Building | Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, USA | Jun 2007

Malcolm Gladwell on Late Bloomers: Why do we equate genius with precocity?

Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity – doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth. … [but] for some reason in our accounting of genius and creativity we have forgotten to make sense of the [late bloomers] of the world.

[David] Galenson’s idea that creativity can be divided into these types—conceptual and experimental—has a number of important implications. For example, we sometimes think of late bloomers as late starters. … We also sometimes think of them as artists who are discovered late; the world is just slow to appreciate their gifts. In both cases, the assumption is that the prodigy and the late bloomer are fundamentally the same, and that late blooming is simply genius under conditions of market failure. What Galenson’s argument suggests is something else—that late bloomers bloom late because they simply aren’t much good until late in their careers.