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

by Rich Karlgaard

Consider how, in high-pressure cities, some elite preschools play on the fears of affluent parents of three- and four-year-olds. The Atlanta International School in Atlanta offers a “full immersion second language program”—for three-year-olds. Just pony up $20,000 for a year’s tuition. But that’s a bargain compared to the fees at Columbia Grammar School in New York, which will set you back $37,000 a year.

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.

In fact, many early bloomers are suffering terribly. The pressure to achieve early success led to three student suicides in the 2014–15 school year at Gunn High School, a public school in Palo Alto, California, three miles from the elite Stanford University campus. All were good students striving for early achievement. By March in the same school year, forty-two Gunn students had been hospitalized or treated for suicidal thoughts.

Today five to eight times as many high school and college students meet the diagnostic criteria for major depression and/or anxiety disorder as in the 1960s.

And if you think getting into the right college eases that anxiety, think again. In the past fifteen years, depression has doubled and suicide rates have tripled among American college students.

Being seen as a potential late bloomer was once a mark of vitality, patience, and pluck. Nowadays, more and more, it is seen as a defect (there must be a reason you started slowly, after all) and a consolation prize. This is an awful trend, since it diminishes the very things that make us human—our experiences, our resilience, and our lifelong capacity to grow.

The median age for the full maturation of executive functioning is around twenty-five.

For the fortunate majority of us, however, some kind of intellectual or spiritual awakening happened, and we stepped onto a new, improved road. We found our way. But others become so steeped in shame or see themselves as so far removed from opportunity that they never develop their ability to bloom. And I would argue that failure to bloom during one’s lifetime is catastrophic for people—and for societies.

As Oprah Winfrey says, “Everyone has a supreme destiny.” Late bloomers are those who find their supreme destiny on their own schedule, in their own way.

What potential late bloomers have to do is to get off the conveyor belt and find a new path of discovery.

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 most people realize.

More than 1.6 million students took the SAT in 2017. And for the first time, the number of students who took the ACT surpassed the SAT takers by about two thousand.

A kid in the United States is now fourteen times more likely to be on medication for ADD compared to a kid in the U.K. A kid in the United States is forty times more likely to be diagnosed and treated for bipolar disorder compared to a kid in Germany. A kid in the United States is ninety-three times more likely to be on medications like Risperdal and Zyprexa used to control behavior compared to a kid in Italy. So 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. No other country does this. This is a uniquely American phenomenon, and it’s quite new.

The World Mental Health Survey, supported by WHO, found that half of those who suffered from mental health problems—including depression—first experience symptoms at age fourteen. In high-income countries, like the United States, fewer than half of adolescents with a mental health problem receive treatment. Not surprisingly, this all too often leads to tragic outcomes. Rates of teen suicide are rising at an alarming rate, according to an August 2017 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with rates for girls higher than at any point in the last forty years. From 2007 to 2015, the suicide rate rose 40 percent for teenage boys and more than doubled for teenage girls.

More weight is given to tests and grades than ever before. Children today spend more hours per day in school than ever before. Outside school, they spend more time than ever being tutored, coached, ranked, and rewarded by adults. During the same half-century in which children’s anxiety and depression have increased, what researchers call “free play” (and most of us call goofing around) has declined, while school- and adult-directed activities such as organized sports have risen steadily in importance. In all these instances, adults are in charge, not kids or adolescents. And this, it appears, is a recipe for unhappiness, anxiety, psychopathology—or worse.

Twenge connects the generational increases in depression to a shift from intrinsic to extrinsic goals. Intrinsic goals have to do with your own development as a person, such as becoming capable in activities of your own choosing or developing a strong sense of self. Extrinsic goals, conversely, have to do with material gains and other status measurements, like high grades and test scores, high income, and good looks.

Today’s young adults are also more likely to be at home for an extended stay compared with previous generations of young adults, according to the Pew Research Center. As of 2016, 15 percent of twenty-five-to-thirty-five-year-old adults were living in their parents’ home. This represents a 50 percent increase over the share of Generation Xers who lived in their parents’ home in 2000 at the same age, and nearly double the share of the Silent Generation who lived at home in 1964.

We’ve long understood that movies, magazines, and television can shape self-image and enforce social ideals, but social media has now become our most toxic cultural mirror. According to an extensive survey conducted by the Royal Society for Public Health, visual platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat allow young adults to compare themselves to one another and earn approval based on appearances.

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.

The incoming president of Harvard University, James Bryant Conant, was angry about the gross inequality. His family was not from East Coast old money. His father was a merchant who owned a photoengraving shop. Conant, despite his good grades, felt like a second-class citizen amid Harvard’s wealthy set. The chip never fell off his shoulder, even when he became Harvard’s president in 1933.

Amazingly, by the 1990s, the Washington Post newspaper company derived most of its market value not from the newspaper but from its ownership of an SAT prep course vendor, Kaplan Testing Services.

The American social psychologist Donald T. Campbell formulated what’s come to be called 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.

