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In response to some of the whining about some of the new writers joining Substack, wrote on Notes,

I think she’s right; what I want to talk about is this part.

Tons of people grow on merit and talent. The lion’s share of ultra-successful writers got to where they are, in part, by network effects though. A lot of that is just luck.

I want to persuade you that a lot of luck isn’t as lucky as it looks. Before I wrote Second Act, I was a naive believer in luck. I thought a lot of luck was dumb luck to the extent I thought about it at all. When people talked about making your own luck, I assumed they were easy optimists. If you think you have to go out and make your own luck, you are probably lucky enough to be the sort of person who finds it easier to go out. And indeed, there is some evidence for that.

The psychologist Richard Wiseman believes that lucky people are not blessed with better fortune: they make their own luck. Lucky people are more extroverted, engage in more social encounters, have body language that attracts people to talk to them — lucky people smile twice as much as unlucky people – and, most importantly, ‘lucky people are effective at building secure, and long lasting, attachments with the people that they meet’. Unlucky people are significantly more neurotic and much less open to new experiences. One obvious problem with this is that you would expect lucky people to be happier. After all, they got lucky. These are correlational studies.

It’s not great evidence, but it is suggestive that the people who believe in making your own luck don’t realise they won the personality lottery. But the more I learned, the more I came to believe that this is a shallow version of a true idea.

Look at the story of Maya Angelou.

Angelou only realized her ambition to write in her thirties when she was working as a dancer in California. She heard that the writer John Killens was in town and she sent him samples of her work. He advised her to move to New York. There she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, a group that provided support and feedback on her writing. Some years later, her friend the novelist James Baldwin took her to dinner with Jules and Judy Feiffer. Judy Feiffer was a writer and editor. She persuaded Angelou that her incredible life story ought to be turned into a book and introduced her to an editor at Random House. It was in this way that Angelou wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, her first book, aged forty.

I love this story. By the time her opportunity came along, Angelou was tired. She actually didn’t want to go to the dinner party! The fact that she went, that she got invited, was lucky. The fact that she was in a position to get invited was not lucky; it was the result of years of work.

… that wasn’t random luck: she had spent years in the network, building relationships. And when she got to the dinner, she was able to dazzle with her story. Not everyone gets invitations to parties like that, but you are more likely to get them if you send your work out, take advice, join writers’ groups, and so on.

When you see the details, it doesn’t look like extraversion and networking, it looks like someone pursuing a career long and hard enough to get lucky. The publishers at the party asked her to tell the story of her life. She was so ready for that. Networking and luck aren’t just about making connections: they are about being able to make use of connections.

Angelou didn’t only persist at networking until the right connection was made: she was able to make use of that connection. Although she got started late as a writer, it was through what Wiseman would call her ‘network of luck’ that she got published. We are not all going to become Maya Angelou and make friends with James Baldwin. But if you decline to participate, the world will decline to pay attention. ‘Many complain of neglect who never tried to attract regard,’ said Samuel Johnson.

This isn’t the same as being an extravert. If there’s something you want to do, do it. By doing it, you increase your “surface area of luck”, as Paul Graham says. The idea I most loved discovering was James Austin’s four types of luck, which is all about increasing the surface area of your luck.

In his book Chase, Chance, and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty, the neurologist James Austin used this to illustrate his theory that ‘exploratory behaviour’ was crucial to finding good luck. Austin describes four sorts of luck.

Luck is the result of exploration. The more you explore, the more you find.

Obviously, one of the four types is “dumb luck”.

First is the pure chance of accident that happens to everyone.

I cannot deny this sort of luck exists, but I can show you it is less important than you think. The other three types of luck are all to do with energy. I will bold the essential sentences.

The second sort of chance involves what Austin calls ‘motion’: you must keep looking if you want to discover something. ‘If the researcher did not move until he was certain of progress he would accomplish very little.’ Austin said that ‘ill-defined, restless, driving’ action has a place in helping to uncover opportunity.

Next is the type of chance that requires the ‘special receptivity’ of the lucky person. This sort of chance, as Louis Pasteur said, favours the prepared mind. This is how Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. It is well known that penicillin mould appeared on a Petri dish he neglected to clean. Fleming was prepared to take advantage of this because years earlier he had discovered lysozyme, which also kills bacteria, when a drop of his mucus fell onto a Petri dish. Having discovered a bacteria-killing substance once before, his mind was open to the chance next time.

Finally, Austin describes how we create our own luck through what we do and the sort of people we are. He illustrates this with Benjamin Disraeli’s comment that ‘we make our fortunes, and we call them fate’. The way you act changes the sorts of opportunities you are likely to encounter. Circumstances that would be lucky for one person are not for another. Austin compares this to the way mutations occur in plants. Some plants have rare but helpful genetic mutations that make them better adapted to adverse weather conditions. Only when the weather does get more extreme is the plant’s ability to thrive revealed; without the change, that capability would have remained dormant.

Each of these sorts of luck is contingent. You get lucky this time because of something you already did, something you didn’t do as preparation, but as exploration. Luck is not the result of trying to get lucky; it is the result of being busy, productive, energetic. The more you do, the more opportunities you will find, be able to recognise, or be well suited to. Maya Angelou exhibits all three of these sorts of luck.

As Wiseman says, the lucky are relaxed, not anxious. They don’t spend their life searching for their magic moment. Instead, ‘Lucky people see what is there, rather than trying to find what they want to see. As a result, they are far more receptive to any opportunities that arise naturally.’

If you want to get lucky, get busy.

Second Act is out in paperback on 22nd May. In the US, it will be out in paperback in October. You can already get it in hardback, kindle, and audio.

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But in his enthusiasm for his thesis, James made some quite contestable statements about how talent changes as we age. The genius of age can also burn brightly.

Psychologists tell us that “fluid intelligence” — the power of speed, abstraction and logic — peaks at 20. “Fluid intelligence” will strike most Dylan fans as an apt description of the flashing currents, spiralling eddies and surreal gushes of association that characterise his best songs.

“Fluid intelligence” is also the hydraulic force that drives the great breakthroughs in physics and mathematics. Most of the pre-eminent geniuses of 20th-century physics started young: Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and Paul Dirac were 23, 28 and 26 respectively when they made their world-historical achievements in the discipline. “A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so,” said Einstein in a phrase that haunts tardy PhD students. He published his own special theory of relativity at 26. The Fields Medal for mathematics is awarded only to those who are 40 or younger.

I have two chapters about this in Second Act. The quotes below are from those chapters. (They are not the whole argument, for that you need the book.)

One point James missed is that the average age of achievement in scientific fields has shifted over time, suggesting that the age of accomplishment is as much to do with factors like the burden of knowledge as it is with inherent ability at a certain age.

Before 1905, 69 per cent of chemists, 63 per cent of medical scientists and 60 per cent of physicists did their Nobel prize-winning work before age forty. Something like 20 per cent of their prize-winning work was done before age thirty. By the end of the twentieth century, almost no prize-winning work was done before the age of thirty. And in physics, great achievements before the age of forty happen about one-third as often as they did a century earlier. The average age for doing prize-winning work increased by seven years for medicine laureates, ten years in chemistry, and thirteen years in physics. Most strikingly, at the start of the twentieth century, 66 per cent of prize-winning work in chemistry was done by age forty. By the end of the century, that number was close to zero.

As for G.H. Hardy, who said maths was a young man’s game,

Ironically, Hardy admitted to being a late bloomer himself. Of his collaborations with the mathematicians John Edensor Littlewood and Srinivasa Ramanujan he wrote, ‘It is to them that I owe an unusually late maturity: I was at my best a little past forty.’ Another irony of this book is that Hardy uses Euclid’s theorem of an infinity of prime numbers as a way of demonstrating how maths works. This theorem gave rise to the twin prime conjecture, a problem that has remained unsolved for over a hundred years. The most recent major advance towards solving this problem was made by Yitang Zhang, aged fifty-five.

And here is why the Fields Medal is awarded to those under the age of 40.

The 1950 committee discussed criteria for nominating people. The chair, Harald Bohr, wanted a young mathematician called Laurent Schwartz to get the medal. The other leading nominee was André Weil. Bohr suggested a cut off of age forty-two, seemingly because André Weil had turned forty-three the previous year. Bohr argued, for reasons of international politics and ‘the encouragement of further achievement’, that age was an important factor in choosing the winner. But really he was concerned to have his candidate succeed and used the arguments necessary to ensure the outcome. It was committee politicking that ensured the Fields Medal was a prize for younger mathematicians. In 1966, forty was chosen as a convenient round number for the age limit.

We actually don’t know whether maths ability declines as much as we believe: the fact that we believe this so much has become self-reinforcing.

In 1978, sociologist Nancy Stern published a paper about mathematics, age and productivity. She looked at the number of papers mathematicians wrote at different ages, and she concluded that: ‘There is no apparent overall relationship between age and mathematical productivity.’ Table 10.1, which summarizes her results, shows you can be productive as a mathematician at any age.

A few years before Stern’s paper, Stephen Cole investigated age and scientific performance. He found that there was a ‘slight increase in productivity through the thirties’ and then a ‘slight decrease in productivity over the age of 50’. Both, he said, were ‘explained by the operation of the scientific reward system’. The ones who keep publishing form a ‘residue’ of the best members of their cohort; the others were disincentivized from carrying on.

