Late Bloomers

Therefore, it is the thesis of my book – at this time in history when we overvalue early achievement so much – that we're wildly undervaluing the capabilities of most human beings.

Rachel Salaman: Now just to be clear, how is this different from the traditional progression of a career, where you start out in junior positions and then you progress slowly up the ranks to better jobs and more recognition of your talents in middle age?

Rich Karlgaard: Well everything today is more front-end loaded than it used to be. And I believe the reason that we put so much pressure on kids, teens and young adults to achieve big and achieve early is due to the nature of the economy today.

In the last 30 years, around the Western world and affluent nations and Asia, the most lucrative industries have been what I call the "algorithmic industries." They're software, the web, and high-end financial services. The employers in these fields recruit for how well you did on your SAT tests (that's a standardized test in the United States), particularly the Math portion of it.

They recruit on how "elite" the university you attended is, according to various rankings, and the kids who get jobs at Google or Facebook or Goldman Sachs today were prodigies: they achieved very big, they achieved very early, and they can prove it.

Whereas the people whose brains suddenly come together and people who find their inner motivation in their middle 20s or late 20s or 30s or 40s or 50s are kind of put off to the side – at least in this sorting mechanism that we've created over the last 30 years.

Rachel Salaman: And how big a problem is this, do you think?

Rich Karlgaard: Well, I think it's a huge problem. For every Mark Zuckerberg or some youthful prodigy who goes out and achieves very early, there are people a) who are left on the sidelines because their true skills and their deepest passions aren't surfaced by the sorting mechanism that we have today, and b) even some of the winners are left in a terrible state.

I talked to a woman named Carol Dweck, she wrote a book called "Mindset" in 2006. It was a big best seller in the United States, and I think around the world, and I said "Carol, what about the students you see at Stanford?" Stanford has a 3% admissions rate, anybody who gets into Stanford today could rightly be said as a winner in the early blooming sweepstakes; they've got great grades, great test scores, and they demonstrated leadership in some extracurricular activity.

She leaned forward on her table with a look of horror and she said, "The kids I'm seeing at Stanford today are ‘exhausted' and ‘brittle', they don't want to mar their perfect records."

I wouldn't call that a win. What she was describing was exactly a fixed mindset, 18 and 19 year olds who are exhausted from the long march of trying to prove themselves to somebody else's standards.

Rachel Salaman: This might sound like an obvious question, but why does this all matter?

Rich Karlgaard: Well, boy, if you look in the United States, and I don't know the figures in the UK or around the world, but when you look at depression, anxiety and suicide as markers of dysfunction and poor health, they have been rising very rapidly in the United States over the last 20 years for teens and young adults.

So the pressure cooker that young adults feel today, that Millennials and Gen Zs behind them feel today, is not producing the kind of adults that we want. And this is all the more tragic because if you take care of yourself, and if you stay mentally engaged, you're going to have, more than likely, a long and healthy life.

So to have a fixed mindset at age 18 or 19, when you may very well live to be 90 or 100, as Millennials and Gen Zs who take care of themselves probably will, is really a prescription for misery, depression, underachievement and all of that.

You know what, none of it conforms with what neuroscience tells us. Neuroscience is very clear – particularly a 2015 study in the United States, done by Harvard and MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital, that looked at the different decades of our lives and what our brains do uniquely well in the different decades of our lives. So sure enough in our 20s we're really good at rapid synaptic processing speed, working memory.

That's all terrific if you're going to be a software coder under a time clock, but it's only in our 30s, 40s and 50s that we begin to develop deeper skills of pattern recognition, empathy, communication, leadership skills, and it's in our 60s and 70s where we develop this kind of deeper wisdom.

So you think about these unfolding gifts over the course of our lives, and sure we give up some things (we'll never be as good at rapid synaptic processing speed in our 40s as we were our 20s) but we don't fall off a cliff. In fact, we lose by something like 0.4 percent per year in that particular category, meanwhile we're gaining all kinds of other, richer skills.

