In this week’s New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell looks at the (unfortunate) cultural phenomenon of equating genius with precocity. There’s been some talk of this recently, mainly in terms of economist David Galenson’s work, as well as a lecture given to the Association For Psychological Science by Gladwell in 2006. A high point of the argument:
On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith. (Let’s just be thankful that Cézanne didn’t have a guidance counsellor in high school who looked at his primitive sketches and told him to try accounting.) Whenever we find a late bloomer, we can’t but wonder how many others like him or her we have thwarted because we prematurely judged their talents. But we also have to acccept that there’s nothing we can do about it. How can we ever know which of the failures will end up blooming?
Also listen to Gladwell remark on the differences between artistic prodigies and late bloomers.