David Brooks wrote a wonderful article for The Atlantic last year on the idea of “late bloomers” and why they succeed later in life, especially in comparison to the more popular notion of “early bloomers” who experience their success at a young age. (Apple News+ link.)

Brooks leads with a story about Paul Cézanne, who achieved success late in his life and career, and cites other well-known figures with similar “delayed” success (Morgan Freeman and Colonel Harland Sanders, for example). He uses them as a springboard to explore why some people “peak” later. He writes:

It turns out that late bloomers are not simply early bloomers on a delayed timetable—they didn’t just do the things early bloomers did but at a later age. Late bloomers tend to be qualitatively different, possessing a different set of abilities that are mostly invisible to or discouraged by our current education system.

Brooks identifies eight traits “that tend to distinguish late bloomers from early bloomers.” All resonated with me—these five especially so—each of which I might immodestly attribute to myself, to varying degrees (but that’s a topic for a future article!):

• Intrinsic motivation.

People driven by intrinsic motivation […] are bad at paying attention to what other people tell them to pay attention to.

[…]

But such people can be great at paying attention to things that do interest them. The intrinsically motivated have a strong need for autonomy. They are driven by their own curiosity, their own obsessions […].

He also writes that intrinsically motivated people:

[…] are self-directed and often obsessed, burying themselves deep into some subject or task. They find learning about a subject or doing an activity to be their own reward, so they are less likely to cut corners.

• “Diversive curiosity.”

Many late bloomers endure a brutal wandering period, as they cast about for a vocation.

[…]

During these early periods, late bloomers try and then quit so many jobs that the people around them might conclude that they lack resilience. But these are exactly the years when the late bloomers are developing what psychologists call “diversive curiosity”—the ability to wander into a broad range of interests in a manner that seems to have no rhyme or reason.

[…]

They walk through life like a curious person browsing through a bookstore.

• The ability to self-teach.

Successful autodidacts start with what psychologists call a “high need for cognition”—in other words, they like to think a lot.

[…]

Successful late bloomers combine this high need for cognition with a seemingly contradictory trait: epistemic humility. They are aggressive about wanting to acquire knowledge and learn—but they are also modest, possessing an accurate sense of how much they don’t know. This mentality combines high self-belief (I can figure this out on my own; I know my standards are right and the world’s standards are wrong) with high self-doubt (There’s a lot I don’t know, and I am falling short in many ways).

The combination of a high need for cognition and epistemic humility is a recipe for lifelong learning. Late bloomers learn more slowly but also more deeply precisely because they’re exploring on their own. 

• The mind of the explorer.

[…] the best moments of life can be found within the lifelong learning or quest itself. It’s doing something so fulfilling that the work is its own reward. “Effort is the one thing that gives meaning to life,” the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck once wrote. “Effort means you care about something.”

• Wisdom.

Wisdom is a complicated trait. It starts with pattern recognition—using experience to understand what is really going on. The neuroscientist Elkhonon Goldberg provides a classic expression of this ability in his book The Wisdom Paradox. “Frequently when I am faced with what would appear from the outside to be a challenging problem, the grinding mental computation is somehow circumvented, rendered, as if by magic, unnecessary,” he writes. “The solution comes effortlessly, seamlessly, seemingly by itself. What I have lost with age in my capacity for hard mental work, I seem to have gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight.”

But the trait we call wisdom is more than just pattern recognition; it’s the ability to see things from multiple points of view, the ability to aggregate perspectives and rest in the tensions between them. 

The remaining traits (Early screw-ups, The ability to finally commit, Crankiness in old age) offered several more nods of recognition, and there’s a lot more to each trait than even the extensive pull quotes above. Brooks’ piece is an enlightening read, especially if, like me, you’re constantly contemplating your own “what’s next.”