Rachel Salaman: I suppose some people might say that an early achiever could achieve in a certain career or a certain type of job and then they might stop, take some time out and do something else. So I'm wondering, why is it helpful to see success through the lens of when we achieve it rather than focusing on the quality of the success, regardless of our age?

Rich Karlgaard: Well that's a great question, Rachel. First of all, I want to be very clear that I have nothing against people who achieve early. They deserve applause, they deserve recognition, and then, if they want to take time out and figure out their next stage of life, that's all good.

What really alarms me today is how we undervalue people who didn't make that first demonstration of early achievement. And how they are kind of considered second-rate people today.

When I started this book five years ago, I really couldn't find a solid definition of what it meant to be a late bloomer. To the degree you picked in the scientific literature, it was almost described as a problem, some dysfunction that was holding people back. Well that's a terrible way to look at people whose brains might develop later. Let me tell you a story that is embarrassing for me but I hope it inspires some other people.

At age 25 I could not hold an adult job. I mean, really could not hold any kind of responsible job. I bounced around, feeding myself with minimum wage jobs, like security guard, temporary typist and dishwasher. One night, when I was 25 years old, I was a security guard in a truck yard in San Jose, California, and I was making my rounds and I heard this barking across the fence and in another yard. I swung my flashlight around and it was a Rottweiler. And I concluded that their security was a dog. So at aged 25 my professional colleague was a dog.

Months later Steve Jobs, also 25, would take Apple public and be a center millionaire – you know, a billionaire in today's dollars. And I thought, "You know, pal, you've really fallen a long way here." But there's really nothing that I could have done. I was very hard on myself, I loathed myself. I mean, I looked in the mirror and I thought, "What on earth has become of you, Rich?"

It wasn't until my late 20s when, by way of being a temporary typist, I got an opportunity to be a technical writer of a research institute. And this was the first job in my life that was an adult job which I was capable of handling, and that was around 26, 27.

Then things began to fall in place, and as I look back I see that really there's almost nothing that I could have done to accelerate that process, I was just one of those natural neurological late bloomers.

Now I think that when that happened to me we didn't have Facebook, Instagram (we didn't have all of these things that kind of mark us and brand us and create an image for us that is hard to escape) – it was easier to reinvent yourself before social media and all of these early blooming pressures.

Rachel Salaman: Now some people listening might think, "Well 26, 27, that still sounds quite early." Are you likening that beginning of your "blooming" that you felt when you were in your late 20s, are you likening that to someone blooming in their 50s, or is that a completely different thing?

Rich Karlgaard: Well I think – I say in my book, Late Bloomers – that we have multiple opportunities to bloom. I don't want to go into gender categories, but women in particular [are late bloomers]. Just from observation, and I think the research would back it, just simply because in most Western societies the woman who bears the children tends to be the one, if anyone, to stop out, or to halfway stop out, or to otherwise put their career on hold.

An example of an early bloomer that I wrote about was Carol Fishman Cohen, who was college president as an undergrad, she went to Harvard Business School, then she became an investment banker in Los Angeles and made partner. Now all of these are tremendous markers of early blooming, she was an early bloomer by any definition.

In her 30s she stopped out, had four children, spent 12 years out of the workforce raising her children. And then, when she got back in, she was stunned to find that nobody wanted her and that her confidence was shattered. And it wasn't shattered over her capability, it was shattered over little barriers that she had a hard time overcoming.

The fact that people were using workflow apps today, that they were communicating in a different way, that the vibe was different. And she knew there must be other people like her, so she started a company called iRelaunch that looks at parents who stopped out and are coming back into the workforce in their 30s and 40s and getting them up to speed.

One of the main things that she found is, don't try to pursue the career you left five or 10 or 15 years ago, because your brain has changed, your motivations have changed. Map what you're doing today with your deepest passions and sense of mission, but also your deepest capabilities, which now have shifted because the brain evolves over time.

So I think that's a wonderful story of somebody who was once an early bloomer and then became a second act late bloomer. So that's an example, Rachel, I think, of the people who have multiple opportunities to bloom.

Rachel Salaman: Now one thing I noticed in your book is that you imply that people who aren't early achievers are automatically late bloomers. But some people never bloom at any age, should we also acknowledge them in this discussion?

