Hi there, I'm Malcolm Gladwell, your guest host for the week. Welcome to Radio Headspace

and to Tuesday. This week I'm discussing some different ways to maximize your personal

performance. Today we're going to talk about the benefits of being a late bloomer. Our

culture is obsessed with young people achieving high levels of success and that can be amazing

to watch, but it's important to note that success doesn't have to come at an early age.

There are lots of benefits to being a late bloomer. In fact, I would argue that in many instances

you're probably better off being a late bloomer than being a prodigy. To see music for

an example, there have been numerous studies of musical prodigies. What we learn is that

very, very, very few of them ever go on to be truly accomplished adult musicians. So why

is that? Well, because when we observe a prodigy, what we are observing is a child who

is managed to mimic the ability and skill of an adult musician. But that is a completely

different skill from developing an individualized voice as a performer. An adult is someone

who manages to take all of the kind of training and learning and lessons, they learn during

their adolescence and transform them into something entirely new and different, something

qualitatively different, and that is hard to do. There's lots of good examples of late bloomers.

The most famous would probably be Sezon, one of the greatest artists of the last, I don't

know, 500 years. He does his greatest work at the end of his life, and the reason is that

the kind of thing he was trying to do in painting was very difficult, and it had never been done

before, and it took him an entire lifetime to master it. If you wanted to paint super realistic

portraits in 1860, you could master that by 25. If you want to invent an entirely new

way of representing life in works of art, that could take your whole life. I don't mean

to say in all of this that you can't have genius come from precocious people. That's

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