Summary: Late bloomers achieve success later in life through continuous improvement and self-directed learning. They possess unique abilities that are not always recognized by traditional education systems. Late bloomers show resilience, curiosity, and a willingness to explore different paths before reaching their peak performance.
By middle age, he was discouraged. He wrote to a friend, “On this matter I must tell you that the numerous studies to which I devoted myself having produced only negative results, and dreading criticism that is only too justified, I have resolved to work in silence, until the day when I should feel capable of defending theoretically the results of my endeavors.” No Cézanne paintings were put on public display when he was between 46 and 56, the prime years for many artists, including some of Cézanne’s most prominent contemporaries. (View Highlight)
What drove the man through all those decades of setbacks and obscurity? One biographer attributed it to his “inquiétude”—his drive, restlessness, anxiety. He just kept pushing himself to get better. (View Highlight)
His continual sense of dissatisfaction was evident in a letter he wrote to his son in 1906, at age 67, a month before he died: “I want to tell you that as a painter I am becoming more clairvoyant to nature, but that it is always very difficult for me to realize my feelings. I cannot reach the intensity that unfolds before my senses. I do not possess that wonderful richness of color that animates nature.” He was still at it on the day he died, still working on his paintings, still teaching himself to improve. (View Highlight)
Late bloomers tend to be qualitatively different, possessing a different set of abilities that are mostly invisible to or discouraged by our current education system. They usually have to invent their own paths. Late bloomers “fulfill their potential frequently in novel and unexpected ways,” Karlgaard writes, “surprising even those closest to them.” (View Highlight)
These people don’t do as much advanced planning as the conceptual geniuses, but they regard their entire lives as experiments. They try something and learn, and then they try something else and learn more. Their focus is not on their finished work, which they often toss away haphazardly. Their focus is on the process of learning itself: Am I closer to understanding, to mastering? They live their lives as a long period of trial and error, trying this and trying that, a slow process of accumulation and elaboration, so the quality of their work peaks late in life. They are the ugly ducklings of human achievement, who, over the decades, turn themselves into swans. (View Highlight)
Many late bloomers endure a brutal wandering period, as they cast about for a vocation. Julia Child made hats, worked for U.S. intelligence (where she was part of a team trying to develop an effective shark repellent), and thought about trying to become a novelist before enrolling in a French cooking school at 37. Van Gogh was an art dealer, a teacher, a bookseller, and a street preacher before taking up painting at 27. During those wandering years, he was a miserable failure. His family watched his repeated downward spirals with embarrassment. (View Highlight)
During these early periods, late bloomers try and then quit so many jobs that the people around them might conclude that they lack resilience. But these are exactly the years when the late bloomers are developing what psychologists call “diversive curiosity”—the ability to wander into a broad range of interests in a manner that seems to have no rhyme or reason. (View Highlight)
The ability to self-teach. Late bloomers don’t find their calling until they are too old for traditional education systems. So they have to teach themselves. Successful autodidacts start with what psychologists call a “high need for cognition”—in other words, they like to think a lot. In his book Curious, Ian Leslie presents a series of statements that, when answered in the affirmative, indicate a high need for cognition: “I would prefer complex to simple problems”; “I prefer my life be filled with puzzles that I can’t solve”; “I find satisfaction in deliberating hard and for long hours.” (View Highlight)
The combination of a high need for cognition and epistemic humility is a recipe for lifelong learning. Late bloomers learn more slowly but also more deeply precisely because they’re exploring on their own. The benefits of acquiring this self-taught knowledge compound over time. The more you know about a subject, the faster you can learn. A chess grandmaster with thousands of past matches stored in their head will see a new strategy much faster than a chess beginner. Knowledge begets knowledge. Researchers call this “the Matthew effect”: “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance.” Pretty soon, the late bloomer is taking off. (View Highlight)
The ability to finally commit. Of course, late bloomers can’t just wander forever. At some point they must grab onto some challenge that engages their powerful intrinsic drive. They have to commit. (View Highlight)
“Effort is the one thing that gives meaning to life,” the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck once wrote. “Effort means you care about something.” (View Highlight)
“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life,” the sculptor Henry Mooreonce told the poet Donald Hall. “And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do.” (View Highlight)
The mind of the explorer. By middle age, many late bloomers have achieved lift-off and are getting to enjoy the pleasures of concentrated effort. They are absorbed, fascinated. But since they are freer from ties and associations than the early achiever, late bloomers can also change their mind and update their models without worrying about betraying any professional norms. (View Highlight)
