by Kathy Keler
Visual Artist
WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE LATE BLOOMERS? PART 1
A good garden may have some weeds.
~Thomas Fuller
Does an article about yet another twenty-something internet millionaire make you wonder where you went wrong? Does a story about a grandma who ran her first marathon at 86 make your day?
Don’t worry. If you’re a late-blooming adult, you’re not alone. You’ve got some remarkable company.
According to Wikipedia, “a late blooming adult is a person who does not discover their talents and abilities until later than normally expected.”
I’m not talking about people who started early and kept going into their 60s and beyond, like Picasso, Kurosawa or Joyce Carol Oates.
I’m tracking people who don’t realize their creative passion until later, or who discover it early but can’t pursue it until adulthood. I call them Later Bloomers.
WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE LATER BLOOMERS?
I’ve identified four broad patterns. In this installment, I explore how the “rocky soil” of our youth could contribute to blooming later through:
Lack of guidance and opportunity and
Post-traumatic stress disorder
In the second installment, I look at two intriguing traits that many Later Bloomers share:
Having too many passions and
Learning by experimentation
LACK OF GUIDANCE AND OPPORTUNITY
At age 10, Linda Bach witnessed her father die of a heart attack. She vowed to become a doctor so she could save other lives. At age 20, she graduated at the top of her college class with a microbiology degree.
She applied to medical school. During her entrance interview, she faced a panel of six men. Their first question – did she plan to marry and have children? “Yes,” she answered. “After I finish school and establish my practice.” One of the examiners said under his breath, “God, I’d hate to be your kids.” She didn’t get in.
Devastated, Linda asked her college counselor for advice. The counselor didn’t see a problem. Why didn’t she just want to get married and have kids?
In 1969, at age 20, Linda felt that rejection by two unimpeachable sources of authority – the review board and her counselor – had sealed her fate.
Today we can discover everything about anything via the Internet. In the past, however, we depended on parents, teachers and libraries to guide us. The quality of that guidance varied from place to place, individual to individual. For the fortunate, it lead to success. For others, like Linda, its lack slammed the door to their dreams – but not forever.
Linda Bach entered medical school at the age of 46. She is currently a doctor in private practice. Her story is told in Defying Gravity: A Celebration of Late-Blooming Women by Prill Boyle.
Some people know their path, but didn’t have the resources in youth to follow it. Lack of guidance and lack of opportunity often go hand in hand.
Do you recognize this guy? Does it matter?
Albert Einstein had an IQ of 150. Chris Langan’s IQ is so high that it can’t be measured. You’ve probably never heard of Langan because, according to Malcolm Gladwell, Langan’s upbringing handicapped his social skills.
Langan never got a degree. When he ran into a few troubles, his college took the hard line and dropped him from classes. For instance, his car broke down and he couldn’t afford to fix it. He could hitch into town for afternoon classes, but administration wouldn’t let him transfer to the later sessions. His mother forgot to sign his scholarship application, so they rejected it.
Gladwell thinks that Langan could have turned things around if only he’d learned how to negotiate with authority figures.
But that’s just one symptom of the deeper problem Langan faced — extreme poverty. While growing up, food was a luxury. He owned only the clothes on his back. His stepfather beat him for eight years.
As Langan’s brother explained, “I couldn’t get financial aid either. We just had zero knowledge, less that zero knowledge of the process. How to apply. The forms. Checkbooks. It was not our environment.”
Langan might as well have been raised on Mars. The guy with an IQ higher than Einstein ended up as a Rhode Island bouncer for 20 years.
Savant Daniel Tammet speculates that an intersection between talent and delayed opportunity causes late blooming:
If you’re born in a very poor environment, where you’re not given books and you’re not given good education and then subsequently doors are closed to you that are open to others who perhaps don’t have your talent . . . I could well imagine that throughout our history there are people who have come into their own relatively late in life.
Langan now raises horses and hones his cognitive-theoretic model of the universe — a grand theory of all origins. I don’t understand most of what he writes, but sometimes he gets oddly poetic (“I just had a chance encounter with a garden slug, and it got me thinking about time”).