Rich Karlgaard: I'm more optimistic than that, I don't want to give up on anybody. I think that everybody has the capacity to bloom, and if you define blooming – and since nobody really in the academic world had defined late blooming, I decided to go ahead and define it myself – I believe it is that intersection of your deepest passions.

Now I'm kind of skeptical of the word passion, because you can be passionate about a rock band or a TV show or something like that and it's all ephemeral. So I almost like to think in terms of mission, because mission is the passion you'd be willing to sacrifice for, you'd be willing to really do hard work for, suffer the slings and arrows along the way.

So it's that (call it what you want: deep passion, sense of mission) with your truest native gifts, whatever they are. I believe that the vast majority have that in us, but if we're buried under such layers of disrespect, and never being recognized, and never having the chance to unleash our latent gifts, then yes: it's possible people won't bloom, they'll fall into depression, they'll fall into just kind of a "screw it" attitude, and I think that's tragic. It's tragic for individuals and I think it's tragic for society.

Rachel Salaman: And of course the workplace has a role to play here, and in your book you say that age diversity within workforces is a powerful weapon of creativity and productivity, but that it's largely untapped. What would organizations gain from hiring more older workers?

Rich Karlgaard: You think about companies that employ people and there's often a career arc. If you're doing well you rise up the career arc, you get higher titles, higher pay checks, but at some point you have to admit that everybody peaks at some point. They peak if nothing else in their willingness to work sacrificial hours.

Then the consideration should be, "What do people have to offer past their peak?" Assuming that they still want to make a contribution. And that's what led me to propose this idea of a "career arc." That past your peak you have a lot to offer, but you're going to have to give up a significant part of your paycheck, maybe keep healthcare, and agree that you now have more of a coaching and consultative role.

I think it's very powerful when you take some young, really ambitious, focused young people, who really know technology and really understand the way demographics are changing, really understand where the trends are that will become big, and you have somebody who's managed projects before, knows quite a bit about HR, knows quite a bit about human interaction... and I think what stops companies from [doing] that is that, unless you acknowledge that there's an arc, then the older employee becomes very turf defensive. They tend to bash the young people simply because they're afraid of being displaced.

If you can take out that fear of being displaced and say, "Hey, you're now at part of your career where you're a consultant and a coach, and we've got to make way for the young talent coming up." I think you've got a magical combination.

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Rachel Salaman: In the book you devote a whole chapter to some unusual advice to encourage late bloomers, which is: quit. So could you tell us what you mean by this and why it's a good idea?

Rich Karlgaard: Well I think popular culture in affluent, ambitious, capitalistic nations (like the US and UK and so forth), have put out this idea, you know, captured by a cliché, "winners never quit and quitters never win." You must stick to something to the very end. You know, maybe in the UK you'll invoke Churchill's name, or something like that.

And yet, when you look at entrepreneurs, the successful ones, they're quitting all the time. Look at the businesses that Richard Branson has quit, Virgin Cola, Virgin Brides, many others.

Richard Branson knows that there's always an optimal use of his time, his talent and his treasure, or his money, and it may not be in keeping to... You know, trying to keep kicking the same dog over and over hoping the dog will revive – it may be [better] simply saying, "Look, we tried that, we gave it a good shot, let's move to an adjacent space, or an entirely different space, and give it a go."

So when business people do that, we applaud them for their flexibility and vision. If we see a military leader doing a strategic retreat, because it's a hopeless situation and they're going to lose a terrible number of lives by continuing to pursue something, we applaud them for their flexible tactics. And yet, when we talk to people, and particularly young people, it's this, "You can't ever quit," kind of a thing. Well why can't you?

None of us wants to become a serial quitter, I don't think, we don't want to encourage people to quit at the first sign of adversity, but at some point quitting is a good thing.

Rachel Salaman: And it's specific advice for late bloomers because they might have a limited time left? Or is there another reason why you included it specifically in this book?

Rich Karlgaard: Late bloomers often need to find their own path.

