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June 3 - June 3, 2019
Aging is associated with a shift in brain activity. Consider something called Hemispheric Asymmetry Reduction in Older Adults (HAROLD): the half of the prefrontal cortex that is less active in youth increases in activity as we age. In turn, this increases the overall activity in the prefrontal cortex. And older adults tend to use both brain hemispheres—called bilateralization—for tasks that activate only one hemisphere in younger adults. The best-performing older adults are most likely to show bilateralization.
To fully bloom, we must declare our independence from our family.
The consistency of these associations is remarkable. In terms of physical health, children who grow up in poor families have 1.7 times higher rates of low birth weight, 3.5 times higher rates of lead poisoning, 1.7 times higher rates of child mortality, and 2.0 times higher rates of requiring a short-stay hospitalization than their more privileged counterparts. In terms of achievement, the correlations are equally bleak. Children who grow up poor are twice as likely as their wealthier classmates to repeat a grade or to drop out of high school, and 1.4 times as likely to suffer from a learning
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The problem for late bloomers is that many of the standards and expectations pushed through mass and social media can work against us.
Recovering addicts have a useful saying: Don’t compare your inside to other people’s outside. It’s good advice. But social media make it almost impossible to follow.
Even Asch was surprised by the outcome. In the twelve “wrong answer” trials, 75 percent of the test subjects gave the wrong answer and conformed to the majority at least once.
When we laugh at that joke that isn’t funny, give an obviously wrong answer to show solidarity with a group, or decide that vegan is the right way to eat even though we love hamburgers, do we recognize how much of our behavior is due to social influence and how much is based on our own choice—on our own free will?
The findings from dozens of studies on normative social influence are clear: Normative social influence is a powerful lever of persuasion. Yet we consistently do not acknowledge it or recognize it. Most people are unable to identify the true cause of their behavior. According to psychology professor Robert Cialdini, “Given the ubiquity and strength of normative social influence, it is surprising how little note people take of this potent form of influence when, as observers, they decide how to interpret the causes of their own actions.”
Research points to three awkward truths about our determination not to quit: (1) tenacity, or willpower, is a limited resource; (2) quitting can be healthy; and (3) quitting, not doggedness, often produces better results. The first problem with our cultural obsession with determination is that applying single-minded resolve to something that you don’t really believe in actually makes you less effective.
We all possess cognitive biases that hinder our ability to abandon a miserable job or fruitless activity. These biases can best be defined through two economic concepts: the sunk-cost fallacy and opportunity cost.
Most adults, they found, are (embarrassingly) worse at considering sunk costs than children and dogs. Yes, dogs. That’s how beholden we are to the sunk-cost fallacy.
The good news is that self-doubt, odd as it may sound, is actually a secret weapon for blooming. When properly managed, it is a source of information and motivation. As a result, it can help combat complacency and improve our preparation and performance. It drives us to question results, experiment with new strategies, and be open to alternate ways to solve problems—all tactics that correlate with late bloomer strengths such as curiosity and resilience. But self-doubt isn’t only a performance enhancer; it’s also a recipe for being a wiser leader, teacher, parent, and friend. Coming to terms
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Additionally, many self-handicappers rely on what psychologists call the “tomorrow fantasy.” This fantasy is that we’ll give our full effort tomorrow, down the road, when it suits us. When the time is right, we’ll give our genuine best—which, of course, will produce success.
Some late bloomers cope with self-doubt through a strategy researchers call “other enhancement,” another form of self-defeating rationalization.
Finally, another common—and maybe the most pernicious—late bloomer strategy for dealing with self-doubt is “stereotype threat.” We internalize negative stereotypes about our own capabilities in a way that convinces us that we can never be good at certain activities, no matter how hard we try.
In 2005 the sociologist Joseph Hermanowicz found the opposite to be true. It turns out that the smartest and most accomplished physicists—the real-world Sheldons and Leonards—have loads of self-doubt. In fact, the more accomplished they were, the more self-doubt they admitted to.