But Langan will never be published in an academic journal, because he didn’t get the right credentials. Many of his would-be peers (with lower IQs) think he’s nuts.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter. He’s living his dream – a quiet life devoted to higher learning. And the Internet has become the great equalizer. One day Chris Langan’s name might be as recognizable as Albert Einstein’s.
POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER
Carl Jung wrote, “I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” A very brave statement, but the truth is, sometimes we do become what was done to us.
The National Institute of Health defines post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as:
an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which grave physical harm occurred or was threatened. Traumatic events that may trigger PTSD include violent personal assaults, natural or human-caused disasters, accidents, or military combat.
Psychotherapy recognized PTSD in the aftermath of Viet Nam. But PTSD doesn’t just affect veterans of war or victims of atrocities.
Children can develop PTSD after experiencing physical or psychological abuse or even playground bullying. PTSD symptoms can surface after learning about a traumatic experience second-hand.
The numbness, anxiety and emotional emptiness that characterize PTSD will kill the joy, passion and excitement necessary to bloom early.
My father, self-portrait, age 20
My father was a heart-breaking case in point. Before World War II, he was an animator for Walt Disney Co. They discovered him when he won a drawing contest at age 15. He dropped out of high school to work for Disney and apprenticed on Fantasia.
The Army drafted him at 20 and assigned him to a mobile photo battalion. He saw and recorded many atrocities that haunted him for the rest of this life.
Disney did not re-hire him after the war, and it broke his heart. As a high school dropout artist, it became harder and harder for him to find work. He was often unemployed. Sometimes he drank.
He passed away in 1994, a broken man who never, for the 50 years after WWII ended, engaged his passion for illustration or photography. You can see evidence of his early talent in the self-portrait at right and in his war photos.
I’m not a therapist, but I believe PTSD may be one reason why some people don’t reach their potential.
CONCLUSION
Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.
~A.A. Milne
In this installment, I explored the weeds that may need tending before you can bloom — lack of guidance and opportunity, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Recent media fixation on The Secret has rendered any discussion of hardship practically taboo. The “law” of attraction decrees if life doesn’t go the way you want, you must not have visualized correctly, believed hard enough or unconditionally aligned yourself with the universe.
Just what kind of law tells victims of rape, war, poverty and other tragedies that they authored their own misfortune?
If youth has left scars, being told to “move on” or “get over it” is just as insulting.You may never get over it, but the world needs your special gift. I believe that each person has one thing they must do that no one else can.
If this installment rings true to you, you may want to consult a therapist in order to cultivate your gift. Or you may not. But, no matter how thoughtful or wild, forthright or sneaky, typical or unconventional, you must find some way for your gift to triumph over what was done to you.
Next: Passions and Experimentation – Why Are Some People Later Bloomers? Part 2.
RESOURCES, PART 1:
Boyle, Prill. Defying Gravity: A Celebration of Late-Blooming Women.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story Of Success.
Kaufman, Scott Barry. Conversations on Creativity with Daniel Tammet: Part V, Creativity, Mind, and the Brain (Psychology Today: 10/26/09).
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:
Who Are The Top 10 Late Bloomers of All Time?
Was Ben Franklin A Late Bloomer?
Why Are Some People Late Bloomers? Part 2
Late Bloomers Who Like a Cold Wet Wakeup Call
Source: http://www.laterbloomer.com/late-bloomers-1/
What are Some People Late Bloomers? Part 2
WHY ARE SOME PEOPLE LATE BLOOMERS? PART 2
In Part 1, I explored how “a good garden may have some weeds” — life’s difficulties and Later Blooming.
In this installment, I look at two intriguing traits that many Later Bloomers share:
Having too many passions and
Learning by experimentation
TOO MANY PASSIONS
During the Renaissance, humanism arose in revolt against the limits of Medieval education, which confined learning to law, medicine and theology.
The movement reignited interest in what we now call the humanities — classics, languages, literature, philosophy, arts of all types.
Many of our greatest minds were “Renaissance Men.”
