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

by Rich Karlgaard

parents, schools, employers, the media, and consumers of media are now crazily overcelebrating early achievement as the best kind of achievement or even the only kind.

Society’s desire for early-blooming validation has led to—let’s be honest—price gouging by those official scorekeepers of early achievement, colleges and universities.

That means our current obsession with early blooming is a human construct, not supported by science.

in this country and really in no other country, we now use medication as a first resort for any kid who’s not getting straight A’s or not sitting still in class.

By 2011, for the first time in more than twenty years, more teenagers died from suicide than homicide; only traffic accidents led to more teen fatalities.

A late bloomer can be the apparently listless teenager like record-setting astronaut Scott Kelly, who could not pay attention in high school to save his or her life, but later finds motivation in a book, a subject, or a person. A parent might jump back into the workforce after a decade of child-rearing, feeling ten years behind but being ten years wiser. Or a retiree might find a deeper meaning in life by finally pursuing a childhood dream or mentoring others.

Truth is, many factors can slow our blooming early in life, including delayed physical or neurological development, early childhood trauma, nonstandard learning styles, socioeconomic status, geographical restrictions, illness, addiction, career turbulence—even plain bad luck.

The critical thing to remember is—we cannot give up on ourselves, or on others, even (and especially) if society has made it harder to catch up.

In reality, our educational system operates largely according to the dictates of an industrial system: a consistent drive toward greater standardization and measurement, an overt promotion of a utilitarian STEM-focused curriculum, and even a physical synchronization through the use of bells to signal changes and breaks—all as if kids are little Ford Model T’s rolling off a Frederick Taylor–designed assembly line.

And in the absence of a system of hereditary titles, with no officially mandated status ladder in place, we’ve created a new system of snobbery based on IQ scores and elite university degrees.

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.

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.

When society so overtly favors early bloomers, it’s difficult for the rest of us to see ourselves as worthy.

The future self you must identify with is your blooming self. You have to believe that that person can be you and is you. Psychologically, this is called “creating an identity goal.”

As legendary UCLA film professor Howard Suber wrote, “You seek your destiny; you succumb to your fate. Destiny originates within the self; fate comes from outside.

Blooming has no deadline. Our future story is written in pencil, not carved in stone. It can be changed. There is no fixed chronology to self-determination, no age limit for breakthroughs.

We all have a supreme destiny: to discover our gifts, however long it takes, to pursue our deepest purposes, and to bloom.