As Harvard’s Todd Rose writes in his brilliant book on differing human talents, The End of Average, the rigid pathways of today’s educational system stem from ideas about factory management:

In Thiel’s mind, the U.S. economy has too much investment capital flowing into “bits” companies.

An “atoms” company, in Negroponte’s and Thiel’s vernacular, is the older kind of company that manipulates physical objects—harvests crops, extracts fuels, forges steel, manufactures cars, binds books, assembles TVs, and transports goods over land, sea, or air.

In speculating about which jobs are at risk, MIT economist Frank Levy pinpoints white-collar jobs that are “rules-based.” They require following complex directions or rules, such as filing legal briefs, reading schematics, or creating structural designs. Up until now, someone could make a good living doing such jobs, but now they are under attack—and probably doomed.

Then it hit me. The security guard in the lumberyard next door was not another person, but a dog. The implication was sobering. I was twenty-five years old, a Stanford graduate. In a few months, Steve Jobs, also twenty-five, would take Apple public, change the computer industry, and become fabulously rich. I, on the other hand, was poor and stuck, and my professional colleague was a dog.

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.

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.

Andrew J. Martin, researching 338 students, discovered that young adults who take gap years tend to be less motivated than their peers before the gap year, much like Kyle DeNuccio. But after their gap year, most of them find new motivation.

This was the radical discovery of Laura Germine (a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital) and Joshua Hartshorne (a postdoctoral fellow at MIT). Their 2015 study measured the cognitive abilities of nearly fifty thousand subjects on website brain tests, including testmybrain.org and gameswithwords.org. They found that different parts of our intelligence peak at different ages:

The data showed that each cognitive skill peaked at a different age. For example, the speed of information processing appeared to peak early, around eighteen or nineteen. Short-term memory continued to improve until around twenty-five, then leveled off for another decade. The ability to evaluate complex patterns, including other people’s emotional states, on the other hand, peaked much later, when participants were in their forties or fifties. The researchers used a vocabulary test to measure crystallized intelligence—the lifetime accumulation of facts and knowledge. Crystallized intelligence peaks later in life, just as psychologists thought. But the new data indicated that the peak occurred when participants were in their late sixties or early seventies, much later than anyone had speculated.

Cognitive research has revealed that each of us has two types of intelligence: fluid intelligence (abbreviated as Gf) and crystallized intelligence (abbreviated as Gc). 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.

In the medical field, liver transplants are notoriously more complex than other organ transplants because of the many small blood vessels that connect to the liver.

The test taker’s job was to make their sequence of answers appear as unpredictable as possible to a logical computer program. The researchers discovered that peak randomness (and implied creativity) occurs at twenty-five, as expected. To their surprise, however, they found the drop in random thinking ability (and implied creativity) very slight all the way through the sixties. 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.

Erikson believed that ages forty to sixty-four constitute a unique period where creativity and experience combine with a universal human longing to make our lives matter. Starting a company is how many people pursue what Erikson called “generativity,” building something that has the potential to make a positive contribution beyond our mortal lives.

Curiosity is the first late bloomer strength.

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.

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.

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.”

Early bloomers enjoy many advantages in affluent societies. But one huge disadvantage they face is that by dint of their youth and accomplishments, they give themselves credit for their success, more than the rest of us do. That’s understandable: adolescents and young adults tend to be self-centered; it is a necessary waypoint in the evolution from a parent-centered childhood to an independent and mature adulthood. The problem arises when early bloomers have a setback: Either they put all the blame on themselves and fall into self-condemnation and paralysis, or they blame everyone else. Late bloomers tend to be more circumspect; they are able to see their own role in the adversity they face, without succumbing to self-condemnation or blame shifting.

Research has long established that calm leaders are more effective. Elizabeth Kirby, a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley, created the following chart to show how optimal performance quickly degrades when emotions run too strong.

In his 2018 book Creativity, Goldberg debunked the popular notion that creativity resides in the brain’s right hemisphere (while the left hemisphere is a repository for reasoning). The real story is more complicated and interwoven. The right hemisphere matures in childhood; the development of the left is consistent with the development of the prefrontal cortex, which is not fully mature until the mid-twenties, by the estimates of some scientists, and “early to mid-thirties” in Goldberg’s experience. The right hemisphere is home to visual recognition and the ability to process novelty; the left hemisphere stores memories, patterns, and language. The left is also “generative”—it can create what Goldberg calls “memories of the future” by imagining new things from existing patterns. Language itself is generative.

How, then, does the brain process and prioritize novelty? What happens to a novel perception after it is perceived by the right hemisphere? Goldberg believes that an interbrain network intermediates the right and left hemispheres; he calls it the “salience network.” What salience does is help the left brain assign importance to incoming novel perceptions.

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.

Research on wisdom over the past several years has revealed that middle-aged people are much more expert at many social interactions—such as judging others’ true intentions and moderating emotional reactions—than younger people. It peaks between ages forty and fifty, then stays on a high plateau until the final years of life.

As we age, we collect and store information. That, and not a “fuzzy memory,” is part of the reason it takes us longer to recall certain facts. We simply have more things to remember. 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.”

Through this work, they identified six components of wisdom, 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.

“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.”