For example, Benjamin Franklin was an writer, printer, soldier, politician and diplomat. He invented bifocals, the lightning rod and the Franklin stove. Peter Mark Roget was a doctor, teacher, inventor, designer and compiler of the famous Thesaurus.
Specialization is a relatively recent compulsion.
Some people just have too many passions. They have no desire to specialize because they’re driven by curiousity and wonder. In today’s world, they’re often denigrated.
Margaret Lobenstine calls this type of Later Bloomer a Renaissance Soul. She writes:
"Renaissance Souls much prefer variety and combination over focusing all their energies on one thing. They prefer widening options by opening more and more doors, to narrowing choices by specializing and sub-specializing.
After succeeding in one area, the Renaissance Soul will seek a completely new adventure instead of accepting a promotion, or job hopping to a higher salary."
The musical South Pacific was based on Michener's first novel
This might be why many of these Later Bloomers eventually become writers to explore their varied interests and passions.
James Michener didn’t publish Tales of the South Pacific until age 40. He became famous for epic historical novels — Hawaii, Iberia, Poland, Texas, Alaska and Mexico — and wrote prolificly until his death at 90.
But he also wrote non-fiction on subjects as diverse as The Modern Japanese Print, Sports in America and A Century of Sonnets.
Before becoming a writer, Michener peddled chestnuts, toured America by boxcar, joined a carnival, enlisted in the Army, taught English and edited textbooks.
Other late-blooming authors (and their former lives) include:
- Miguel de Cervantes (valet, soldier, tax collector) — Don Quixote, age 58
- Daniel Defoe (wine merchant, terrorist, tax collector) — Robinson Crusoe, age 60
- Charles Perrault (civil servant) — Tales from Mother Goose, age 67
- Bram Stoker (civil servant, theater manager) — Dracula, age 50
- Isak Dineson (coffee rancher) – Seven Gothic Tales, age 49 and Out of Africa, age 52
- P.D. James (civil servant, hospital adminstrator) – Published her first Adam Dalgliesh mystery in 1962, at age 42. She’s still writing them.
By far, writers comprise the largest subgroup of Later Bloomers I’ve researched (I think the fact that many were government employees is just coincidence).
LEARNING BY EXPERIMENTATION
David Galenson is an economics professor who writes about artists.
In Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity, Galenson examined the auction prices of paintings throughout several artists’ lives. He identified two distinct patterns, not just in art, but in other creative fields:
Conceptual innovators peak early. They’re our prodigies and ”young geniuses.” They see the whole scenario, then execute it — on canvas, in writing, on a music score sheet.
Picasso is the classic conceptual innovator.
Picasso once said,
"When I paint, my object is to show what I have found, not what I am looking for…I have never made trials or experiments."
Other conceptual innovators include Johannes Vermeer, Herman Melville, Sylvia Plath and Orson Welles.
Experimental innovators, on the other hand, are classic “old masters” and late bloomers. According to Galenson, they:
- need a visual objective;
- work slowly and incrementally;
- consider their creative endeavors a form of research;
- value the accumulation of knowledge over the end result;
- become totally absorbed while pursuing an ambitious, vague and elusive goal; and
- experience frustration that their goal may be completely unobtainable.
- They consider creative output “as a process of searching, in which they aim to discover the image in the course of making it.”
Paul Cézanne is the classic experimental innovator. He created his most valuable paintings (in terms of auction price) at the end of his life. Just a month before he died, Cézanne wrote:
"Now it seems to me that I see better and that I think more correctly about the direction of my studies. Will I ever attain the end for which I have striven so much and so long? I hope so, but…until I have realized something better than in the past…I continue to study."
Cézanne isn’t the type of late bloomer I’m tracking. He started painting in his 20s (after dropping out of law school) and peaked late.
I’m more interested in people who don’t actually realize their creative passion until later, or who realize it early but can’t pursue it until later.
However, I believe Galenson’s findings still apply. I suspect many Later Bloomers also learn by discovery and experimentation.