Imagine a world without tenure, where the Fields Medal sets the cut-off age on factors other than internal politics, and you might start to see more breakthrough from older mathematicians like Yitang Zhang. It is very notable that Zhang had an entirely untypical career and was not actually interested in the usual status markers of other academics. (I tell his story in more detail in Second Act.)

Second Act also deals with simplistic interpretations of fluid intelligence. The real picture of how our intelligence changes over time is more complicated!

…processing speed (matching numbers and symbols) peaks much earlier than working memory (unfamiliar shapes and reciting lists of numbers). These are both aspects of fluid intelligence, but they peak at different times. The idea that fluid intelligence is one thing and declines early isn’t quite right. There are many aspects to intelligence and they peak at different ages throughout our lives. The authors of the study say: ‘Not only is there no age at which humans are performing at peak at all cognitive tasks, there may not be an age at which humans are at peak on most cognitive tasks.’

The average is real, but there’s a lot of variation around the average. Some people, in fact, score better on intelligence tests when they are old.

On 1 June 1932, almost every schoolchild born in 1921 and attending school in Scotland took the same intelligence test. This was the Moray House Test No. 12, similar to a school-entrance exam that measures IQ. Split roughly equally between boys and girls, 87,408 children took the test. The same thing was done in 1947, with another 70,805 children born in 1936. Ian Deary, and a group of intelligence researchers, contacted hundreds of these people many years later and gave them the same test they had taken at about age eleven. This allowed Deary and his colleagues to see what happens to intelligence over seventy years.

This chart shows the results.

Look at the horizontal axis. This is the IQ as measured at age eleven (standardized to be a mean of 100 at that age). From 100, which is the average IQ, look up the graph and you will see that people who scored an IQ of 100 at age eleven were scoring between 40 and 120 when they were aged eighty. Although there is a general trend for people’s IQ to be approximately the same at the age of eighty as it was at the age of eleven, this is by no means a sure thing. The average conceals a lot of variation.

What’s really interesting is how to explain the variation between people’s scores age eleven and eighty. Is this variation caused by genetics or environment? Deary says: ‘About half the differences in people’s intelligence test scores in older age are not accounted for by childhood intelligence.’ That means that half of the changes in the scores (when people’s scores improve or get worse over time) can be explained by their childhood intelligence. The other half has to be explained by other factors.

James also repeats the old canard that great lyric poetry is written by the young. Yes, great Romantic lyric poetry often was (per his examples), but they mostly died young. Shakespeare’s sonnets and Donne’s religious poetry counter-balance Keats and Coleridge quite forcefully! Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens wrote some of their most canonical work after they turned fifty, including ‘Stopping by Woods’. There is also Tennyson, Yeats, Larkin, Hughes…

Beyond the lyric, it becomes simply inarguable. Shakespeare was thirty-five in 1599, after which he wrote Hamlet, Twelfth Night, the other great tragedies and the Romances. Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in his fifties. Milton wrote Paradise Lost in retirement. Dante! Pope! Virgil! Yes there are plenty of young poets, but the idea of the Young Poet is a Romantic idea.

James is right that we need to encourage young talent, but talent is not as exclusively youthful as he says.

If you want to know more, read Second Act!

So many people have had lovely things to say about Second Act. Full quotes are at the bottom, but here’s a taste.

said it has a “mix of compelling stories and persuasive evidence.” says Second Act “showcases Henry’s wide reading, deep understanding and playful prose style.” Tyler Cowen said, Second Act will “revolutionize how we think about talent, and how we study the history of the arts and also politics.”

Matt Clifford, who co-led the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, invests in AI at Entrepreneur First, and Chairs ARIA, the new government science funding body, said that I have “the most encyclopedic knowledge of great achievement of anyone I know.” (He’s much too nice.)

My splendid friend called it “a brilliant ode to the infinite variety of human experience.” And I was delighted when Dan Rothschild, who runs the Mercatus Centre, said “this is not a work of therapeutic managerialism.”

And if that wasn’t enough to persuade you, it’s already 17% off on Amazon.

Order Second Act

Here’s the opening couple of pages,

Katharine Graham became the CEO of the Washington Post Company — a major publishing business that owned radio and television stations, as well as Newsweek and the Washington Post — one summer afternoon in 1962, at the age of forty-five, when her husband shot himself. She had no idea what was going to happen. For most of her life, she had been so denigrated and mocked by her mother and husband that she lacked the confidence to dress herself for a party, let alone believe herself capable of running a major corporation. Despite the fact that her father had owned the Post, and nurtured her talent, she believed that running a business was never in her blood. She said that when she bought a house in her late twenties, she did not know the difference between income and capital. She was obsessed by news and politics but bored by advertising and balance sheets. And so, when she woke up from a nap that August afternoon to find her husband – alcoholic, manic depressive, adulterous, verbally abusive – shot dead, Katharine Graham faced a transformative moment. For the six months before Phil Graham died, Katharine had worried that he would take the Post away from her, after he started a bitter-minded legal attempt to take control of the company. In her grief, she faced a challenge. She could either run the business herself or let it go out of the family. She was advised to sell. She declined.

Katharine Graham went on to become one of the most successful CEOs of the twentieth century, and one of the few women of her time to hold so much commercial and political power.

To the people around her — and perhaps to herself — Katharine Graham’s success as a CEO came out of the blue. She had no training in business. She lacked confidence. But she had everything a late bloomer needs to succeed. She didn’t come out of the blue at all. She had just been overlooked. Her talents were always there, but they were unappreciated.

Katharine Graham never lacked the qualities she needed for success. What was missing was opportunity. In among the long years of self- doubt, there were many flashes of the steel, signals of the character that would later see her acclaimed as one of the most powerful people in Washington and one of the most successful CEOs in the United States, in whose company Warren Buffett confidently invested and whose salons became essential attendance for new presidents. From her abusers, she drew resilience. From her elite background she had acquired the skills for success. Circumstances that might have crushed other people didn’t quite crush Katharine Graham.

Graham’s story exemplifies many of the ways in which late bloomers flourish. Because she was a woman, she wasn’t going to be just given the opportunity to run the company. In a perverse, tragic way, she got a lucky break. But she was prepared to take that break. She was well educated, knew the newspaper business in detail, had been acquainted with the Post from her childhood. She was networked with the right people and learned from the good influences of her upbringing and education. Above all, she was resilient. Persistence is a perpetual theme of late blooming, and Katharine Graham persisted and persisted and persisted, no matter what. She shows us that simply deciding to act when faced with a challenge can reveal new depths of capability. The more she did, the more capable she became. ‘Do your work,’ said Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘and you shall reinforce yourself.’

This book is going to examine the factors that made Katharine Graham — and others like her, in fields ranging from painting to entrepreneurship — a late bloomer, so that we can better understand what a late bloomer is and how we might find more of them.

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Praise for Second Act

“Henry Oliver is a rare talent: smart, funny and insightful. Second Act showcases his wide reading, deep understanding and playful prose style. Read this book to discover why it’s never too late for a second act in your own life.”

, Atlantic writer, author of Difficult Women, writes .

“If you are at all interested in talent, you should join me in pre-ordering Second Act— a study of late bloomers by the brilliant @HenryEOliver, who has probably the most encyclopedic knowledge of great achievement of anyone I know.”

Matt Clifford, co-led the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, co-founder of investment firm Entrepreneur First, Chair of ARIA, the new government scientific funding body.

“When we feel defined by the past we can struggle to see a different future. With its mix of compelling stories and persuasive evidence, Second Act will make you realise that, far from being done, you haven't even got started yet.”

, author of How to Disagree, writes .

“Henry Oliver’s new book on late bloomers will revolutionize how we think about talent, and how we study the history of the arts and also politics. It is one of the forthcoming books I most want to read.”

Tyler Cowen, economist, author of Talent, blogger at Marginal Revolution, Bloomberg columnist.

“Success and failure are often seen as all too reliant on time. Work for long enough and you'll get there, or be precocious early on and you'll do great. This is not just untrue, it maligns the human condition. Henry's book is a brilliant ode to the infinite variety of human experience. Using stories from those who have done this before, he shows past is not prologue, future is in fact unwritten, and achieving excellence is not age dependent!”

, investor, author of Inventing God, writes

“The frequency of the messaging, “adulting is hard,” “we can’t make it work,” “I’ll never amount to anything or make any money,” from the 20- or 30- or 40-year-old generation saddens me. The reality is that MOST of us felt that way... I certainly did. Life is hard… for everyone. I loved Second Act for its hopeful honesty about the slow nature of “becoming.” If we find work we love that adds something to the world and we commit ourselves to that work, the universe finds a way. We mustn’t lose hope.”

Jonathan DeYoe, host of Mindful Money podcast

“This fascinating well-researched book sparks insights into how talent blooms across all ages and disciplines drawing on lives across politics, culture, business and arts. So absorbed, I read it a single sitting.”

Ben Yeoh, Then Do Better, investor, playwright, host of Ben Yeoh Chats

It’s UK launch week of Second Act, so here are fifty late bloomers to whet your appetite. And here’s a tweet thread from Dan Rothschild that praises Second Act in *precisely* the terms that matter most to me: “This is not a work of therapeutic managerialism.”

If you want to know more about late bloomers pre-order Second Act today. It comes out Thursday but copies are already arriving!

