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

by Rich Karlgaard

The third strength that late bloomers tend to have in spades is resilience. As defined in Psychology

Today, “resilience is that ineffable quality that allows some people to be knocked down by life and come back stronger than ever.” Morton Shaevitz, a clinical psychologist at the University of California at San Diego, adds that resilience is not a passive quality but “an ongoing process of responding to adversity with concerted action.”

Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck told me that her freshman students at Stanford, in 2018, are more “brittle” than those in 2008. They are youthful early achievers, and true to their age and exalted station, they are often quite full of themselves. But they are the opposite of resilient. Any chip in their self-image threatens to shatter the whole wunderkind mirage.

Late bloomers, in the same situation, tend to have already suffered plenty of social rejections and so build bridges to supportive communities, obtaining tools that early achievers have not had to develop.

Equanimity means a “mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation.” How is equanimity a late bloomer strength? Is it genuinely an attribute that improves with age?

Equanimity equates to mental calmness, to composure, and to evenness of temper. It’s a mind in balance. This is an advantage for any leader, pilot, Navy SEAL, or person under extreme pressure—and it’s one that we late bloomers naturally develop.

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.

While early bloomers, from Mozart to Mark Zuckerberg, can and do have valuable insights, the conversion of novel perceptions to useful insights tends to increase

as our left hemisphere matures. In other words, our yield of useful insights improves as we age, giving a distinct advantage to late bloomers. That’s why I believe insight is another fundamental strength of late bloomers.

As a graduate student in the 1970s, Vivian Clayton—a geriatric neuropsychologist in Orinda, California—began studying ancient and modern literature in an effort to quantify and define wisdom. Her study led her to think of wisdom as thoughtful behavior, usually involving social situations. She later refined this idea of wisdom to include behavior born of knowledge and instilled with thoughtfulness and compassion. Her early work has served as a foundation for subsequent research on the subject of wisdom.

“Great executives know how to manage ambiguity.”

Wisdom, extensive research attests, isn’t something that we’re born with or that develops over a few years. It doesn’t come with perfect SAT scores or a degree from an elite university. And much to the vexation of modern society, it doesn’t come from an eight-figure bank account or a million followers on Instagram. Instead, wisdom emerges through a complex pattern of personal characteristics and experiential features that coalesce as we weather the challenges of life. It comes with years of ups and downs. It accrues over a lifetime of meeting new challenges. It brings together the sum of our knowledge, experience, and intuition. As author Daniel J. Brown told us, wisdom is the ability to see the layers of life that were harder to see when one was younger.

Wisdom increases rather than declines with age and experience. Though our pure cognitive speed may deteriorate, asserts Staudinger, “what doesn’t go down is reasoning and cogni...

this is the perfect definition of wisdom: reasoning and cognition based on kn...

middle-aged people are much more expert at many social interactions—such as judging others’ true intentions and moderating emotional reactions—than younger people.

between ages forty and fifty,

including the ability to make better decisions, a heightened focus on the positive, better coping skills, an increased sense of equanimity, and the ability to more quickly and accurately interpret patterns.

“cognitive templates” develop in older brains based on pattern recognition and form the basis for wise behavior and better decisions.

Older people have vastly more information in their brains than young people do, so retrieving it naturally takes longer. In addition, the quality of the information in older people’s brains is more nuanced. While younger people excel in tests of cognitive speed, one study found, older people show “greater sensitivity to fine-grained differences.”

including pragmatic knowledge of life; the ability to regulate emotion; prosocial behavior, which entails compassion, altruism, and empathy; and knowing one’s strengths and limitations. Next, Jeste’s team looked at studies on brain imaging, genetics, neurochemistry, and neuropathology that targeted the individual components of wisdom.

brain integration—and its resulting increases in judgment, expertise, and wisdom—happens naturally as we move into middle age.

There’s a reason car rental companies are reluctant to rent to adults under twenty-five. There’s a reason

the U.S. Constitution dictates that you must be at least thirty-five to be president. Even two centuries ago, the founding fathers understood the value of an older, wiser brain.

Early maturity—or early blooming—in no way correlated to maturity and wisdom as an older adult. Wisdom, it turns out, isn’t bequeathed. It’s earned.

And these qualities—curiosity, compassion, resilience, equanimity, insight, and wisdom—are conferred only with time.

But our modern obsession with early blooming was born during the 1980s, with the personal computer boom and the arrival of heroes still in their twenties, like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who overthrew the old guard and got rich extremely fast.

The algorithmic, hypermeritocratic culture we live in today is Bill Gates’s culture.

The obsession with early measurable achievement is a huge part of our culture.

For late bloomers, culture is a big deal, and here’s why. If we think we haven’t yet fully bloomed—that is, discovered our destiny and fulfilled our potential—then we must examine our cultural influences to see if any of them are holding us back.

If we haven’t yet bloomed into our full potential, or if we sense we’re on a wrong path, it’s natural to ask why. Natural, yet difficult. Who wants to cast a critical eye at societal norms to see what could be sabotaging our opportunities to bloom? Who wants to consider how our

own parents, friends, and teachers might have put us in a box where it was impossible to bloom?

To fully bloom, we must declare our independence from our family.

It means only that we must reach our own conclusions about what does and does not support our blooming. Loyalty to family is one thing. Blindly conforming to family expectations is another and will likely hold us back from fulfilling our potential.

In truth, adults are just as subject to peer pressure as children and teens.

not all communities support growth and positive change.

It’s tempting to say that poorer people are held back simply by lack of financial resources, especially today as the wealth gap between rich and poor is the highest it has been since the 1920s. But it’s more complicated than that. As Vance notes, the problems in poor communities are also cultural. The few upwardly mobile people from the community often leave and thereby deprive the community of role models for success. Many of those left behind fall into a fatalism that leads to drugs and alcohol. As employers leave, citing lack of qualified employees, community trust collapses, and with it a

hopeful sense of the future. Against this cultural gravity, it’s hard for anyone to summon the effort to work and invest for the long term. Anger and defiance take over, so that a community may consider even showing up for work at a low-skill job to be a “sellout.”

In some ways, high-performance cultures can be a special kind of trap, pushing kids to a breaking point. They’re raised to be ambitious and driven, verbally and mathematically quick, to get into elite schools and

launch high-paying careers. But these kids often have little time or room for self-exploration. They are shuttled onto the conveyor belt, moving in one direction, with no encouragement of other interests or career choices. The conveyor belt moves them along a narrow path of success and starves

them of opportunities for sel...

One thing is clear: All communities pass along beliefs that can keep us from

blooming. Whether we attended an elite prep school or grew up in a poverty- and crime-ridden inner city or a depressed town in the rural sticks, each community puts an imprint on its inhabitants, exerting pressure to conform to its expectations.

In what researchers call “cultivation,” over time, heavy viewers of television may come to believe that the real world is similar to the television world.

The problem for late bloomers is that many of the standards and expectations pushed through mass and social media can work against us.

Thus media affect how we define success, what types of careers or relationships are desirable or even acceptable, and when life milestones should be met. So the dominant social culture can create self-doubt, or even self-loathing, among those who do not conform.

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.”

Study after study has shown that most of us are clueless when it comes to understanding why we so readily conform. People are more environmentally responsible—conserve energy and increase recycling—due to social normative influence more than any other factor. We put out our recycle bins because our neighbors do it. Yet in these same studies, participants rated normative social influence as the least important factor in evaluating why they changed their behavior.

Normative thinking creates the belief that the right pathway is the one followed by the person we see as a normal member of our social group.

Confused, we default to following norms and take the road everyone else is taking. But the problem for late bloomers is this: That