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

by Rich Karlgaard

What I suggest is that 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. We do so at the cost of shaming the late bloomer and thus shortchanging people and society.

I learned the most important part of leadership is showing up.

More recently Google has discovered that having high SAT scores and an elite college degree are insufficient predictors of an employee’s career success at the company.

Women especially feel society’s scorn for not living up to their early-blooming potential.

So what exactly does it mean to be a late bloomer? Simply put, a late bloomer is a person who fulfils their potential later than expected; they often have talents that aren’t visible to others initially.

Late bloomers are those who find

their supreme destiny on their own schedule, in their own way.

Most of the late bloomers I interviewed didn’t bloom by belatedly copying the habits, skills, and career paths of early bloomers. In fact, trying to do so was almost always a recipe for failure and heartbreak.

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.

This fetish for youth and early blooming has reached such a fever pitch that fashion commentator Simon Doonan pronounced, “Youth is the new global currency.”

But our culture’s obsession with early achievement has become detrimental to the majority of the population—to the multitudes of us who develop in different ways and at different paces. It pushes the message that if you haven’t become famous, reinvented an industry, or banked seven figures while

you’re still young enough to get carded, you’ve somehow made a wrong turn in life.

This message, I believe, is far more dangerous than mo...

it’s easy to overlook the significant cost of preparing to apply to college. The expenses start adding up well before students ever apply for college, in the form of commercial test preparation classes and tutoring for the SAT and the ACT. The

tests are an industry unto themselves, with hundreds of millions of dollars spent on test fees, administration, and preparation.

For too many children, this intense pressure for early achievement is damaging to their physical and mental health.

This pressure for early achievement has an unwitting dark side: It demoralizes young people. By forcing adolescents to practice like professionals, to strive for perfection, and to make life choices in their teens (or earlier), we’re actually harming them. We’re stunting

their development, closing their pathways to discovery, and making them more fragile.

Just when we should be encouraging kids to dream big, take risks, and learn from life’s inevitable failures, we’re teaching them to live in terror of making the slightest mistake. For...

“I think society is in a crisis,” she told me. “Kids seem more exhausted and brittle today. I’m getting much more fear of failure, fear of evaluation, than I’ve gotten before. I see it in a lot of kids; a desire to play

it safe. They don’t want to get into a place of being judged, of having to produce.”

A study by the bank UBS found that in the wake of the 2008–9 financial crisis, millennials appear more risk-averse than any generation since the Great Depression. They’re making life decisions later, delaying marriage

longer, and taking much longer to settle into a career. And they are less likely than earlier generations to have three things associated with adulthood: A spouse. A house. A child. Yet even without these classic adult-responsibility impediments to mobility, untethered twenty-somethings are pulling up stakes less often than earlier generations of young adults.

For the twenty-somethings among us, the message is clear: Succeed right now or you never will.

Late blooming can happen at any age, and it can happen more than once in a person’s lifetime.

Life is not an Olympic slalom event, but if you’re not one of those elite racers, if you fall behind at some of the slalom gates of life, it is difficult to catch up. This is an enormous problem in society today because it affects so many of us.

Creativity is not the sole province of the young. Some of us simply need more time, experience, and experimentation to develop a path and realize our talents.

Purpose and wisdom, strengths of the late bloomer, come from a

portfolio of these experiences, making late bloomers more reflective, more considerate, and more patient. Late bloomers often have a higher level of empathy. They are usually better at regulating their emotions. They have higher level...

We are in danger of losing a valuable narrative about our lives: that we are capable of blooming at any age and in any stage of our lives. Late bloomers are disappearing from the stories we tell about ourselves, as we become trapped by our cultural worship of the precociously talented, the youthfully ambitious, and the extraordinarily smart—the wunderkinds.

A healthy society needs all its people to realize they can bloom and rebloom, grow and succeed, throughout their lives. This should be obvious. But we’ve made it terribly hard. Why is that?

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.

As Goodhart’s Law makes clear, the more we incentivize test results, the more people will beg, borrow, and steal to game the tests. So people with the economic resources for private tutoring and extensive test preparation will attain significantly higher scores—without having actually learned much more about the subjects being tested. This seems like a lousy, and unfair, method for determining the future of a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old.

Myers-Briggs has never been adopted by the psychology profession—critics note its subjectivity, its user bias, and its lack of falsifiability.

The technology I’m referring to is the late nineteenth-century technology of railroads. The 1890s are often called the Gilded Age for the spectacular wealth and mansions and yachts the railroads produced. But the 1890s also gave us the 1894–97 depression, the worst financial calamity the American economy had suffered to date. (It would

be eclipsed in sheer misery by the Great Depression in the 1930s.)

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. This moment when something complex suddenly makes sense often feels like an awakening. But this pattern can skew the

process of tracking, ranking, and categorizing students along the way. Though some kids have profiles that fit neatly into the learning templates, many others possess profiles that are not well matched to expectations.

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 ...

The outcome of our obsession with measurement? Success today is represented by the high-IQ, high-SAT wunderkind test takers beloved of Bill Gates and other IQ farms like Goldman Sachs, Google, and Amazon. The most successfully measured among us make the most money, and they make it the fastest. Today IQ and data dominate academic sorting, which has put unprecedented pressure on kids to be early bloomers. And thanks to our pressure-cooker education system that picks “winners”—that is, students with high GPAs and SAT scores—generations of young women and men find themselves left behind before they even reach adulthood. Young adults, men especially, look at the adult world, reject it, and live in their parents’ house playing computer games for hours every day. We see it in binge drinking and opioid addiction—all manner of ways in which people seek relief from their confusing, stressful, and unsatisfied lives.

If there’s one key takeaway here, it’s that no one has yet been able to devise a test that can accurately measure the potential or talent of an individual. The simple fact is, it’s impossible to apply a single metric or one-dimensional scale to something

as intricate and multifaceted as human development.

Two more eye-opening numbers: The combined personal wealth of our six wunderkinds math SAT test takers is more than $300 billion. And the companies they created are worth $3.6 trillion, more than the GDP of all but nine countries.

What can we say about Elizabeth Holmes? She was tremendously gifted. Her one-in-a-million algorithmic skills made her fluent in Mandarin and an expert computer programmer in high school. She was a President’s Scholar at Stanford, a patent applicant at eighteen, and as an entrepreneur was so smart and charismatic that at nineteen she was able to talk her Stanford adviser into joining her company. But is she actually a born

liar and a con artist, a Bernie Madoff wannabe? Here I speculate, but I don’t think so—or at least she didn’t start out that way. I think her fatal flaw was an obsession with early success and the impatience that goes with it. When Theranos didn’t succeed on her magical schedule, she didn’t stop to fix the technology but rather doubled down on her young genius narrative, her TED talks, her private

jet trips, and her legal threats ...

And yet when it comes to early achievement and cognitive diversity, we’ve done the exact opposite. We’ve become less tolerant of those with different

cognitive profiles—of those with slower rates of development or skills not recognized by the job market.

We assume that because we celebrate different identities and lifestyles, we also celebrate different learning profiles and cognitive development schedules: We assume