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1. Frank Lloyd Wright did half of his life’s work after the age of 68, including the Guggenheim.

2. Before he was unexpectedly picked as a Senate candidate aged 50, Harry Truman thought he would retire or take a sinecure job.

3. Rani Hamid only started playing chess aged 34. She became Bangladesh’s first International Woman Master.

4. Gladys Burrill completed the Honolulu Marathon aged 92.

5. Ynés Mexía started studying botany aged 51 and went on to discover fifty new species of plants.

6. Michael Ramsay founded TiVo aged 47.

7. Emma Rowena Gatewood became the first woman to solo hike the Appalachian Trail aged sixty-seven.

8. Freeman Dyson published a new solution to the prisoner’s dilemma aged eighty-eight.

9. Mary Delany invented a form of paper-cutting in her seventies and created nearly a thousand detailed illustrations of botanical specimens.

10. Ray Charles won a Grammy aged seventy-four.

11. Laura Ingalls Wilder started writing Little House on the Prairie at sixty-five.

12. Gertrude Jekyll, the famous garden designer, started her career in her forties.

13. John Goodenough developed the lithium-ion battery the year before he was forced to retire from Oxford. He was still an active professor in Texas aged ninety-nine and is the oldest Nobel laureate in history.

14. Knut Wicksell spent fourteen years in graduate school. He later made significant contributions in economics.

15. Marjorie Rice was in her fifties when she discovered new forms of pentagonal tessellation in geometry. She was an amateur with only a high school diploma.

16. Helen Downie started painting aged fifty. By posting her work on Instagram, Downie ended up collaborating with Gucci.

17. Ruth Wilson, a former elocution teacher in Australia, emerged from a depression in her sixties by rereading Jane Austen. Wilson went on to achieve a PhD in Jane Austen aged eighty-eight.

18. Robin Chase was a stay-at-home mother with an MBA before she founded Zipcar, aged forty-two. (She doesn’t think of herself as a late bloomer.)

19. Siphiwe Baleka nearly became an Olympic swimmer aged fifty. (He was denied the chance to represent Guinea-Bissau because of a technicality.)

20. Gerald Stratford became famous online for growing big vegetables in his retirement; he is now the ‘Twitter King of Big Veg’ and has published a book. Before this, he was a butcher and a barge controller on the Thames.

21. Carl Allamby was an auto mechanic for twenty-five years before he went to medical school aged forty.

22. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote from prison late in life.

23. The mathematician Eugène Ehrhart graduated high school aged twenty-two and finished his PhD aged sixty.

24. Charles Spearman, the psychologist who developed the theory of general intelligence, started his PhD aged thirty-four, paused it to fight in the Second Boer War, and completed it aged forty-one.

25. Toussaint Louverture began leading the Haitian Revolution aged forty-eight; he had been a slave himself until the age of thirty-three, and a property owner after that.

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    If you want to know more about late bloomers pre-order Second Act today. It comes out Thursday but copies are already arriving!
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26. Alan Kay was one of the oldest PhDs to join the Californian research and development company PARC. He studied mathematics and molecular biology, computer science not being a degree at that time; he learned to code aged twenty-two in the US Air Force; he got his undergraduate degree aged twenty-six and his PhD aged twenty-nine.

27. At twenty, Malcolm Little was in jail, showing no signs of his later brilliance as a preacher, political communicator, orator, and civil rights leader. By twenty-five, he was Malcolm X.

28. Jay-Z didn’t release his first album until he was twenty-six.

29. Winston Churchill’s career was thought to be finished before the Second World War.

30. There has been a recent vogue for Stoicism — we should remember that Seneca wrote his famous letters in his final years.

31. English philosopher Mary Midgley wrote her first book at fifty-nine.

32. Viola Davis spent decades playing mainly supporting roles before becoming a television, and now film, star later in her career.

33. Instead of retiring, Michelangelo became the architect of St Peter’s.

34. Penelope Fitzgerald’s most successful novel was her last, written in her late seventies. She began writing fiction in her sixties.

35. Joseph Conrad didn’t start writing fiction until he was in his thirties.

36. Julia Child was thirty-seven before she went to France and attended Cordon Bleu cooking school. She then spent a decade writing The Art of French Cookery.

37. Aged 27, Carl Bernstein was at risk of being fired. A year later got the Watergate assignment.

38. Ray Kroc was 58 when he discovered a small family restaurant called McDonalds. Before that he was a milkshake mixer salesman.

39. Audrey Sutherland solo explored and kayaked the coasts of Alaska and British Columbia in her sixties, seventies, and eighties. Before that, she had never explored in artic waters before.

40. Ronald Coase’s two critical papers – ‘The Nature of the Firm’ and ‘The Problem of Social Cost’ – were published when he was twenty-seven and fifty. They were both revolutionary and contributed to Coase’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991.

41. John B. Fenn won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002 for a paper published in 1991, after he had been forcibly retired from Yale.

42. Vera Wang started designing dresses aged 40.

43. Rosalind Arden studied art history before producing science documentaries for television. She got a PhD in behavioural genetics late in her career and is now a research fellow at the LSE.

44. Eric Yuan founded Zoom aged forty-one.

45. Robin Hanson started his PhD aged 34.

46. Kenichi Horie sailed solo across the Pacific aged 83

47. Fields Medal winner June Huh didn’t start taking maths seriously until the end of college: he had wanted to become a poet.

48. Michelangelo did almost no painting for a fifteen-year period in his forties and fifties. He then produced The Last Judgment.

49. The movie director Ava DuVernay didn’t pick up a camera until she was thirty-two.

50. David Duffield founded Workday aged 64. It is now worth more than $43 billion.

If you want to know more about late bloomers pre-order Second Act today. It comes out Thursday but copies are already arriving!

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I have recently appeared on the William Blair podcast, the Pathless Path podcast, the Unleashed podcast, and the Mindful Money podcast.

Samuel George emailed, asking about advice for the unsuccessful.

What about the people who never found their calling, are not successful in traditional or frankly any terms, and haven’t had the opportunity to be truly good at anything, but instead forced by their circumstances and bad choices into a life they never wanted?

There’s a long section about callings in Second Act. Here are a few thoughts.

1. You do know that having a calling doesn’t always make you “happy”? Many moral callings are unattainable. (Think of zookeepers and animal shelter workers, or climate activists.) It’s a common trope of medical dramas and spy stories: the hero is compelled to do something they know they cannot complete in a morally satisfactory manner.

2. Callings don’t always arrive like revelations. The psychologists Bryan J. Dik and Ryan D. Duffy have said that a calling is not always an undeniable or transcendent feeling early in life but can be “an ongoing process of evaluating the purpose and meaningfulness of activities within a job and their contribution to the common good”. Maybe you found it already…

3. On the question of not having the opportunity, the “sit your ass in the chair and type” advice about writing generalises. Yes, you are busy. But ten minutes a day is better than nothing and you do have ten minutes. Stop drinking. Stop watching TV. Stop hoovering. Stop whatever you need to stop. If you wait for the right circumstances, you will grow old waiting. (On the issue of circumstances, there’s a whole chapter in Second Act. I might write about that another time. It’s too long for this post.)

4. I suspect the joining of success and calling complicates this question. What if your “calling” is to play the trumpet as an amateur or listen to lots of music? What if it’s to run a mid-level literature and ideas Substack, come to that? Does the level of worldly success attached to a calling matter? Isn’t this just about taking something seriously? Do you have to be “truly good” at your calling?

5. Some late bloomers start their calling very late. Grandma Moses picked up a paintbrush in retirement. This is a “latent calling”. Moses genuinely didn’t have the time to do anything artistic until retirement (she was a farmer). Bill Traylor is another example. He was born into slavery, and later became homeless. In his eighties someone gave him drawing materials to help him pass the time. (Note, his work wasn’t appreciated until after his death, having been collected by a group of local artists. Finding your calling doesn’t always mean being successful.)

6. Moses needed little help being told what to do. But, this question is about those who don’t initially see their path. The answer is to do more things. It’s a question of sampling. Probably, you know what you are good at and what you want to do: the question is, what you are dedicated at and how can you apply it. Audrey Sutherland had no idea she would end up solo-exploring in the Artic when she began swimming and walking the coast of a Hawaiian island in her forties. She did know she had to go exploring. (She was also a single mother to four children. Talk about busy…)

7. Do you lack a calling or do you lack a goal? From Second Act:

   A calling or vocation can be more motivating than a specific goal. And wanting to do something just for the sake of doing it – because you love comedy or music, because you find political news compelling, because you just want to understand something – is often essential to discovering your goal.

8. Late bloomers iterate until they succeed. Their career paths are meandering. but developing slowly can work much better. People like Manfred von Richthofen, Django Reinhard, and Jerry Seinfeld work this way: slowly, painstakingly. David Epstein covers this in Range. For a case study, read the chapter I posted about Penelope Fitzgerald.

9. This slow, iterative process is what David Galenson found in his study of artists. For “experimental artists” every piece of work is an experiment in finding out what sort of creator they are. Late bloomers become “truly good” piece by piece. Stamina matters. You do not simply wake up one day and discover that you are Toni Morrison. (See point 3.)

