Raye. Revenge of a late bloomer.

“It’s even harder to be brave alone.”

Last night, I said the next play for the Shakespeare book club was As You Like It. This is wrong. **The next play is Henry IV, part I**. Schedule here.

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Raye. Revenge of a late bloomer.

“Knowing what I know now, I would not have put pen to paper on a full album record deal.” That was what Raye, the singer songwriter, said in 2021, when her record company Polydor refused to release her first album. Raye had originally signed in 2014. But Raye’s singles hadn’t sold enough to reassure corporate decision makers. So they sat on her debut album for seven years.

After Raye tweeted about being locked into a deal where her work wouldn’t be released, Polydor freed her from the contract. She became an independent, self-funded artist, managed by her parents. It was a slow start.

Eighteen months ago she couldn’t sell a hundred tickets to a church concert. She still has a mortgage and does her own hair and make-up on tour to save money. But, last year, her single ‘Escapism’ went viral on TikTok and became a number one.

This weekend, Raye won a record six Brit awards, and she’s sold out the O2.

If you want to see the full power of Raye’s talent, try this video of her singing “Feeling Good”. As her exceptional set at the Brits showed, Raye has enormous range.

It seems obvious now that Raye is talented. Which raises the question, how could they possibly have missed that? Why, when her talent was spotted so early, did it take so long to flourish? If we understand that, it can help us think about how other talents can flourish, and the decisions we make in our own lives.

We can understand Raye by thinking of her as a late bloomer. It might seem wrong to think of a twenty-six-year-old as a late bloomer. But consider that musicians die in their late twenties and thirties at a higher rate than the rest of the population, probably because of the pressures of early fame. Adele was twenty for her first album. Taylor Swift was sixteen.

My definition of a late bloomer, though, is not based on age, but on the idea that some people succeed when no-one thought they could. That’s the case with Raye. She’s a late bloomer in the sense that she was signed at fourteen, but reached her mid-twenties before her work came out because the record company didn’t think she could make it.

While she worked for the record company, Raye was in a period of exploration. Aged 18, she had released several singles. In the next few years, she released several more, eventually peaking at number three on the charts. She was a well-regarded song writer too, providing lyrics for artists like Beyonce.

She experimented with a variety of genres. Maybe she was finding her voice, or maybe she found that earlier; but she was working across a great range: performing and writing in different modes. As she said in 2021, “I’ve done everything they asked — I switched genres, I worked 7 days a week…”

All late bloomers have this exploration stage. To succeed, they must switch to an exploit stage, where they can take what they learned in the exploration and make it productive. They have to stop exploring their options and start exploiting their talents.

And many, many factors can frustrate them in making that change. Before Katharine Graham, the woman who approved the release of the Pentagon Papers, became the CEO of the Washington Post Company, she was a bullied housewife. It took the tragic death by suicide of her husband to bring about the change she needed for her talents to flourish.

This happens again and again. Margaret Thatcher only became Leader of the Opposition, against the expectations of even her own strongest supporters, when all the other candidates dropped out. Vera Wang didn’t design wedding dresses until she had the dispiriting experience of shopping for her own—at a period when her life was in a dip and she had left her job. Ray Kroc was a fifty-three-year-old milkshake mixer salesman when he drove into the car park of a small family restaurant called McDonald’s.

What links them all is that they made the change, they switched—they chose to take a risk. All the experience they had accrued, the skills and knowledge, all the toughening up and resilience they had learned, became the basis of their success.

That’s what happened with Raye. There was a decisive moment of change when she switched from the record company to being an independent artist. It took courage to leave. But if she hadn’t gone, Raye would have been taking a major risk. Polydor had kept her trapped in the explore mode.

To have a hot streak, a burst of your best work, it’s the switch that is essential. Too much exploration and you end up as a dabbler, a dilettante. Too much exploitation can be boring: you don’t discover enough new information to do original work.

This is the finding of a large study of artists, filmmakers, and scientists, which found that it is not either exploration or exploitation alone that is critical to a hot streak: moving from explore to exploit is what matters. Making the switch means you can discover the most productive ideas and expand your creative possibilities.

Lots of other factors are needed too. Raye’s career with Polydor had brought her an audience and connections in the business. (Pop star Charli XCX recognised her talent, helped her make music videos, and encouraged her.) Networks are often the way late bloomers flourish. Most luck isn’t lucky: it’s the payoff of years of work. You don’t find yourself in the right place at the right time by accident.

Raye’s parents, who quit their jobs to be her managers, are late bloomers, too. “Both of their previous jobs make them ideal for the music industry,” she told the Times. “My mum’s seen it all in 30 years in mental health. My dad would go into companies, learn about them and set them goals. By fate, they’re brilliant for what I need.”

But none of that would have mattered if Raye hadn’t been prepared to dedicate herself to her work in a way that no-one else would—to walk away from the “safe” path. One of the most significant markers of her talent is that she could see how important that change was and that she had the guts to leave.

If you’re interested in late bloomers, you can find out more in my book Second Act. What Late Bloomers Can Teach You About Success And How to Change your Life. (US link)