I consider myself a late bloomer. During my teens, I was immature in handling relationships, and I’m still amazed at how silly some of my past senseless actions were when I reflect on them. It seems my maturity has always lagged a step behind my peers. I would like to think I’m more mature now, yet I suspect that in a few years, I might cringe at some actions I take today. This suggests I am still changing, hopefully for the better. While not everyone may become more productive or successful later in life, I think it’s beneficial to believe we can always grow. As Henry Oliver might say, I hope to continue becoming my true self as I age.
Excerpts from the book:
Personal transformation happens through cultural immersion, sampling the world and changing our surroundings. In new circumstances, gradually sampling our way into a new mode of thinking, living or working, we can change our opportunities, perhaps even change ourselves.
Late bloomers are serious, perhaps, intense, obsessive, occasionally eccentric, volatile, or weird. Not infrequently, the people around them don’t quite understand who they are capable of being. Their earnestness can make them seem strange, off-putting, and makes it difficult to see how and where their talent could flourish: their capability often hides in plain sight…Their ambitions are usually secret, or unknown to themselves for a long time. They pursue their interests quietly. Their ability and confidence growth with experience.
Our time is not guaranteed to be well spent. How many people every year are lost to weariness, laziness, mental decline, exhaustion, redundancy? As Jimmy Carter wrote in his memoir of post-presidential life, The Virtues of Aging, ‘Each of us is old when we think we are – when we accept an attitude of dormancy…a substantial limitation on our physical and mental activity…As I know from experience, this is not tied very closely to the number of years we have lived.’
Addiction to success, habit, and love of status had prevented them from travelling or seeing their children. One important type of late bloomer is someone who successfully changes the balance of their life.
[Late bloomers] They tend to be smart (which doesn’t have to mean successful at school), self-educating and self-directing. They follow their own interests and take lifelong education seriously. They never stop teaching themselves; often, they set their own agenda…Another thing that characterises many late bloomers is a period of withdrawal for reflection.
[Jerry Seinfeld on producing Seinfeld] If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The show was successful because I micro-managed it – every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting. That’s my way of life.
Rather, knowledge was sought for its ability to improve our character: ‘A man always makes himself greater as he increases his knowledge.’
Take Samuel Johnson’s advice. Resolve, work, fail, and resolve again. We should do this not just for ambition, for ‘hope of a better fortune’, but because ‘the time comes at last, in which life has no more to promise’ and all we can do then is remember our lives; and ‘virtue will be all that we can recollect with pleasure’. We should keep working and keep trying, keep expanding our perspectives and horizons, our stock of knowledge and our range of experiences, not just for aspiration, but so we will know at the end of our lives that we did.
First, the culture we live in has a huge influence on our work: our circumstances change who we become. Second, our mental powers do not inevitably decline as we age: the more work we produce, the more likely we are to be successful.
It matters who you surround yourself with and what circumstances you put yourself in. Influence builds up over time.
‘The feeling of being in a great culture isn’t smoothness – it’s the feeling of solving hard problems with people you admire.‘
This is not the direct influence of peer pressure but the indirect influence of sampling the world via your network.
Different people are influenced by different things. Some people are more strongly influenced by their parents but not by their peers, and vice versa. Some people are going to be strongly susceptible to the influence of music but not painting. Many people are what Belsky calls a ‘mosaic’ – rather than fitting a neat pattern, we are influenced by different things in different ways.
That is why key transitional moments in life affect us differently. Just as the war affected the young delinquents in various ways, so will retirement, children, redundancy and other moments of change affect people.
We should aim to be comfortable at being incompetent when we try new things. The more we branch out, the more we can discover what we are really good at. We had to be incompetent for a long time while we developed our current expertise, and sometimes we should be willing to be incompetent again.
Late bloomers spend a lot of time cultivating themselves. They often experience life as a long, organic process, where decisions emerge out of previous experience. They are always becoming themselves.
‘The best predictor of exceptional creativity is productivity. It’s lots of hard work.’
‘Leonardo da Vinci demonstrated the potential of drawing as a form of research and as a medium for the generation of new ideas.’ Michelangelo’s drawings are full of repetition. He draws the same figures over and over with slight variations in posture, pose, angle. It’s how he encoded basic forms into his memory and how he discovered ways of being original.
Ask yourself as Audrey Sutherland did, ‘What part of my goal can I achieve now? What can I do now to achieve my goal later?’
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