10. To explain this in a simple framework, I use explore/exploit. After a period of exploring (meandering, inefficiency, slow development) late bloomers find their focus—and opportunity—and switch into exploiting. They look around for a long time but when they find what they want to work on they make a significant change. Sometimes this is because they meet new people or go to new places, sometimes they have made themselves available for luck. Either way, what matters is that they were prepared, they did something to open up their opportunities. If you decline to participate, the world will decline to pay attention. As Samuel Johnson said, “Many complain of neglect who never tried to attract regard.”

If you want to know more, pre-order Second Act today.

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Vera Wang was an Olympic level ice skater and then a Vogue journalist for years with no thought of designing clothes. When she made the switch, she had accrued all the skills and contacts she needed.

At the end of the First World War, Eisenhower stayed in the army, while his friends left for cushy corporate jobs. He knew another war would come, deeply regretted his lack of action in the first, but also increasingly felt he probably wouldn’t still be in service for the next war. For sixteen years, he got no promotion. But he had three mentors, who he learned from, and in the time he spent studying strategy and working closely with those generals, he was getting ready to become Supreme Commander. When the war came (and Eisenhower was close to retirement) his ascent began and it was prodigious.

What happens is that late bloomers switch. Vera Wang was inspired by her own wedding to design wedding dresses. Eisenhower was forced into action by the war. Life interrupts and late bloomers change. The three most significant ways late bloomers do this are: networks, circumstances, mid-life crisis.

Grandma Moses went from being an old lady on a farm to a celebrated painter when a dealer discovered her work and used his Manhattan network to bring attention to her work. When Samuel Johnson left Oxford University early, with no degree, he thought his prospects were dismal. When he moved to London he put himself into new circumstances which facilitated his writing career. He was later chosen to write the Dictionary. Frank Lloyd Wright was a celebrated architect, but in middle age his practice declined and he seemed like the world of yesterday. He had serious personal problems too, financial and romantic. He turned this crisis round, by refusing to quit, drawing on his limitless belief in his own talents.

To make the switch, though, is not easy. You need preparation. Samuel Johnson had read what seemed like every book in London. Vera Wang knew all there was to know about the fashion market. Grandma Moses painted for several hours, every day, to the age of one hundred and older. Malcolm X became a late bloomer by transforming into one of the most powerful orators and political activists of his time by spending hours in the prison library, transcribing the entire dictionary, reading his way through classic books, giving himself the education he hadn’t had before.

The usual objection to this is time. Who has time to read every book in London or transcribe a dictionary? Who has access to Eisenhower’s mentors or Vera Wang’s Vogue career? The late bloomers Chris Gardner and Audrey Sutherland have the answer to this problem. (They both wrote excellent memoirs, which I highly recommend. The Pursuit of Happyness and Paddling My Own Canoe.)

In the early 1980s, Chris Gardner became a stockbroker despite having no experience, no college education, and an atypical background for a finance career at that time. He was one of two black men at his firm. On his way to success, he had to raise his son and live homeless for a period.

Audrey Sutherland was a Hawaiian kayaker, used to going out in warm waters. When Sutherland turned sixty, she looked herself in the mirror and said, ‘Getting older, aren’t you lady? Better do the physical things now. You can work at a desk later.’ For the next twenty years, into her eighties, she undertook solo kayak explorations of the Alaskan and British Columbian coast, navigating ice-cold waters and encountering bears. Earlier in her life, Audrey had been a single, working, mother to four children.

They both gave the same advice when people asked them how, with all the responsibility of life—jobs, spouses, children, elderly parents—one could achieve one’s dreams. Audrey Sutherland was a single mother on a moderate income. When asked this question, she replied.

Then you need to ask yourself: What part of my goal can I achieve now? What can I do now to achieve my goal later?

That was how she did it. One step at a time. Read maps. Acquire cheap gear. Practice capsizing. Do preparatory treks in local terrain. Anything that gets you closer.

Chris Gardner said the same thing.

While you’re brushing your teeth, ask yourself: If tomorrow morning you could be doing anything in the world, what would it be? Second, what did you do today to make that tomorrow possible?

For anyone who wants to be a late bloomer, this might be the most important piece of advice. To make the switch, you have to have done a lot of preparation. So ask yourself, what part of my goal can I achieve now?

What did you do today to make that tomorrow possible?

If you are a potential late bloomer, or know someone else who is, pre-order my book Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Reinventing Your Life.

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Three sorts of people

Everywhere I go, I tell people I am writing a book about late bloomers. And I get three responses.

Some people ask how old you have to be to be a late bloomer. The short answer is that there is no age. It’s about flourishing after you are expected to. Martina Navratilova was late for high-end tennis in her twenties. Bill Traylor didn’t start drawing until his eighties. Margaret Thatcher was right on time as a fifty-year-old party leader, but a few weeks earlier even her supporters were saying “Oh God, we can’t have Margaret.”

Then there are the many people who tell me that they are a late bloomer. Most of these stories are inspiring and some are actually about good old regular blooming. I enjoy them all (and am always grateful to get emails on this topic.) Also in this category are those who will give me examples of other late bloomers—my recent favourite is Thomas Hobbes, the only time anyone has nominated him, though sadly he isn’t in the current draft. (I lack space and does anyone else care?) If you’re very lucky I’ll write about him here one day.

Finally, there’s a group of people who ask,—why late bloomers?

Here is my answer to their question. As you will see, it is too long for parties.

Seeing the inside of recruitment

For ten years, I worked in advertising. We specialised in talent attraction. Organisations hired us to think about how to attract candidates to apply for jobs with them. My job was to work out the answer to one simple question—what makes this organisation interesting to the people they want to employ?

I spent a lot of time thinking about the labour market, who works where, and what is valuable in a candidate. Obviously, this varies from organisation to organisation, department to department, job to job. But there are trends and fashions. For the last decade, for example, much more effort has gone into designing programmes and systems of employment for mothers who left the labour force and people who are neuro-divergent. Internships for the over fifties are another new endeavour.

The more I learned about recruitment, the more convinced I became that talent allocation isn’t as good as we think. People have incredibly narrow recruiting criteria. Their intuitions guide them more than any empirical information about talent. And they are inconsistent. When organisations make use of their existing employees, they move them around and let them work more broadly than their job description: when they hire externally, this is all forgotten. People are locked out because they lack certificates, years of experience, the exact right sort of experience, and so on. Unless you are young, lacking a track record makes you less and less interesting in recruitment terms. That causes us to miss some very interesting people.

Being irascible by nature, I was now pointed towards what I felt was a big hole in our knowledge of talent:—people who haven’t succeeded yet, but maybe they will, as Tyler Cowen put it in his interview with Tim Ferris.

And this intersected with the way my own career had caused me to think about myself as a late bloomer.

A diversion into my past

Before advertising, I had a patchy career. I sold shirts on Jermyn Street. I worked as a teaching assistant with a class of eight year olds who had failed the entrance exam to their next school. I tutored people who literally didn’t know Winston Churchill from a hole in the ground or that Henry VIII and Queen Victoria were hundreds of years apart. I blogged for an immigration law firm. And I worked for Liz Truss, before she was famous. (Oh Liz, what happened?)

The common thread was that I wanted to be a writer. Often, when I applied for pure writing jobs, I was told I was more of a researcher. “You seem to be interested in the ideas,” they would tell me. As if writers were mere word shufflers who were not interested in ideas. At one point I thought I would get a dream job as a speechwriter. Then I went to work for Liz. (If you want to hire me as a speechwriter, or any other kind of writer, get in touch...)

Like many of the late bloomers I have studied, I had a meandering career and was deeply interested in something that was slightly outside my employment. In advertising, I became the person who interviews the C-suite and gets to ask them about their cultural problems. And then write up a report with ideas and suggestions. This was very cool. I did write a few adverts. But mostly I wrote internal documents. Most writing is like this: it exists inside institutions and is uninteresting to those outside. But it convinces: it persuades.

Still, I thought of myself as a writer. I had spent years reading books of grammar and style,—not to mention all the actual books I was reading,—and practising the techniques I learned in my emails, memos, reports, and so on. A good writer is not bound by mode or medium. “I would write ads for deodorants or labels for ketchup bottles, if I had to,” John Updike once said. My hero, Samuel Johnson, wrote adverts, too, as well as sermons, and anything else he needed to.

Because of this catholic approach, I was not happy doing only one sort of writing. Like, yes, everyone wants to be a historically famous novelist, but really, the challenge is to write lots of different things and to write them well. And in that sense, I began to think of myself as a late bloomer.

And so the idea was forming, even though I was only writing about it indirectly and behind opaque organisational walls.

Three lessons from my meandering career

Here are some of the things I got radicalised about as I wandered through education, politics, and the law. (Did I mention I went to law school? Not a good idea,—but it is at least useful when I need to write a legal letter.) These three ideas are all foundational to my work on late bloomers.

Everyone has potential.
Whoever you are, you have something in you, some talent, some worth, that cannot be degraded. We can all do something. Those children who failed their exams were a remarkable bunch and made some serious progress. The kids who didn’t know English history made leaps and bounds. To this day, it really boils my piss to think about the utterly lame teaching some of them had received.

So the first lesson is that everyone has potential and if you expect more from people, they will often deliver it. It might not be easy. They might turn out to be idle or bored or whatever. You might be the problem! But there’s often some kind of margin available by expecting more.

