaning.

Framing also matters after the fact. If you blow an opportunity, don’t beat yourself up or make excuses. Frame your mistake as an opportunity to learn. Instead of saying, I bombed that presentation, or They gave me a terrible time slot, ask yourself, Where did you start losing people? Then admit, That wasn’t your best effort, Lisa. Next time, you prepare smarter. Post facto framing is an incredibly powerful tool for late bloomers, as well as everyone else.

Self-compassion is closely associated with emotional resilience—a late bloomer strength—including the ability to soothe ourselves, recognize our mistakes, learn from them, and motivate ourselves to succeed. Self-compassion is also consistently correlated with measures of emotional well-being, such as optimism, life satisfaction, and autonomy, and with reduced levels of anxiety, depression, stress, and shame. Understandably, self-compassionate people can improve on mistakes, failures, or shortcomings more easily than others because they view them more objectively.

Finally, self-compassion enhances motivation. People who are more self-compassionate are less afraid of failure. One study found that when participants failed a test, the ones who showed high levels of self-compassion actually studied longer and harder for the makeup test. Because self-compassion helps create the sense that it’s okay to fail, it motivates us to try again—and try harder.

Why would people, even friends, try to keep you “in your place”? Animals and humans are wired to be status conscious. Groups of crabs will quite literally pull down any member who tries to escape a trap or a bucket, relegating the whole group to certain death. Psychologists and sociologists call this phenomenon the “crab pot syndrome.” Among humans, members of a group will attempt to negate the importance of any member who achieves success beyond the success of others.

Another belief that plagues many late bloomers springs from the limiting stories we tell ourselves. We hold these stories—I was shy in high school, and I’ll always be shy—in our heads as if they’re immutable facts. But these stories stem from the old us, the nonblooming us. They imply that we possess certain fixed behavioral traits and always will. Such a fixed belief about ourselves prevents us from repotting and trying alternative paths.

But the Internet and search tools can also be a barrier to reinvention. By archiving the minutiae of our lives, they have chained us to every mistake, misstep, or poor choice we’ve ever made—making the possibility of self-reinvention seem like an ideal from an older time. In a sense, we’ve collectively lost our ability to forget. And with it, we’ve forfeited a very American ideal—the right to a new beginning.