Late Bloomers

Finally, there are the people Galenson calls “the masters.” In his book Old Masters and Young Geniuses, he writes about people like Cézanne or Alfred Hitchcock or Charles Darwin, who were not all that successful—and in some cases just not even very good at what they did—when they were young.

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.

David Brooks

Late bloomers tend to have a high tolerance for ambiguity, and can bring multiple ways of thinking to bear on a single complex problem. They also have a high tolerance for inefficiency. They walk through life like a curious person browsing through a bookstore. In old age, the historian Daniel Boorstin wrote, “The amateur spirit has guided my thinking and writing.” He had wandered from subject to subject throughout his life, playing around.

Ibid.

The benefits of this kind of curiosity might be hard to see in the short term, but they become obvious once the late bloomer begins to take advantage of their breadth of knowledge by putting discordant ideas together in new ways.

Ibid.

Successful late bloomers combine this high need for cognition with a seemingly contradictory trait: epistemic humility. They are aggressive about wanting to acquire knowledge and learn—but they are also modest, possessing an accurate sense of how much they don’t know.

This mentality combines high self-belief (I can figure this out on my own; I know my standards are right and the world’s standards are wrong) with high self-doubt (There’s a lot I don’t know, and I am falling short in many ways).

Ibid.