Aspiration matters
Reading Ron Paul’s minority report on the gold standard on the way to work was a quake moment. Not because I actually think we ought to revert to the gold standard, but because I realised you can continually expose yourself to strange new ideas outside of education. In my twenties, I got up early to learn economics and read history before work. I have notebooks full of supply and demand curves and shelves of the books I read to paper over what I considered woeful gaps in my knowledge. And I read a lot of biography.

So the second lesson is that your ambition might not be fulfilled very early. That is a reason to do more. Before I started blogging, I was writing at home in the evenings, on and off, for years.

The ideas you believe change who you become
I only found a way of expressing that idea recently, when I spent some time re-immersed in John Stuart Mill. Gradually, my interests in literature and history converged with my work in talent attraction. The question, what makes this organisation interesting to the people they want to attract? was introduced to me by an excellent boss. But it represents an idea that goes back to Aristotle. I was, and am, fascinated by advertising because I had previously read Aristotle’s Rhetoric when I wanted to be a speechwriter.

So the third lesson is that you really are the hero of your own life, but not in the sub-Hollywood bullshit way. Your life is a moral journey and the ideas you believe will change where you end up. By not having a notion or model of late bloomers, most people are simply unable to know when they encounter them.

My book is going to provide some of those models, but combine them with what we know from social science to try and explain what we can learn from them.

It was only chemo

Then I got cancer. Not scary cancer. Just pain-in-the-arse, drag yourself around like you turned ninety overnight, cancer. This matters not because I had some life-changing revelation on chemo (apparently some people do, and good for them) but because it gave me four months off work. A lot of that time was spent in a fog. But a lot of it was spent in a book.

One of the things I did was to re-read Penelope Fitzgerald, along with the Hermione Lee biography and the letters and essays. Fitzgerald is one of my favourite novelists. And of course, she was a late bloomer. I then heard Tyler Cowen talking about “people who haven’t done something yet but maybe they will” and the idea started to come together in my blogging and my marketing work.

For a long time, I had been interested in biography and taking time off work also prompted me to do an MA in Biography at Buckingham with Jane Ridley. This course was disappointing in some ways, but the flame was lit. I couldn’t have been happier scraping around in archives and writing to people to discover the secrets of my subject, Elizabeth Jenkins. Elizabeth was a late bloomer in the sense that without the affair she conducted in her middle-forties—the end of which was utterly crushing—she probably wouldn’t have written her most successful novel and biography.

I had planned to write about late bloomers on that course, but there were already books on the topic. But the more I read, the more I believed that what exists on this topic isn’t good enough. We don’t actually understand late bloomers yet. I wanted to write something that would contribute to that better understanding.

So I decided to quit my job and get on with the late bloomer project. Time was running out! I have often been teased for being older than my years. From my perspective, most people cling hopelessly to the vanity of being young and let their age creep up on them. Having children brings into sharp focus the fact that time really does go too fast and that you are going to die sooner than you want to.

If I was going to be a late bloomer, I needed to get on with it. “He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualties,” as Samuel Johnson said.

There are no easy answers

At work, I was more and more convinced that talent was being left on the table. And the more I learned about the most accomplished people, the more I saw that their success was often unpredictable. It took the Pope to persuade Michelangelo to become an architect. (Good thing the recruiters didn’t get hold of that one, eh? “Yes, Mr. Michelangelo, you’re a very good painter. But we’re looking for someone with architecture experience, preferably in era-defining, classically-inspired monumental cathedrals.”)

It took the death of her husband and father to start Penelope Fitzgerald writing novels. Before she was elected as Leader of the Opposition, Margaret Thatcher was dismissed by her own supporters and was fifty-to-one against at Ladbrokes. Even when she won in 1979, no-one imagined she would become a globally important politician.

And I had seen this among the children I taught. I had seen it at work, when CEOs dismissed someone’s potential as a future leader because “they’re not an extrovert” or some similar nonsense. All around us, I began to think, there is talent going unnoticed, undeveloped.

Now, this is not a call for easy optimism. You are not going to wake up one day and discover out of nowhere that you could become the next Toni Morrison. There’s no easy answer. Popular ideas like grit have been incredibly unhelpful because they disguise the fact that passionate persistence is only one small piece of the puzzle. A meta-study found that grit seems most useful when we talk about narrow fields like chess or military training. In messier endeavours, which are harder to define, like Einstein’s search for the mathematics of relativity, grit just isn’t as useful.

In fact, if Einstein had merely persisted without changing tack under the influence of other mathematicians, he would have failed. Sometimes quit beats grit. Contrary to Angela Duckworth’s claim that grit can be more important than talent, grit alone cannot see you through any endeavour. It’s likely true that we can all do better at maths in school with more perseverance, but most of us cannot use grit alone to become musicians or gymnasts. Aptitude is required to get beyond a certain level.1

Ideas like grit,—or that other last ditch of no-hope, growth-mindset,—take hold in recruitment, as they do in schools, and their damage spreads like wildfire. What became more totemic to me is a review of a hundred years of findings in psychological research that examined the effectiveness of dozens of different recruitment practices and summarises the best of our knowledge about how to spot talent. This is no slam-dunk either, but it’s some of the best knowledge in this area.

The main lesson I take from this paper is that there are no rules. You cannot just stack deliberate practice, grit, and growth-mindset and journal your way into doing something excellent. The great failing of “smart thinking” non-fiction in the last few years has been to pretend that we can find clean, simple answers, grand ideas that simply need to be applied to our lives.

The reality is much messier, requires more nuanced judgement, and won’t be so easy to define.

What we know about predicting job performance

Let’s get into the details of that paper and what we know about predicting people’s job performance.

The best indicator we have of job performance is intelligence, which the researchers call General Mental Ability (GMA). A smart person can learn their job quickly and thus perform it better. But GMA is not a perfect predictor. There is more variation in employee performance in professional roles than other types of role. The better workers in unskilled jobs produce about 19% more than the average worker; in professional jobs it is 48% more.2 

GMA predicts two-thirds of what we would be able to predict if we had a perfect way of measuring talent. The only way to improve on this is to add an integrity test to the GMA test.

However, we do not have a perfect way of measuring talent. And many of the best CEOs are nowhere near being the smartest people. Character matters. There is a lot of value in not hiring people who are brilliant but disruptive or dishonest. But character is hard to measure.3

The lowest scoring measures were self-reported personality traits, graphology, and age. Age has a predictive validity score of zero. Still, it’s a major unspoken factor in recruitment. For comparison, it’s less useful than graphology, which is about as scientifically valid as astrology. Paying attention to a candidate’s age is, according to this research, as irrational as reading their horoscope. Another widely used method in recruitment is to ask for people with a certain number of years of experience. This predicts a mere 16% of the performance you would predict with a perfect measure. And yet it is an impenetrable barrier to most jobs.4

It’s just not that easy to find good talent.

Ok so it’s complicated…

Finding talent is not as simple as running GMA and integrity tests. These are merely the most effective ways we have of predicting performance. They are not a substitute for judgement. Take the example of Katharine Graham. How many organisations would have hired her? She was an outstanding CEO who took the business from revenue of tens of millions to over a billion dollars, who approved both the Pentagon Papers and Watergate publication, and who was the reason Warren Buffet invested in the Washington Post Company.

It is hard to see how someone in her position, with no experience, no track record, who actively disliked the business side of things, and without any discernible qualifications, would have been recruited into her role. Nor is it clear that a GMA test and integrity test would have secured her the position. She had to be known, as a person, and that took time, effort, error, and experience.

Which is why few people did in fact predict her success. Though some came closer than they realised. Anyone who had been paying attention could have seen that she lingered in the room where the men talked politics, that her father rated her despite not promoting her, and that she had outstanding integrity—but it would take some imagination and judgement to have thought of her like that in a corporate context.

Similarly so many people around Margaret Thatcher missed her ability: because she was a woman, because she was irritating, because she was right-wing. But it was more obvious than it seemed that she was smart, had good integrity, and was hugely capable of learning on the job.

We see this again and again with late bloomers. That’s why people become second bloomers, like Steve Jobs and Vera Wang, even though no-one predicts it. Their talents are right there, but they are overlooked because of expertise-blinkers. Jobs was a marketing and computer guy, not an animated film expert. Being a near Olympic skater (as Vera Wang was) doesn’t seemingly have much to do with designing dresses. But once someone has shown you their talent, it is foolish to start quibbling it. And of course skaters have to wear impeccably tailored outfits.

You cannot simply run a GMA and integrity test and hire people based on the results, without meeting them. Talent spotting is a combination of clean measures and messy judgements.

Theories and lives

That’s why my book combines biography and social science. My proposition is that talent is less predictable than we think and that potential exists in the second half of life just as much as it does in teenagers and twenty-somethings. At the moment, this idea is often overlooked or thought to be wrong. My aim is to shift the needle from indifference or disagreement to perhaps. I want to do that by using social science to explain a series of inspiring examples of real people’s lives—a set of late-blooming heroes. Biography never explains, and social science never gives us the thick, messy context of real life. By bringing together these two things—inspiring you with examples and then explaining them with empirical research—I hope to show that sometimes we just cannot see the talent that’s right in front of us.

Who knows how many late bloomers might be out there, waiting for their chance… Whether you are a potential late bloomer, an executive or recruiter, a talent spotter, a friend or spouse who thinks they might know a late bloomer, I want this book to make you curious about the people around you,—about the people who haven’t succeeded yet, but who might…

Thank you for reading The Common Reader. If you want to stay up to date about my book project, read interesting essays about history, literature, talent, and biography, then subscribe for free today.

