How to be a late bloomer
What did you do today to make that tomorrow possible?
Late bloomers don’t often know what they’re preparing for. They work blindly towards their goals. Their career paths are meandering, exploratory, restricted, or full of failure. They learn in this phase, developing the skills and knowledge they will use later, but they don’t always have an end point in mind.
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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I didn't know this about Vera Wang (I don't like wedding dresses) but how fascinating. I've been a late bloomers all my life, still am at 55, and much of what you say here resonates deeply.
This stuff is so fascinating.
At the beginning you say that late bloomers often don’t know what they’re preparing for and work blindly towards their goals, but the advice you distil from Audrey Sutherland and Chris Gardner seems more deterministic: you need a goal and you need to ask yourself what’s the next step.
Looking at all your examples though, are you saying it’s less about the specific goal, and more about the style of living within a life where you’ll inevitably have some goals? I struggle to put a word to it: an openness perhaps? An outwardness? With Audrey Sutherland and Chris Gardner, for example, it’s not specifically what they achieve that I think worth emulating (I want to be neither a stockbroker nor a kayaker), but more how they achieve it, within the context of their lives. It’s like there’s a freedom there despite the fact they had enormous challenges and constraints.
It feels to me like in all the examples you give, the people are driven, but not necessarily driven by a single ‘thing’ that would define them, rather they are driven to explore – with some intensity – what they find before them. And so when new opportunities arrive, they do them, they know what to do next. That’s not to say they knew what would work. They could never have known that. But it’ll turn out in the retelling that’s what it was. And of course, we hear their stories and love them. I’d be tempted to call that some form of virtue, but I’m not sure that’s right.