Several studies involving tasks and challenges ranging from golfing, rope skipping, and pistol shooting to taking academic exams and performing analytical tasks show, definitively, that when it comes to high performance, a healthy dose of self-doubt improves results. This is true because participants who experience self-doubt put in more effort, both in their preparation and during their performance. In both sports and academic pursuits, self-doubting participants pay more attention to their practice routine and invest more cognitive effort. Self-doubt, properly harnessed, combats complacency.
Bandura, who achieved his exalted status for his theories on self-efficacy—an individual’s confidence in their ability to accomplish what they set out to do.
Bandura has defined self-efficacy as confidence in one’s own ability to develop strategies and complete tasks necessary to succeed in various endeavors. More simply put, it is an individual’s belief about their own capabilities, like their ability to perform specific tasks:
Because of society’s obsession with early achievement, late bloomers are often denied the two primary sources of a strong sense of self-efficacy: mastery experiences and social modeling.
Researcher Antonis Hatzigeorgiadis and his team at the University of Thessaly in Greece studied water polo players and how self-talk affected their performance in throwing a ball for accuracy and distance. The players using motivational self-talk significantly improved at both tasks versus the others. The following charts illustrate their findings.
Overall, the study showed that motivational self-talk dramatically increases both self-efficacy and performance. It also confirmed Bandura’s premise that increases in self-efficacy are related to improvements in performance.
Ethan Kross, director of the Self-Control and Emotion Laboratory at the University of Michigan, has found that people who speak to themselves as another person—using their own name or the pronoun you—perform better in stressful situations than people who use the first-person I.
When we’re persuaded that we possess the capabilities to master difficult situations, we apply greater effort than we would otherwise. “Persuasive boosts in perceived self-efficacy,” according to Bandura, “lead people to try hard enough to succeed; they promote development of skills and a sense of personal efficacy.”
This just reaffirms a point we all already know: words matter. Instead of telling a late bloomer, “This isn’t brain surgery,” try saying, “This is a challenge, but you can figure it out.” Or instead of telling yourself, “I feel terribly overwhelmed right now,” try, “Alex, you have the capability to do this, and here’s how.” These simple linguistic tweaks can help late bloomers—as well as everyone else—make significant strides toward greater self-efficacy.
Brooks investigated an alternative strategy: framing anxiety as excitement. Compared to those who attempted to calm down, individuals who instead framed their anxious energy as excitement actually felt more genuine enthusiasm and performed significantly better.
Most models of framing in psychological research consist of two contrasting alternatives: learning versus performance, promotion versus prevention, healthy versus unhealthy, or in the case of the previous study, excited versus anxious. The positive frames—learning, promotion, healthy, excited—lead to greater perseverance, greater innovation, and increased learning. By contrast, the negative frames—performance, prevention, unhealthy, anxious—lead to worse outcomes, promoting a sense of risk aversion and a bias for framing new situations as chances to lose ground.
The second reframing step is to link a challenge to a larger goal: This big presentation is not only exciting, it will give me visibility and lead to more opportunities. The larger goal should be clear and compelling in your mind. It should capture the excitement of doing something new that can substantially improve your life.
Psychologist Mark Leary of Duke University and his team investigated how self-compassionate people deal with unpleasant life events. They found that self-compassion buffered people against negative self-feelings, moderated negative feelings when people received negative feedback, and helped people acknowledge their roles in negative events without feeling overwhelmed by negative emotions.
“Self-compassion is treating yourself with the same kindness, care and concern you show a loved one,” explains Dr. Neff. “We need to frame it in terms of humanity. That’s what makes self-compassion so different: ‘I’m an imperfect human being living an imperfect life.’
To sum up: All healthy people have self-doubt, but we late bloomers often have too much of it. We make our situation worse by adopting unhelpful coping mechanisms, such as self-handicapping, to protect our self-image. But these coping mechanisms only take us further away from blooming. Self-efficacy is what thriving late bloomers seek in order to convert self-doubt into a friend. Self-efficacy is our belief that we can accomplish a specific task with a reasonably positive attitude, make a plan based on facts, and bloom by cultivating self-talk, framing/reframing, and self-compassion. These
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You can probably see where I’m going with this. As work at every level gets more complex and collaborative, late bloomer traits like curiosity, compassion, and insight will become even more important.
