Have you celebrated your Fiftieth or are you approaching that big birthday soon? If so, you’re going to thank me for this one. Give yourself a holiday lift by re-reading a great article by Malcolm Gladwell from The New Yorker (20 Oct 2008) titled “Late Bloomers: Why Do We Equate Genius with Precocity?”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell
Here’s the premise: it’s commonly held that genius is tied to precocity, that “doing something truly creative…requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth.” However, statistically, this bit of common wisdom does not hold up. What’s most common is that “genius” is connected to long hours of experimentation and practice.
The average age of students at the college where I taught was twenty-eight , which placed many students well beyond their eighteenth birthdays and the typical age that people conjure up when you describe “a college student.” Many of my older students spoke to me about their being anxious and filled with self-doubt before they returned to school, convinced that they would struggle to keep up with the assigned work that would be easy for “the young ones.” I’d reassure them with a statistic I learned years ago: “The people who are nominated for Who’s Who in America didn’t BEGIN the endeavor for which they’re being recognized in Who’s Who until AFTER their 40th birthday.”
It’s true. Please look it up! What I learned as these same students began to take and complete college-level work and talk to me about their experience is that their self-confidence and self-esteem grew as they spent time with younger students and realized that their experience prepared them well for tackling difficult assignments and persevering. Many would say, “I expected to have to do a lot of remedial work, but I approached the work with a can-do attitude and things just clicked! Plus, I’m older now, and I know what I want and what I don’t want, and I KNOW I want to work at something that makes me feel fulfilled and makes a contribution to someone else’s life, and I’m willing to work hard to get there.”
Okay, here’s the tie-in to Gladwell’s article and genius and creativity. He examines research on famous poets, film-makers and artists, reviewing studies that focus on the age at which each creative genius published or reached mastery. Time after time, the “late bloomers” were more willing to use an experimental approach to creation. Prodigies like Picasso [whose success was early] “rarely engaged in…open-ended exploration,” but Picasso’s are very rare. More commonly, geniuses bloom later as a result of “the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error…[taking] a long time to come to fruition.”
If you’re almost 50 or almost 70 and wondering whether or not the world will EVER recognize your genius, talent, precious gifts and exquisiteness, you’re going to get such a lift from Gladwell out of this. The article winds up with this great line: “But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied: sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.” Don’t you love it? How absolutely true!
Some of us are excited about the up-tick in the economy and the sense of great expectation as 2010 turns into 2011, but there are others of us who need a little convincing. If you’re in the latter category, click on the link above or download this article on your Kindle and read it. It’s going to make you want to pull out that dusty paint box or pull out that half-finished novel you started years ago and get busy.
My pleasure,
Doctor Mell