In fact, I think the major message of the book is that if society has created this conveyor belt particularly designed for early achievers (how well you do on standardized tests, how high are your grades, and are they in advanced placement courses, and are you getting into the right college, and are you getting the right job just out of school – that's the conveyor belt that we've constructed in affluent societies today), the late bloomer needs to say, "Look, I'm not just going to try to belatedly pick up all the skills that have rewarded early bloomers, because now I'm playing on somebody else's turf and I'll never catch up. What I need to do is quit the conveyor belt, and begin to find my own paths of discovery."

You asked the question earlier, will all potential late bloomers in fact bloom? No they won't. But I think their best shot at blooming, my best shot at blooming, was to find my own paths of discovery and try things, and quit things when they didn't work, but keep moving forward, finding that path that is our own unique path that was seemingly made for us.

Rachel Salaman: Well another controversial opinion in your book is that self-doubt is actually a "secret weapon" for blooming, you say. What do you mean by that?

Rich Karlgaard: Yes. Well first of all people who are late bloomers, or potential late bloomers – that is people who aren't acknowledged early – tend to have more self-doubt than early bloomers. It's just sort of a natural response, right? That if people aren't acknowledging you and recognizing you, you begin to wonder if the problem is with you.

When I say self-doubt is a secret weapon, it's how you use self-doubt. Self-doubt is information. When you feel self-doubt, step aside, take a deep breath, don't imagine for a minute that self-doubt and your own self-worth are in any way connected – they're not.

Look at self-doubt as information, "Why am I feeling this doubt? Well maybe I'm not quite on the right path, maybe I need to prepare a little more, maybe I need to look at this problem from a different perspective, maybe I need help."

If you can use self-doubt as that kind of a tool, it's like an annoying friend that shows up and delivers information you don't want to hear at the moment, but that annoying friend might have information of value. You listen to it (you listen to it in a way that doesn't undermine your self-worth, that's key) and then you say, "OK, what did I learn from this bout of self-doubt, what is it telling me exactly?"

If you can learn to do that, then self-doubt goes from being this trigger of depression and anxiety to a tool. Maybe not a tool that you particularly welcome at any moment, but it's a tool nonetheless.

Rachel Salaman: And I suppose the idea is: because you're a late bloomer, you might be that much more mature at harnessing the self-doubt and not letting it get you down like you might have earlier on.

Rich Karlgaard: Yes. You know, there are so many tricks to using self-doubt as an advantage.

And I don't mean tricks in the sense that they're really not backed by science. Everything I did in this book…. The reason it took five years to write is that I wanted everything unimpeachably backed by what the research was saying, and the research offers some tips that are really kind of delightful when you think about self-doubt.

For example, if you're facing a situation that is causing you anxiety – you have to get up and give a speech, and you don't often get to give speeches, for example, or you're doing a job interview – as you're thinking about it, simply by referring to yourself in the third person ("Why is Rachel feeling anxiety about this?" as opposed to "Why am I feeling anxiety about this?") there's research around that that shows that the outcomes are a lot better if you can refer to yourself in the third person, because what it does is cause a little distance.

You wouldn't heap scorn and pressure on your friends if they felt self-doubt, you would coach them through a situation. It's natural that we treat our friends and our family and our colleagues in a way that's better than we treat ourselves, because we make the mistake of letting self-doubt creep into our self-worth and then we're shattered.

So how you refer to yourself is seemingly a kind of little surface trick, but the research says it's a very powerful tool.

Rachel Salaman: Another tip in your book continues your flower metaphor, you advise us to "repot ourselves in a better garden" if we're slow to grow. What kind of "repotting" can help, especially for people who may not want to make a major move?

Rich Karlgaard: Repotting is this idea that there's an environment, a set of friends, a company culture, all of those things that you live with every day, some of them will nourish you more than others. And repotting is this decision that you make that you're going to find that pot of soil that is for you. Where the culture… It could be the company culture, it could be the political culture, it could be any kind of culture, but cultures where you feel at home and you feel like you can be yourself and you feel like you can thrive.