ANOTHER TAKE ON LATE BLOOMING
Malcolm Gladwell popularized Galenson’s work in a much-quoted New Yorker article entitled “Why do we equate genius with precocity?” He concluded that a late bloomer’s success is “highly contingent on the efforts of others.”
Gladwell cites author Ben Fountain as his case in point. Fountain published his short-story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, to rave reviews — 18 years after he quit his law practice to write full time. During those 18 years, his wife, also an attorney, supported him both financially and emotionally. She also bore and supported their two children.
Now here’s something interesting. In Outliers: The Story Of Success, Gladwell concluded that a prodigy’s success also depends on the efforts of others — especially his or her family.
Lucky prodigies like Bill Gates, whose parents sent him to private school and gave him access to a computer at age 13 (in 1968), had a greater chance of succeeding than those like Chris Langan (from Part 1), whose stepfather beat him for eight years:
…that’s because those others had had help along the way, and Chris Langan never had. It wasn’t an excuse. It was a fact. He’d had to make his way alone, and no one — not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses — ever makes it alone.
I admire Gladwell for taking on the Great American Myth of the self-made man, but he’s also simplifying the obvious. Of course, both prodigies and late bloomers stand a better chance of success if they have support. Everyone does.
Yet most of the Later Bloomers I’ve researched supported their own families and still pursued their passion — with little outside encouragement.
Bram Stoker, for instance, didn’t publish Dracula until age 50. He married and raised a son. For over 20 years, he managed the career of Henry Irving, the Victorian era’s most famous actor and a notorious egotist. (Irving refused to play Dracula on stage.)
Buster Merryfield, a beloved British character actor, married and had a daughter soon after serving in WWII. For 40 years, he rose through the ranks of NatWest Bank, then took early retirement at age 58 to pursue acting professionally. Merryfield got his break seven years later, when he was cast in the sitcom Only Fools And Horses.
And the reigning grand dame of British crime fiction, Phyllis Dorothy (P.D.) James, took a job with the National Health Service when her ailing husband could no longer work. She went on to the Home Office and retired at age 59, seventeen years after her first novel was published.
Unlike Ben Fountain, neither Stoker, Merryfield, nor James had the luxury of quitting their day jobs to pursue their creative paths, yet all three found a way — just a little later.
They were driven by some mysterious impulse, despite obstacles and responsibilities. That’s what I find fascinating, and what I hope to explore through this blog.
CONCLUSION
Not all those who wander are lost.
~J.R.R. Tolkien
In this installment, I reviewed how curiosity and wonder drives many Later Bloomers. They have too many passions to settle. Plus, as David Galenson discovered, they often learn through discovery and experimentation, so achievement takes longer.
Two years before Malcolm Gladwell popularized Galenson’s work and concluded it was all about having support, Daniel Pink (Al Gore’s old speechwriter and another lapsed lawyer) reviewed it in Wired magazine. He made a different inference:
Of course, not every unaccomplished 65-year-old is some undiscovered experimental innovator. This is a universal theory of creativity, not a Viagra for sagging baby boomer self-esteem. It’s no justification for laziness or procrastination or indifference. But it might bolster the resolve of the relentlessly curious, the constantly tinkering, the dedicated tortoises undaunted by the blur of the hares.
In the end, though, you must define success for yourself. What I like about Wikipedia’s definition of late bloomer – “a person who does not discover their talents and abilities until later than normally expected” – is a sly implication that normalcy might be superfluous.
Coming Soon: Part 3, Why Everyone Should Be A Later Bloomer.
RESOURCES, PART 2:
Galenson, David. Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story Of Success.
Gladwell, Malcolm. “Why do we equate genius with precocity?” (The New Yorker: 10/20/2008).
Lobenstine, Margaret. The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One.
Pink, Daniel. “What Kind of Genius Are You?” (Wired Magazine: 07/2006).
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:
Who Are The Top 10 Late Bloomers of All Time?
Why Are Some People Late Bloomers? Part 1
Was Ben Franklin A Late Bloomer?
Late Bloomers Who Like a Cold Wet Wakeup Call
Source: http://www.laterbloomer.com/late-bloomers-2/
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