Better Late
David Brooks wrote a nice piece for The Atlantic titled You Might Be a Late Bloomer. It really resonated with me. Before I say why, let me say first that it’s unfortunate the article is pay-walled. While I believe good writers deserve to be paid for their work, meaning if you want to read pay-walled material then you should pay for a subscription, I also think there’s nothing necessarily unethical about using a feature of an Internet browser that’s able to capture the meaningful content of a web page and present it as plain text. So if you’re not a subscriber to The Atlantic, yet really want to read this article, here’s a Pro-tip: Open that link in a Firefox private window –> Toggle Reader View (F9) –> Reload the page.
OK, back to the show
Brooks’ thesis pushes back on the widely held belief that the achievement of excellence necessarily requires focus on a singular pursuit, plus a long time working to achieve it. Think of Malcom Gladwell’s widely acclaimed book, Outliers (which I have read). Many people’s takeaway from that book was that people who achieve uber excellence in some endeavor (Outliers) require 10,000 hours or more of practice. His exemplars include The Beatles, Bill Gates, top professional athletes, etc. And because it takes so long to practice, one is wise to get after it in life as soon as possible. Gladwell notes practice is not sufficient for success, there are uncontrollable factors like simple good fortune involved in becoming an Outlier. But my takeaway from the book was that he believes that lots of practice that begins early in life, combined with an unwavering focus on a singular goal, is necessarily important to achieving uber excellence.
Brooks argues there’s another way. He describes the life arc of certain people he calls Late Bloomers. You can read about his examples at the link. There’s an important difference in the life trajectory between Brooks’ Late Bloomers and Gladwell’s Outliers. The latter begin early, stay focused and practice their brains out. Late Bloomers by contrast lack focus, they try and fail (often repeatedly) at many disparate pursuits, and are acknowledged only later in life as exceptional at something (an age well beyond when most Outliers are sitting back counting their plaudits). Full disclosure: by no means do I consider myself either a Gladwell Outlier or a Brooks Late Bloomer. But the thing about Late Bloomers that really resonated with me were the psychological and motivational features associated with the archetype. Now there I saw some similarities with my own life’s arc.
For example, LBers are intrinsically motivated people; Outliers are extrinsically motivated. LBers are not motivated to do things by some external reward for doing them well, they are internally driven to learn what interests them, purely for the sake of learning it. Sometimes LBers appear obsessed with learning something (I can relate), which is psychologically different from the practice, practice, practice mentality of Outliers.
LBers are known to be repeated screw-ups, as Brooks calls them. Both early and often. He characterizes them thusly
Late bloomers often don’t fit into existing systems. To use William Deresiewicz’s term, they are bad at being “excellent sheep”—bad at following the conventional rules of success. Or to put it another way, they can be assholes. Buckminster Fuller was expelled from college twice, lost his job in the building business when he was 32, and later contemplated suicide so his family could live off his life insurance. But then he moved to Greenwich Village, took a teaching job at Black Mountain College, and eventually emerged as an architect, designer, futurist, and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Again, I’ve not won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, I’m certain I never will. But have I at times been an asshole, resistant to abide the normative rules of success during my coming up years? Sure, I’ll own that. And then to Brooks’ very next sentence
Late bloomers often have an edge to them, a willingness to battle with authority.
Oh yeah, I’ll own that too. I’ve been called “edgy” probably more times than I can count. And “willingness” to battle authority? Hell, I’ve always been willing to do that. Often enough I’ve even provoked the battles. One time many, many years ago in a corporate job I held, well before I “bloomed” you could say, I got sideways so bad with a department manager he angrily blurted out in a meeting that was a follow-up to my annual performance review, “You are the most insufferably arrogant person I have ever met.” At the time I wore that like a badge of honor (an attitude, I suppose, that only confirmed his diagnosis).1 Looking back on it, maybe it was an early indicator I was destined to become a Late Bloomer?
LBers also demonstrate what Brooks terms diversive-curiosity. This in contrast to the Outlier’s focus on that one thing, driven by the promise of external reward. Related to diversive-curiosity, Brooks says LBers tend to be self taught, like autodidacts. I can’t really claim to be self taught – for goodness sake I’ve spent over twenty-five years of my life in formal education. But I’ve been all over the map during those years in terms of what I’ve chosen to learn; a focus on one particular science or discipline would in no way fairly characterize my intellectual life.
A couple other features that caught my eye, which Brooks says tend to the LBers: Crankiness in old age, and Wisdom. I can be fairly criticized for being in possession of a late-onset, oppositional mindset (as Brooks calls it), after all my years in corporate America. I agree with him that spending much of one’s life being self-directed, self-taught, etc., butting heads with authority and eschewing established norms – unlike the Outliers I’ve known who tended to coddle to that stuff – leaves one feeling cranky in review. So far as Wisdom goes, I believe in the Wisdom of Elders, I’ve even been known to get surly when it goes unrecognized. I don’t know that those two feature are unique to LBers, but they’re certainly consistent with them.
Anyhoo, check out the article, especially if you think you may be a Late Bloomer, or close enough. You might learn some things about yourself.
1. For the record, shortly after that meeting that manager was transferred to another district. A close colleague of mine who worked in that district told me that shortly after this manager settled into his new role, he enacted a few unusual and controversial office policies intended to improve workplace safety. Shortly after that he had to take extended leave from the office after he fell from a ladder at home. Subsequently, in the course of one of many company-wide layoffs, while he was still away on leave, they canned him. Meanwhile, shortly after the replacement manager in my district got settled, against his caution that I “think again” before doing this (although kudos to him he didn’t outright say don’t do it), I directly appealed to the vice-president of our division for a promotion. Six days after that he called me back to his office to say he’d reviewed my record, talked with some folks, and while he concluded I deserved a two grade promotion, he only had the direct authority to grant a one grade promotion, which he did on the spot. Some eighteen months later his replacement, the new vice-president, saw to it that I was awarded a second promotion.