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One day soon I am going to die. Don’t panic, the cancer isn’t back. I’m quite healthy. But I am thirty-five. That’s half my three scores years and ten. Of course, my life expectancy is higher than that, probably my quality of life expectancy too. But with a little bad luck, I am already midway on the wave. If you scoff at the idea that thirty-five is early middle age, you might have a surprise waiting for you when the time comes. “Everybody goes out as though he had just come in”, said Montaigne. The best way not to get caught out by your death is to act like it’s closer than you think it is.

Our time is not guaranteed to be well spent. How many people are lost to weariness, laziness, mental decline, exhaustion, redundancy? I have seen too many colleagues dropped by the office because they were no longer seen as being fresh enough, and too many lives not lived as they could have been. One of my grandmothers was a widow for forty years. The other outlived two of her children. “Sometimes it is the body which is the first to surrender to old age,” says Montaigne, “sometimes the soul.”

Every year, we delay some part of living. As we get older, each year is a bigger part of what we have left. But we don’t value our years differently enough. People plod through jobs and lives they do not want. Do they not know what fraction of themselves they are letting go? Is it as simple as not being able to think of an alternative?

How long will you reassure yourself with the statistics? Most people who think thirty-five is still young aren’t so informed about life expectancy that they know what the odds of dying at sixty actually are, nor do they seem to take any sort of insurance against it. Their faith in not being middle-aged is a little too solid to be credible.

There is a powerful halting quality to the stories of mothers with cancer or young men who drop dead of heart failure in the gym. The odds of it being us are low, but not zero. Aeschylus was killed by a falling tortoise shell. I can’t imagine there are useful statistics on the odds of that happening. Did you know, by the way, life expectancy had stagnated for some years before covid?

This isn’t a philosophy of misery, it’s a call for action. We must live while we can. You do not have to die for your life to diminish. JFDI, as I would say in another context. YOLO.

All of which is to say, I quit my job on my thirty-fifth birthday and am writing a book about late bloomers. This is being generously funded by Tyler Cowen and the Mercatus Centre through the Emergent Ventures scheme. It’s a life-changing opportunity.

A dozen years ago or more, I saw an article in the paper about a High Court judge who was retiring to start a PhD in theology at Oxford. I can never find that article in newspaper archives, but it stayed with me. I can see it in my mind. Several years later, I read James-Lees Milne’s Diaries; this passage fixed itself in my memory.

I am a late developer more than most men of my generation and in some respects still quite adolescent, an opsimath indeed.

Opsimath is a mesmerising word — and an even more captivating idea.1 Then, listening to Tyler Cowen’s interview with Tim Ferris, a phrase struck me: “People who have not yet succeeded but maybe they will.”

I was reminded of Leonard Bernstein's father who didn't want his son to study music and who later said, “How did I know that he would become Leonard Bernstein?” Immediately, also, I thought of the genius Penelope Fitzgerald, who has a claim to be the most underrated novelist of the twentieth century. She started writing fiction aged sixty.

So I suggested the Fitzgerald Rule as a way of modelling “people who have not yet succeeded but maybe they will.” The rule, based on Fitzgerald’s life, is simple. You spot talent by looking at what people persist at, not what persistently happens to them.

No-one expected greatness from Penelope. Her life was a mess, her houseboat sank, her husband was a drunk and a dropout. They were homeless at one point. Hermione Lee has a snippet from some family friends, talking about when the boat sank, who said that was exactly the sort of thing they expected of the Fitzgeralds. They were looking at the wrong thing.

Instead, what matters most in Fitzgerald’s life is her quiet persistence. Her novels are based on the tumult of her life, but also on her wide-ranging immersion in great European art. She travelled, read, learnt and practised the languages of the major historical cultures. She sat in the rafters at the opera and theatre, taking her own sandwiches. And she taught.

Without all that, she would not have written the strange, unique novels she did. Unlike almost everyone else who writes about Fitzgerald, I don’t entirely “blame” her husband and the chaos he caused for her late start. I think it was partly innate. Some people flourish later. Fitzgerald was, for all the turbulence of her life, self-directed, self-educating, deeply curious, and, in a non-obvious, broad-minded way, ambitious. She was also pragmatic.

These are qualities that recur again and again in late bloomers, people like Margaret Thatcher, who was 50-1 against at the bookies in the run up to the Conservative Party leadership election, or Audrey Sutherland, who looked at herself in the mirror one day and realised if she didn’t quit work and become an explorer now she never would. She was sixty.

Once you start looking, these people are everywhere. Siphiwe Baleka nearly became an Olympic swimmer aged fifty. He was denied the chance because of a technicality. Rani Hamid started playing chess aged thirty-four and became Bangladesh’s first International Woman Master. Frank Lloyd Wright did more than half his life’s work after the age of sixty-eight. Barry Diller didn’t work independently for the first thirty years of his career: then he took over QVC and became a phenomenal success. The philosopher Mary Midgley wrote her first book aged fifty-nine, saying, “"I didn't know what I thought until then."

I was going to write my MA dissertation on late bloomers, but I got sidetracked into a project about Elizabeth Jenkins, a novelist and biographer of distinction who is now all but forgotten. She is a prime example of a late bloomer whose career changed course because of an interruption, in her case an affair that left her devastated and inspired her to write a vicious, subtle novel The Tortoise and the Hare. Without that change, she would probably be remembered only as Austen’s first biographer, rather than as the author of one of the more popular Virago Modern Classics. (If you want to read my dissertation, email me or say so in the comments. It’s about the real lives behind the characters of Tortoise as well as Elizabeth’s life.)

I hadn’t lost my broader interest in the subject, though; my most popular essay ever, written last year, is about opsimaths. And I have been writing about people like Alan Lascelles.

Now I’m developing this idea into a book, a series of biographies of late bloomers. I want to encourage people to think about how to evaluate themselves as potential late bloomers — and how to discover and encourage late bloomers in the workforce. By telling the stories of a series of individuals, I hope to inspire people to look for potential in people we are currently under-rating. Biography is a mode that helps people see how they can apply the lessons to their own lives but it will be made more rigorous by the inclusion of scientific and psychological research. Each subject will be chosen for their field — politics, literature, etc — and compared to other people in that field, to show the patterns people follow and the range of scenarios in which late bloomers thrive.

This is not going to be easy optimism and cheery self-help. I don’t think many people can wake up one day and discover that you are in fact a fully-formed Cézanne or Toni Morrison. (Even people like Mary Wesley and Grandma Mose shows some early signs of a talent delayed by circumstances.) There is a compelling idea that populists are attracted to the concept of late bloomers. I’m not here to argue that our current system of assessing and allocating who is good at what is broken, dysfunctional, and needs replacing with a friendly gentocracy.

But there is more than one way to be successful. There are people who flourish later on. Late bloomers exist in all fields. And because their “lateness” is relative they exist at all ages. A tennis player might be a late bloomer in their twenties, while for a business executive success in their fifties might be late. My experience of spending a decade working in the talent attraction industry is that the people in charge of finding and selecting talent are not thinking enough about late bloomers.

Equally, I’m not trying to make people feel comfortable that they might wake up one day and discover they are a genius. This is about trying to understand what late blooming is and why it happens to some people. Is it something we can “solve” and thus make these people early bloomers, or should we be looking for ways of identifying and enabling late blooming talent on its own terms?

Late bloomers often face obstacles. They are self-educating and self-directed. There is usually some interruption in their life, either external or internal. Before luck or the sudden emergence of raw talent comes into play, late bloomers are the product of persistence. Not necessarily in the way the concept of “grit” promotes persistence at a goal over the long term. They also display range, curiosity, a willingness to change, openness, and self-direction.

Biographies of late bloomers will illuminate all this. It might leave us with lessons about how some people can be helped to flourish earlier — but more often I think it will show us that some talents come to fruition differently. We should encourage a diversity of paths to success.

What’s most intriguing about late bloomers is that even at an advanced age, they don’t give up, they haven’t lost their sense that doing something is their best course of action. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote from prison. Eugène Ehrhart graduated high school aged twenty-two and finished his PhD aged sixty. Charles Spearman started his PhD aged thirty-four, paused it when he had to fight in the Boer War, and completed it aged forty-one.

This spell of time that has been given to us rushes by so swiftly and rapidly that with very few exceptions life ceases for the rest of us just when we start getting ready for it.

Seneca’s “very few exceptions” are what interest me. He was one himself. Late bloomers are an inspiration to us all for personal development, for helping us discover new sources of talent in business, but also for showing us how to live a good life. “It is not that we have a short time to live,” Seneca said, “but that we waste a lot of it.”

If you are interested in wasting less of the time available to you, I expect my book will be of interest.

Give me your opinion!
What should I call the book? Take the survey to give me your opinion about titles and tell me about your favourite late bloomers… or leave your thoughts in the comments

Possible titles
Late Bloomers
They all Laughed: late bloomers and lifelong learners
The Fitzgerald Rule: life stories of late bloomers
Look at me now: how late bloomers succeed when no-one expects them to
Things take the time they take: lives of the late bloomers
Slow burn:: late bloomers and lifelong learners
Never Too Late: life stories of late bloomers

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In 1953, when he was 45 and had been working at the National Trust for twelve years, saving country houses that would otherwise have been destroyed, James Lees Milne wrote in his diary:

I love my country house tours more and more as I grow older and become more and more fascinated by persons, places and things. I am a late developer more than most men of my generation and in some respects still quite adolescent, an opsimath indeed.