If you were “Bob in the mailroom” but then got an accounting degree through professional courses, you’re probably still “Bob in the mailroom” to people at work. To be “Bob the respected financial officer,” you might have to change companies.
Groups of crabs will quite literally pull down any member who tries to escape a trap or a bucket, relegating the whole group to certain death. Psychologists and sociologists call this phenomenon the “crab pot syndrome.”
According to authors Daniel Cable and Timothy Judge, people who succeed in making a job or career change place less emphasis on person-to-job fit than on person-to-organization fit. In other words, the culture and environment of an organization are more important to success and satisfaction than the actual job tasks. This means job seekers should collect and evaluate information about an organization’s culture in addition to the specific job.
One more kind of repotting is worth mentioning: repotting to a new set of friends and colleagues, when you suspect your old friends are holding you back.
Churches and other faith-based organizations are another good source for peer groups. I once asked megachurch founder and pastor Rick Warren the secret behind the growth of Saddleback Community Church. “Small groups,” he said. “The real work of Saddleback, and the thing that creates loyalty to Saddleback, is not what I preach on Sundays. It’s what happens in small groups from Monday through Friday.”
We must commit ourselves to the process anyway, for what psychologists call “goal commitment.” As dozens of studies have shown, goal commitment is the key to goal attainment.
Remember, when it comes to repotting, late bloomers have a distinct advantage over early bloomers. We’re naturally curious and resilient. We’re not afraid to follow a different path or break free of convention. We genuinely want to see what’s around the corner or over the hill. These late bloomer strengths enable—even propel—the change we need to find the right people and right place to help us thrive. The real benefit of repotting is that we get to define our own life instead of having someone else define it for us. There will never be the perfect pot that can contain us. We will always be
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I’m confident that late bloomers can persist for two reasons. First, we are natural storytellers. In our personal lives, we think in stories, talk in stories, communicate in stories, and even dream in stories. It’s safe to say that the default mode of human cognition is narrative. We instinctively make reason out of chaos and assign causality to all the random events that make up our lives.
The second reason for optimism is that as we age, and as we gain experience and absorb life’s lessons (often painfully), we exercise persistence.
The power of narrative is the premise of a fairly new branch of medicine called narrative psychology. Proposed independently in the 1980s by psychologists Theodore Sarbin, Jerome Bruner, and Dan McAdams, it’s a school of thought concerned with how people make meaning through the construction, telling, and recounting of stories. If neuroscience and some branches of psychology think of the mind as a container, a machine, or something akin to a computer’s CPU, narrative psychology sees the mind as the “great narrator.”
Paul Ricoeur, a French philosopher who wrote extensively about narrative and identity, defined agency as the opposite of suffering. According to Ricoeur, when we lose the ability to act independently of our own free will, we suffer.
So storytelling is a tool we late bloomers can use for good or ill. If, for example, we’ve interpreted our slower blooming to mean that we’re unlucky or unwise or lazy, it’s hard to have a positive image of the future. In this case, our storytelling can lead us to despair and fatalism. Conversely, if we acknowledge that we’ve made mistakes, faced challenges, and learned from our missteps, we’ll feel a much greater sense of agency over our lives.
There are personal qualities that both catalyze and strengthen our persistence: faith, purpose, and patience.
Purpose is the next important driver of persistence. Purposeful people are significantly more motivated than others to pursue a meaningful life.
Diane Greene’s story confirms what neuroscience is only starting to tell us: Success skills like self-regulation, deep focus, and pattern recognition come with time and experience. The moral is that we need to try things. We need to learn. But we need to have patience.
What I learned was this: I accomplish the most not when I set out to prove something, but when I set out to discover something.
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