Some people need a radical repotting. They've come from a violent or dysfunctional family, or a community that is "on the skids" and it's going to take a while to work out of that situation, or a horrible employer – those are situations that call for radical repotting.

But most of us live somewhere in the middle. We get stuck where the job is "meh." You know, the friends save us from boredom but they don't really nourish our highest aspirations in a way that we'd really want. You know, what are we to do then, particularly if we're dependent on our paycheck?

It's one thing when you're young to go out and try new cities, new friends, new careers. It's another thing when you're old and retired and may have the luxury of doing that too, but what if you're in mid-life and you depend on your paycheck?

There's a real powerful tool here, and that is to find support groups. You know, the best kind of support group is people who are like you, in the sense that they aspire in the way you do, they have concerns in the way you do, they have fears in the way you do, things are standing in the way for them as they are for you, but they're not your best friends, they're not your closest confidants and they're not your family.

Because oftentimes, over the course of many years, we develop such preconceived roles that we play, with the people closest around us, it's hard to break out of that. It's hard to go to somebody that you've been friends with for 10 years and tell them something radical about yourself. It's easier to do that when you're in a support group.

Support groups can be church-based, they can be organizations like Toastmasters, they can be addiction recovery groups, 12-step groups, they can be all of those things. But the idea is that you surround yourself with people who are on roughly the same journey, with roughly the same set of challenges as you, and that's a wonderful way to start thinking outside of the box, repotting options for your life.

Rachel Salaman: So finally, looking more broadly, what would help redress the balance between early achievement and late blooming so that individuals and society benefit?

Rich Karlgaard: Well I think there are several models out there, Rachel, in the world that are worth emulating. Finland just happened to pop up at the top of the happiest country to live in in the most recent survey that came out within the month, and one thing that Finland does really well is that it starts children in school at aged 7 and they don't really dive into reading and writing and maths until they're 7.

So they're letting kids be kids, they're not forcing them onto this conveyor belt of early achievement that right from the get-go, the kid who's dyslexic, the kid who has ADHD, I mean, right from the get-go kids like that fall off the conveyor belt. They develop this idea that somehow they're inferior people – that's the danger of training people to certain metrics at such an early age.

Another idea that I came away believing was very powerful is this idea of gap years. I believe everybody should have the opportunity to go to college, that doesn't mean I believe that everybody should go to college.

Some people should go off on an adventure, as long as your parents aren't mindlessly writing checks to them. If their adventure is self-supported, they will learn so much: they will learn about themselves, they will learn confidence in themselves and being able to survive.

I came away from this book a proponent of national service. It could be military service, but a lot of people reject the idea of serving in the military, so it could be national service of a different sort. But when you look at countries like Singapore or Israel or Sweden or Switzerland, the outcome for their young adults is much better than it is for the US and the UK. It's measured by drunkenness, crime, all of those sorts of young adult dysfunctions.

Then finally, I think we need to revive the idea of skilled trades. In the United States it's a scandal that only one out of 20 public high schools have, what we used to call in my day "shop class" but it's really a path for skilled trades. Because there are so many people out there, and I think boys in particular who have rejected school (because they have ADHD, they can't sit still, they've found other forms of stimulation like computer games), people need to know that they can go out and be a welder or a carpenter, and actually make a decent income.

Not all of these jobs are disappearing into software, I think that's a myth, and at any age they can say, "Hey, I've had enough of that, I've saved up some money, by the way. Now I'm going to go back and get a college degree and, by the way, I'm not going to waste my time because I now know what I want to do. You know, having been a welder I now want to go into industrial engineering."

It's a very practical focus, having seen the way the world really works and employment really works, so I think that should be encouraged too. Then, as I've talked about, I think this idea that we should think about career arcs. And in the United States, HR departments and legal departments inside of companies make that difficult to do, because they're afraid that the older employee will say that they were bullied into it for a lower pay check and that's age discrimination. And I just think we have to find a new way of negotiating the downside of the arc path for older employees.

Rachel Salaman: Rich Karlgaard, thanks very much for joining us today.

Rich Karlgaard: Thank you so much, Rachel.

The name of Rich's book again is "Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement."

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.