In 1931, Lees Milne had left Oxford with a third-class degree and few prospects. By the end of his life he was a pillar of the National Trust, who had acquired many of the great houses the Trust now owns, as well a celebrated diarist, and the author of one of the best English memoirs ever written. His career at the Trust started when he was in his twenties, but got interrupted by time in the army, which ended with him being invalided out. So he went back to the Trust, a disappointed man in his mid-thirties.

At this point, he had a double revelation: one religious, one architectural. As well as converting to Catholicism, he realised he had a ‘deep atavistic compassion for ancient architecture so vulnerable and transient’, and decided to devote his ‘energies and abilities, such as they were, to preserving the country houses of England’.

He believed that his mental faculties were better in his forties — when his hair was falling out and his libido was failing him — than they ever had been.

Milne was right; he was a late developer. But he was wrong to think of it as late. Different sorts of people realise their abilities at different stages of their lives. This is consistent with recent research on the ages at which different cognitive functions peak throughout our lives. (More on that below.)

This view of development is starting to become more widely appreciated. But it is by no means well established. In deeply meritocratic industries like tech I suspect it’s easier to get a break despite your background. Organisations like Lambda school show that. But my experience of working in the talent attraction industry is that, on the whole, companies want to hire based on proven experience, rather than potential.

We are not very good at knowing how to assess people who have not yet succeeded but who might become impressive later on. Why do some people show no sign of their later  promise, and how can we think about the lives of those late bloomers who had precarious journeys to their eventual flourishing?

This is not something unique to one profession or period of time. It is becoming much more recognised that some people bloom later for inherent reasons, not just because of external circumstances. We ought to find this less remarkable than we do — and feel less of an instinct to explain it. It is, in fact, quite normal.

Biography can be a way of helping us to see the variations of when people excel. And writing biography explicitly about late bloomers can help us to think differently about how we assess and define development. We need more lives of people who wouldn’t have been picked out as successes earlier on. And we need to understand those people better and find other ways of framing them than as simply ‘late’.

The people I am interested in are usually opsimaths. That strange, attractive word Lees Milne used to describe late bloomers really means someone who learns throughout their life, or who begins learning later on. Rather than a Romantic idea of genius, the inward lamp that burns intently from a young age, this is a gentler, more perpetual idea of development.

In his short autobiographical essay, David Hume said about his life:

‘In 1734, I went to Bristol, with some recommendations to several eminent merchants, but in a few months found that scene totally unsuitable to me. I went over to France, with a view of prosecuting my studies in a country retreat; and I there laid that plan of life, which I have steadily and successfully pursued.’

‘Steady and successful’ is a template we often feel the need to explain as late or slow. But for many people, the reasons for flourishing later on are not complicated, they are natural. A growing area of study suggests all sorts of reasons for this. 

A famous article by Malcolm Gladwell, about the story of late blooming writer Ben Fountain, started a new trend of thinking differently about success. Gladwell cited an economist at the University of Chicago, David Galenson, who has studied creativity. He uses poets like Frost, Williams, and Stevens to show that, contrary to common belief, writing lyric poetry is not a talent reserved to young people. His work has a neat comparison between Picasso, who produced masterpieces from a young age, and Cézanne whose best work was done at retirement age. 

Galenson points to the imprecise goals of late bloomers, who work over things again and again, refining them as they go. This is the opposite of the prodigal Mozart types who seem to emerge as complete talents when they are in their late teens or early twenties. Picasso was ready to express his vision young; Cézanne came to his vision through repeated attempts at expressing it.

Other books are following the way. Range by David Epstein argues that you don’t have to specialise early to succeed — quite the opposite. Generalists who specialise later on can be more successful. More recently, Late Bloomers by Rich Karlgaard (US link) is a review of the new research in neuroscience that makes late blooming seem quite normal. It is not always rational to expect great things exclusively from the young. Ageing often means advancing.

Scientific work has shown that while fluid intelligence declines relatively young, concrete intelligence continues to strengthen until much later in our lives. The distinction between fluid and concrete intelligence (the difference is between dealing with novel problems vs being expert in something) is a blunt one. But it does help us see clearly that we are better at the sort of thinking that assimilates and responds to new issues better when we are young. This is, for example, why poets are often very young but few historians are.

However, we now know that people peak cognitively for different abilities at different ages. Hidden within the averages above are some significant variations. Raw speed in processing information appears to peak around age 18 or 19. The ability to recognise faces improves until your early 30s, as does visual short term memory. Evaluating other people’s emotional states peaks in your 40s or 50s. Vocabulary can peak as late as your 60s or 70s. You can see from this table that there is considerable range in when various functions peak.

One study has concluded that ‘conceptual poets, conceptual novelists, experimental poets, and experimental novelists… do their best work at ages 28, 34, 38, and 44, respectively.’ This mirrors the fluid/concrete intelligence finding. Conceptual artists are like Picasso and Mozart, born with a vision. Experimental artists are like Cézanne and Beethoven, they develop their abilities through practice.

I’m not sure how useful it is to average out things like this for creative artists, but it certainly shows that we ought to be much more open to the idea that people’s best work can be done at any stage of their lives, even if they are doing highly unique, incommensurable work. The fact that Jane Austen wrote her best novels before she was twenty five tells us nothing about how we ought to assess other novelists’ lives. Our expectations of when authors will naturally start producing ought to be revised.

A similar result has been observed in entrepreneurs. The paper ‘Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship’ found that, contrary to popular assumptions, ‘The mean founder age for the 1 in 1,000 fastest growing new ventures is 45.’ Just like with poets and novelists, not all tech founders are young.

Scientific success has typically been associated with middle age, and in physics was thought to be strongly correlated with youth. Recent work has shown it to be evenly spread across people’s lives. As Jones, Reedy and Weinberg remind us, ‘Copernicus completed his revolutionary theory of planetary motion around age 60.’ The difference between conceptual and experimental thinkers we saw in writers is also seen in Nobel prize winning scientists, with the average age for empirical winners being older than that of theoretical winners.

A study of when scientists publish their highest impact work found that scientists are just as likely to do their best work old as young.

We find that the highest-impact work in a scientist’s career is randomly distributed within her body of work. That is, the highest-impact work can be, with the same probability, anywhere in the sequence of papers published by a scientist—it could be the first publication, could appear mid-career, or could be a scientist’s last publication. This random-impact rule holds for scientists in different disciplines, with different career lengths, working in different decades, and publishing solo or with teams and whether credit is assigned uniformly or unevenly among collaborators.

The important conditions for scientific success are a combination of ability and environment, luck, and, importantly, persistence. Once scientists have prestige and tenure, they tend to produce less work. The ones who keep going are the ones who bloom late. Nobel prizes are awarded for work done at all ages.

Luck is essential. Choosing the right project at the right time matters. But once that opportunity comes along you also need a series of other factors in place.

Turning that fortuitous choice into an influential, widely recognized contribution depended on another element, one the researchers called Q.

Q could be translated loosely as “skill,” and most likely includes a broad variety of factors, such as I.Q., drive, motivation, openness to new ideas and an ability to work well with others. Or, simply, an ability to make the most of the work at hand: to find some relevance in a humdrum experiment, and to make an elegant idea glow.

When you get your break is just as important as whether or not you have the abilities to make the most of it. Importantly, the Q factor, life long persistence, and luck, are independent of each other. Highly productive people who lack Q will not be successful, for example, in the way that people with both are.

What we see here is that lifelong learning is essential. Late bloomers in this model are really opsimaths who got a break.

There are many lives we can look to as illustrations of these principles. Biography has been through phases of applying other models in the past. Masses of psychobiographies are gathering dust in libraries the world over, valiant attempts to stretch out the details of people lives to fit Freudian theories. More usefully, Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose tells the stories of well known historical figures in order to illustrate a feminist argument about marriage. This is a less forced, more factual approach that yields provocative results. We might take it as a model for telling the lives of opsimaths.

This is not about a crude application of empirical work (akin to a posthumous medical diagnosis, for example) but a way of reframing how we interpret people’s lives as an example for future opsimaths. Rather than try and use biography to demonstrate these theories specifically, we ought to be looking generally for some core qualities in the lives of late bloomers and lifelong learners.

• People with a combination of Q, productivity, and luck

• People who continuously learn and/or adapt

• People are are ‘experimental’ rather than ‘conceptual’

• People who persist

Elsewhere, I have called this ‘The Fitzgerald Rule’: You spot talent by looking at what people persist at, not what persistently happens to them.

Taking the ideas of cognitive peaks, fluid and concrete intelligence, the role of luck and persistence in scientific success, and other recent empirical findings, we should be able to start re-thinking how we write the lives of late bloomers. We might start by dropping the ‘late’ designator all together.

Rather than thinking of people as late bloomers, people who were in some way held back or prevented from success, we would be better off seeing them as opsimaths: smart people who carried on learning and achieved things when the timing and circumstances were right.

Biography’s contribution to this is to contextualise and show the ways in which talent can express itself seemingly out of nowhere. Tracing the factors that were in place before the biographical subject made their achievement, using the general factors detailed from recent empirical research, might offer a useful approach.

