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This week’s New Yorker has an amazing piece by Malcolm Gladwell called Late Bloomers: Why do we equate genius with precocity?

It’s an essential read for anyone pursuing a career in the arts. It’s not only insightful but quite inspiring.

I think a lot of us, in creative fields, tend to get discouraged at the thought of failing (or not being extremely successful) our first time out. No one wants to think about plugging away at something for twenty years (with potentially little rewards along the way) with no certainty you’ll ever really make it.

There’s this expectation (and misleading notion) that we only get one shot at success, and that if it’s going to happen, it should happen early on in life. As the article points out, so many great artists (writers, painters, poets) really hit their prime in their mid forties, early fifties after years and years of trial and error. Gladwell makes a very clear point that a large part of these late bloomer’s success was dependent on a support network of people who truly believed in them.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

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.

There’s also a ten minute podcast interview with Gladwell on the subject.