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

by Rich Karlgaard

that there’s more opportunity for more of us now than ever before. But this assumption is deeply flawed, a misconception that blinds us to the rigid conformity that vastly overvalues the rapid algorithmic skills coveted by Web companies and financial firms.

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. And this sets up a competition we’re guaranteed to lose.

Society is in a crisis. Our obsession with test scores, perfect grades, and measurable early achievement developed from a good idea that has been way overshot. Instead of a meritocracy that rewards a variety of human talents, we have created a narrowing IQ/SAT oligarchy.

To mitigate this crisis, we must stop excessively glorifying precocious achievement and seeing human development as a “fast track” on ramp for early success.

Not only is it unjust to the majority of us, it’s profoundly inhumane.

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 trajectory

of the rest of their lives. This makes no sense.

Why are so many people in their twenties taking so long to grow up? This question pops up everywhere, underlying familiar parental concerns about their children’s “failure to launch” and the increase in “boomerang kids”—kids who return home.

The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course. As more young people remain untethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, they go back to school for lack of better options. Others travel, avoid commitments, compete ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) gigs, and otherwise forestall the beginning of adult life.

In other words, delaying adulthood may actually be desirable. It can foster independent thinking and the acquisition of new skills. More than that, it can boost motivation and drive.

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.

In today’s rush for early success, though, many students and young graduates hesitate to slow down or take a break that they will have to explain to graduate school admissions offices or employers. They fear they may fall behind or hurt their long-term earning potential. For those fearful of jumping off the career treadmill, some good news may help to assuage this concern.

They found that different parts of our intelligence peak at different ages: “At any given age, you’re getting better at some things, you’re getting worse at some other things, and you’re at a plateau at some other things.

There’s probably not one age at which you’re peak on most things, much less all of them,”

Other studies have confirmed that the human brain is remarkably adaptable throughout the life course.

How you live your life makes a difference as to how you will move into old age….You don’t suddenly become a member of a different species when you grow old. It’s clear that a person who

is quick-minded and not rigid in his thinking has an advantage. Things change, but if you’re a good problem solver or successfully handled a personal crisis when you were younger you will likely continue to do so.

It seems that the middle-aged mind not only maintains many of the abilities of youth but actually acquires some new ones. The adult brain seems to be capable of rewiring itself well into middle age, incorporating decades of experiences and behaviors. Research suggests, for example, the middle-aged mind is calmer, less neurotic and better able

to sort through social situations. Some middle-agers even have improved cognitive abilities.

We have to invest in our health, in our curiosity about the world around us, and in our learning. When we do, we can enjoy multiple brain peaks in our lives and multiple personal bloomings.

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. For most adults, Gc includes both occupational (job) and avocational knowledge (hobbies, music, art, popular culture, etc.). Unlike Gf, measures of Gc show rising levels of performance well into middle age and beyond. Georgia Tech psychology professor Phillip Ackerman and his colleagues have shown a strong link between adult age and levels of knowledge. Older adults, frankly, are more knowledgeable than younger adults.

According to Ackerman, the best way for older adults to compensate for declines in youthful Gf is to select jobs and goals that optimize their Gc—their existing knowledge and skills.

Jobs like software coding tend to favor fluid or Gf intelligence and thus younger coders. That’s a key reason so many young employees populate the likes of Google and Amazon. But managing software projects and software businesses shifts the balance of desired skills from Gf to Gc. That is why you saw Diane Greene, in her early sixties, leading one of Google’s most important businesses, Google Cloud.

In a sense, our brains are constantly forming neural networks and pattern-recognition capabilities that we didn’t have in our youth when we had blazing synaptic horsepower. As we get older, we develop new skills and refine others, including social awareness, emotional regulation, empathy, humor, listening, risk-reward calibration, and adaptive intelligence. All these skills enhance our potential to bloom and rebloom.

Today someone who is fifty-five is as likely to produce a major scientific breakthrough as someone who is twenty-five (i.e., roughly the ages of Einstein, Dirac, and Bragg).

One simply has more to learn, which takes more time, before one can be productive. In neuroscience terms, it takes both early-blooming Gf intelligence and later-blooming Gc to perform Nobel-level work.

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.

We need to give ourselves a break. We need to recognize and celebrate the fact that we’re

all different, with different skill sets, developmental profiles, and backgrounds, and that each of us will forge a different path toward blooming. But today we do the opposite. Our society is grossly lopsided toward individuals who show themselves to be cognitively exceptional and precociously focused at an early age. We ask teenagers and young adults whose brains are still developing to “prove” themselves by gaining admission to

the right schools, taking the right classes, and getting the right job. We hold up those who are exceptional in se...

Curiosity is the first late bloomer strength.

All healthy children have curiosity in buckets, but America’s early-blooming conveyor belt isn’t impressed. It wants us to grow up fast and trade in our youthful curiosity for a determined focus. It does not want us to get off the conveyor belt and take wasteful side trips into, say, a library’s magazine

stacks, when the cost of doing so is a B instead of an A. It wants us to winnow our extracurricular pursuits from enjoyable recreation into activities that will demonstr...

Do late bloomers have more curiosity than early bloomers? Research can’t tell us, but observationally late bloomers seem to retain more of their childhood curiosity, just a...

The London-based science journal the Cube writes that “curiosity is a cognitive process which leads to the behavior perceived as motivation. From the human perspective the relationship between curiosity and motivation creates a feedback; the

more curious one becomes about something, the more motivated one will be, and the more motivated one is the more one learns and the more curious one will become.” Curiosity is a dopamine hit, says the Cube.

According to the National Institutes of Health, curiosity has long-term health benefits, playing “an important role in maintaining cognitive

function, mental health, and physical health in older adults.”

Compassion is a second late bloomer strength, the ability to put ourselves in others’ shoes and in doing so understand their challenges and how best to help them. Compassion includes tolerating difficult feelings. 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.

Yet too often compassion has been sacrificed in our race to early success.

The conveyor belt to early success has created a crisis of compassion.

Late bloomers, by taking the “more scenic route” and experiencing the missteps, bumps, and bruises of life, gain connective insights and perspectives. And they’re driven to

use these insights to understand and help others. Compassion offers benefits to both themselves and the people around them.

Compassionate leaders appear to be stronger, have greater levels of engagement, and have more people willing to follow them.

Compassion offers very real returns. One benefit of being a late bloomer is that we earn a deeper sense of compassion—through years of trial and error, through mistakes and restarts—that improves our critical thinking. It allows us to see the bigger picture and make better decisions. It makes us keener artists, better leaders, and more effective business owners. This is something that deserves celebration—and something that more corporations, human resources departments, and organizations would do

well to heed. Emma Seppälä, author of The Happiness Track, professes that “compassion is good for the bottom line, it’s great for your relationships, and it inspires lasting loyalty. In addition, compassion significantly boosts your health.”