These are some examples of how we might think of some well known historical figures as late bloomers, and where we might start to lay the emphasis differently.

• Samuel Johnson would have been an unknown hack writer if he had died before he was forty, perhaps remembered by specialists as having been at work on a dictionary. Like many writers, he then had an intense period of creativity, an extraordinary fifteen year period in his forties and fifties. He then became the dominant literary figure of his day, having produced the Dictionary, The Rambler, Rasselas, and Lives of the Poets, as well as his edition of Shakespeare. His accumulation of knowledge, which began from a remarkably young age, didn’t make him a young success. But it meant that when a group of booksellers wanted to find someone to write a Dictionary, Johnson’s network, his reputation for scholarship and philology, and his prodigious knowledge made him the perfect candidate. Johnson’s early life was famously given vastly less space in Boswell’s biography than the period after his achievements. His life has some interesting parallels to another opsimath and lexicographer, James Murray, the first editor of the OED.

•  Johnson’s biographer Boswell was another late bloomer. Until he wrote the Life of Johnson in his fifties he was something of a joke among his contemporaries; he was also a failed barrister. He was closely mentored on his project by Johnson in an indirect way, and by his publisher more directly after Johnson’s death. There were many occasions when he more or less quit. The Victorians used to think Boswell was an idiot who got lucky by meeting Johnson. In fact, detailed work by scholars showed that his phenomenal memory and unique system of taking notes means he (very loosely) fits the Q, productivity, luck pattern.

• Thomas Bayes, whose statistical theory of probability, produced as a riposte to Hume’s theory of epistemology, is now the basis for many of the algorithms used in modern technology, was used as part of the Enigma code breaking, and has been important to the way we approached the coronavirus pandemic. His work was found in his desk after he died. He was a Presbyterian minister who became interested in probability in the last decade of his life.

• Edward Jenner, a member of the gentry and a country doctor whose observation of local conditions and interest in variolation enabled him to invent the smallpox vaccine. He was 46 when the first vaccine was administered and 49 when his paper was published. By then he was successful and could have lived a comfortable life. Perseverance and long standing interest led him to his phenomenally important discovery. He is less well known as the man who discovered how cuckoos displaced eggs in other birds’ nests, and was not believed until the twentieth century. His close observation skills were the key to both of his discoveries.

• Charles Darwin, a classic opsimath who published his last book in his eighties which remained a major reference work for many years, was the model of the scientific pattern described above: naturally intelligent, highly lucky throughout his life, and incredibly persistent in the face of a hostile (or worse, indifferent) intellectual climate, and terrible health. The role of luck in his story is astonishing, including the escapade of nearly being taken off the Beagle voyage at least once. His delay in publishing his idea meant it was thoroughly supported and defensible with a mass of research. He is a classic example of the Q, productivity, luck model. He had the basic idea of evolution young, but he did the impactful work much later on, after a famous delay. He also produced works on barnacles, worms, and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, works that remained significant, if not the standards, for many years after his death.

• Benjamin Disraeli, whose antics during the 1825 financial crash left him with debts that burdened the rest of his life, and arguably coloured his early career decisions. The first half of his career was a disaster and his reputation was fairly low. A combination of talent, luck, persistence, and sheer audacity meant he was able to take his opportunity when it finally came along. The number of outrageous things he did in his youth would be enough to ruin the careers of half a dozen good politicians today. His motto, Forti nihil difficile, means ‘To the brave nothing is difficult’. He could easily have retired at sixty and become an anecdotal footnote: outrageous novelist who was once Chancellor of the Exchequer.

• Anne Clough, the first president of Newnham college, had been home educated and left with an interest in reform. She used to get up at 6am, ahead of the household, to teach herself Ancient Greek. Her brother, the famous poet, died young and she looked after his children. She started a pilot school aged 47, and four years later Henry Sidgwick invited her to be president of Newnham. She knew him through her brother. It was the culmination of a lifelong ambition that she had worked at slowly and persistently.

• Bonar Law showed very little outward sign of moving towards a political career, despite being highly ambitious, until he was elected at forty. He became Tory leader with no cabinet experience ten years later, showing his political cunning during the campaign. Although a short lived Prime Minister, he took over the party at its lowest ebb, won a big election, and saw the Irish treaty through Parliament. English politics is full of famous rivals who might have been better working together — Pitt and Fox, Disraeli and Gladstone, Thatcher and Kinnock. Bonar Law was disciplined enough to be the junior partner in Lloyd George’s coalition for the second half of the war and for four years afterwards. He could have been Prime Minister but worked for the good of the country. His achievements are bigger than they look. He was deeply ambitious but spent his life before the age of forty in a very strange and unique sort of preparation for political life. His exceptional memory was honed working in iron trading in Glasgow and his oratory was learned at the Glasgow Parliamentary Society and in the Bankruptcy Courts. His hard won, outsider status, his stoic, hard working temperament, and his age contributed to his political patience, the cornerstone of his success.

• Alexander Fleming was an outstanding researcher with a good record, but like most scientists with nothing historic to his name. It was his unique combination of excellence, persistence, and sheer good luck that meant he discovered penicillin. It was also thanks to his untidiness, another underrated quality in opsimaths. Other people did the subsequent work to make penicillin into a useable drug, but without Fleming the history of medicine would be very different. He is a model story of the power of oblique success.

• Penelope Fitzgerald lived a remarkably difficult life, crowded with misfortune, which showed no flowering of her early promise — a double first from Oxford and a prodigy of the famously literary Knox family. She published her first book in her late fifties and carried on until she was eighty, producing some of the finest novels of the twentieth century. She had a genius for writing about failures and misfits. One version of her life could be that marriage, children, poverty, and her husband’s alcoholism held her back from writing. But she had her children in her thirties and did little to no creative writing before that. Importantly, when she worked as a teacher in middle age she gave herself a second education in European culture, literature, and languages, including widespread travel. She needed the peace that came with later life to write, but she also needed the accumulated experience of her life and her learning to be the sort of novelist she was. Her work is deeply European in form, content, and informed by deep research.

• Wendy Cope  was depressed from the age of three, always assumed she would be a failure, and while working as a primary school teacher spent over a decade in psychotherapy, attending Saturday sessions in the early years as things were so bad. She eventually went to poetry workshops with Blake Morrison and when she was forty published a book that has sold something like half a million copies to date. She is perhaps the most popular British poet since Larkin. Her time as a primary school teacher engaged her with arts and creativity in a way that her earlier life and education had not. She has been influenced by A.E.Housman, another exemplary opsimath.

Oblique success and lifelong learning are essential parts of many of these stories. And the list could go on. Warren Fisher spent sixteen years at the Inland Revenue, not his first choice, before becoming a long lasting Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, and the first head of the civil service. Lord Melbourne was an otherwise unsuccessful Prime Minister who was able to provide important, if not always correct, advice to Queen Victoria when she became queen. Henry Rolls founded his famous company late in life. The writer Oliver Goldmsith is acknowledged as a late bloomer in The Life of Johnson. Charles Spearman spent many years in the army before starting a PhD aged 34. He later did seminal work on the theory of intelligence, creating the theory of general intelligence. Winston Churchill is so famous a failure there is an entire book about it (Churchill: A Study in Failure (US link)). Julia Child didn’t graduate from cookery school until she was in her forties. Mary Wesley published her first book aged seventy. She sold millions of copies and produced a best seller a year for the next decade. Isaiah Berlin considered himself to be a late developer, coming to the history of ideas in the middle of his career. Thomas Hobbes didn’t begin to study maths or science until he was middle aged. Quentin Skinner has said, ‘This sudden awakening, coming as it did when Hobbes was in his forties, entitles him to be regarded as one of the latest of all the late developers in the history of philosophy.’  I would, of course, prefer to think of him as an opsimath: he didn’t start late, he just carried on.

There are examples, too, of people whose achievements are less acclaimed like William Dawson who was a shoemaker in Hertfordshire, eventually taught himself to become a teacher, and was learning Anglo Saxon at the age of eighty. Among his pupils was one of the early students at Newnham College, Cambridge, who studied with Anne Clough. There is a trend now for opsimath clubs, where people who are learning late in life can get together and share their common interest.

This begins to provide new models for thinking about late bloomers biographically. Do they really need to be explained as ‘late’? Doesn’t that rather assume that successful people tend to show their promise early on? There are many fascinating lives in all spheres who would benefit from this sort of biographical treatment. Hetty Saunders' recent biography of J.A. Baker My House of Sky: The Life of J A Baker is an excellent short case study in how to write about such a subject.

As well as offering a new way of thinking about biography, this is relevant to businesses and people interested in spotting talent. Looking for signs of promise is all too often something we default to in young people, assessing mature people on their experiences so far, rather than the future, unexpressed promise that might be just as strong within a forty or fifty year old as in a twenty year old — if not stronger.

Some of the people listed above have already been profiled on this blog. Some of the others will be the focus of upcoming posts.

James Boswell, wonderful failure

Samuel Johnson, opsimath

Why did Wendy Cope start publishing so late?

How J.A. Baker became a great writer after showing no signs of talent for forty years

People who haven’t succeeded yet but maybe they will

Those of you who have been reading since the old blog will remember other posts about this topic, which you can find here.

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