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Recently working in a west coast client cluster I overheard an older staff member remark, "Well, I'm winding down my career so if that's what they want me to do, fine." He was neither old nor dim-witted but instead seemed to be playing out a script no one had assigned. Why do we equate genius with precocity?
Where was it scripted only the young can achieve creative breakthroughs? Why should anyone surrender to time or fatigue based on societal scotoma? Evidence to the contrary is everywhere. Consider artists Picasso and Cezanne. The former began painting in his mid-twenties and fit our idea of genius perfectly; the incandescent prodigy as described by Mal Gladwell in his book What the Dog Saw. Cezanne wasn't. If you go to the Cezanne room at the Muse d'Orsay in Paris (the finest collection of Cezanne in the world) all of the most valuable masterpieces were painted during Cezanne's later years. Doing simple analysis, a painting done by Picasso in his mid-twenties was worth significantly more than one done in his sixties. Yet for Cezanne the opposite is true; a work from his mid-sixties is valued 15 times higher than his early work. Like so many artists, authors, coaches and executives he was a late bloomer, and for some inexplicable reason in our assessment of genius and creativity we have forgotten to account for and make sense of the Cezannes of the world.
When we look across literary greats from T.S. Elliot and Robert Frost to Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, the top eleven pieces of poetry were written over a span of each creator's lives from their mid-twenties to their late 60s, leading us to yet another conclusion. There is no evidence that painting, writing, managing, or generalship is only a young person's game. To underscore this point 42 percent of Frost's poetry was written after the age of 51. Coaching victories for national icons like John Wooden or Mike Krzyzewski piled up long after each mentor passed 60.
The differences between prodigies and late bloomers may be their respective wiring. A prodigy often steps off the cliff and begins writing literature or music; an early percentage of which is of marginal quality. A late bloomer sees life and his or her creative art as research-based (that is to say built on years of trial and error). Consider history's geopolitical super stars such as Roosevelt, Churchill, Reagan or Thatcher. Their finest hours came in later years, after decades of learning and perfecting.
In media where the cosmetics of television or the nuance of music formats may force-flow talent out of one billet into another, the value of true talent knows no boundary, only application. David Galenson, an economist from the University of Chicago, opines creativity can be divided into two types: conceptual and experimental. He says, "Some people think of late bloomers as late starters. They only optimized their talent in their 50s or 60s, but that's not quite right."
Our belief that perhaps it's only that the world is slow to appreciate their gifts is also fundamentally wrong, write Gladwell and Galenson. The answer lies elsewhere. The prodigy blooms early because he or she finds their gift at an early age. Late bloomers simply start slowly and then gain skill inertia over years of trial and error through relentless pursuit of excellence. Sometimes genius is anything but rarefied. Sometimes it's just the thing that emerges after 20 years of coaching a sport, teaching a class, running a division or doing a morning show.
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