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The genius of late bloomers - Gladwell
- maxklein 18y agoAch, I wish a subscription to the New Yorker from outside the U.S were not so expensive. Such articles would be perfect for reading in the train, I can't read it now with so many shiny things on the internet.
- dangoldin 18y agoWhy not just print a few out?
- maxklein 18y agoIt's truly not the same holding a magazine compared to holding some sheets of paper. I could also read it on my iphone. But the experience is different. A magazine is easy to hold and to change pages. Sheets of paper, not really.
- fallentimes 18y agoI feel the same way about the Economist.
- eru 18y agoBut the Economist is affordable all the world over. At least the subscription is. I read that in a book (http://www.amazon.com/Everyday-Ingenuity-Solve-Problems-Small/dp/1591391539 http://www.amazon.com/Everyday-Ingenuity-Solve-Problems-Smal...) that the usual TV station makes less than a dollar for an hours advertisement per viewer. The Economist makes more than five dollars in advertisements per issue. Most people would rather spend a dollar to get rid of one hour advertising on TV, but not many would spend more than five dollars to get rid of the relative unobstrusive ads in the Economist.
- fallentimes 18y agoI love that book. And I love Honest Tea. It's still significantly more expensive than the average magazine in the States. http://www.micro-gems.net/servlet/the-386/The-Economist-1yr-subscription/Detail http://www.micro-gems.net/servlet/the-386/The-Economist-1yr-... Now certainly $80 is affordable (if you have a job), but most of the magazines I used to subscribe to, I paid $5-$20 per year.
- nazgulnarsil 18y agoeconomist is weekly. 4x20 = 80. it is exactly on par with most magazines. and considering the quality you're getting a bargain.
- fallentimes 18y agoSubscribing to the economist is on par if you buy all your other magazines from a news stand - yes. I agree it's well worth it. My original argument was that it's expensive compared to most magazines, which it is.
- nazgulnarsil 18y agoI'm still not getting this. 51 issues a year for $80 equates to $1.57 an issue. this does not seem expensive at all.
- eru 18y agoHow many issues do the magazines for $20 a year have in a year? Too bad, you can't get a magazine that cheaply here in Germany. By the way: There is a website to the 'Why not?'-book (http://www.whynot.net/ http://www.whynot.net/). It tries to be a web-2.0 idea exchange. But browsing it did not gratify me as much as reading their book. Especially I like 'What would Croesus do?' (How would you solve your problem if resources were unconstrained?) and 'Find new problems for your solutions.'.
- nose 18y agoTry this link: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell?printable=true http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_...
- alecco 18y agoGood point. Where are you from?
- timcederman 18y agoI keep my New Yorker subscription only to have for reading on flights. New Scientist gets me sleepy whereas New Yorker gets me engrossed in impossibly long articles. Sadly this means sometimes I'm reading copies that are 6 months old.
- michaelneale 18y agoI am sure this will make it into a gladwell book - they tend to read like his articles so just keep an eye out for it. They are also nice small light books easy to carry on the train.
- nazgulnarsil 18y agocouldn't the difference be more to do with the documented 10 years of practice needed before truly mastering something? the early bloomers could simply be the ones who started when they were 10, while the late bloomers simply the ones who switched careers.
- jcl 18y agoI'd guess Gladwell would disagree. In his example, Cezanne and Picasso were both painting in earnest by age 20. If it only took 10 years of practice, Cezanne would have been at his peak by 30, not 60. Likewise, Fountain was writing for at least 20 years before he had his breakthrough. It also doesn't explain why (in the anecdotal evidence in the article) late bloomers start weak and improve over a long time, while early bloomers peak early and decline.
- zach 18y agoTo avoid seeming to beg the question, I'll call late bloomers experimentalists and the early bloomers (pure) conceptualists. Okay. It may be that conceptualists have a very natural peak in their early years because of two factors: a learning peak and a neural peak. For conceptualists, concepts are grasped, mastered and built on quickly, but are explored in their learning. Once they absorb a subject, they get tenaciously attached to worthless novelty, they find new things, or they're just not able to think about things in the same creative way. That's what I mean by a learning peak. Second, to go further out on a limb, could there be a neural peak? There are many late-blooming artists, but how many late-blooming mathematicians? Not many. Since theirs is the epitome of conceptual work, there might be something natural to it. One suspects that the, let's say, spark of creativity in conceptualists may actually consume neural connections which cannot be regained. It's interesting to think of and compare some notables in these terms. Edison, Fuller, Kubrick, Lucas, etc. It would be instructive to see examples of late-blooming non-experimentalists, for example. I also think that there are many fields where artists are encouraged make the transition from one approach to another, such as the actor that becomes a director. Perhaps this subject encompasses much of the difficulty of the artist at mid-life, maybe even that of Malcolm Gladwell.
- sabat 18y agoAs a 45-year-old with an interest in startups that borders on the unhealthy :-) I am more than happy to see this kind of validation in print.
- ehmunro 18y agoI'll have to agree as a 43 year old with an unhealthy interest in start-ups. Maybe I should tell VC companies that I'm a late-blooming genius? ;-7
- michaelneale 18y agoI am 34. Feel free to call me a young punk or a script kiddie, would make me feel better ;)
- ojbyrne 18y agoOk, obligatory chime-in. 44 years old when I (built|co-founded|whatever the PR people want to call it today) digg.com. Younger partners decided I was too old (or something) ... Working hard to prove them wrong (though within a larger corporation). Meanwhile they flail around, getting more pathetic by the day... Maybe it's my love for parenthetical phrases. ;-)
- wheels 18y agoI do sympathize with what happened, but the Digg digs are a little tired at this point. Just on your most recent page of comments I count three.
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- unalone 18y agoI wonder what Gladwell thinks of Joyce, who published relatively young (Dubliners) and who then spent decades piecing together his final two masterpieces. Is it possible for people to be both ways at once?
- louislouis 18y agoI need to find a lady like Sharie!
- ericwaller 18y agoSeriously, I can't decide which is more impressive, his years of dedication to his writing or hers.
- brandnewlow 18y agoI was a bit less impressed as I found out more about his situation. She wasn't just paying for his writing, she was paying for him to be a stay at home dad and take care of all the mundane stuff that kept their family operating. It's impressive that she never questioned him or gave him a hard time, but it sounds like he was holding up his end of the bargain.
- migpwr 18y agoI actually wasn't impressed at all because I don't think we can ever know if she questioned him or gave him a hard time. It could have been an unbelievably painful number of years for both of them and she could have given up on him years before but was stuck supporting him. It doesn't sound as nice but it is probably closer to reality...
- dgabriel 18y agoShe's a senior partner at a law firm, so I can't imagine their financial situation was all that precarious.
- louislouis 18y agoYeh I couldn't agree more. Most women would've given up on the idea and booted their men out to go find real jobs, but not Sharie, she funded him year on year, including the multiple trips out to Haiti. She must've thought he was seeing another woman all those times, but she had the faith and stayed strong.
- mechanical_fish 18y agoThis is just great. I remember reading one of Gladwell's earlier versions of this argument -- I think it was a transcript of a talk, and it was all about Fleetwood Mac. I recommend trying to find that, too, because the Fleetwood Mac angle is really hilarious. I don't exactly buy this dichotomy of his, actually. I think that trying to force all creative people into two categories is a futile exercise if you take it too seriously -- there are more than just two kinds of creative people. And, yet, I appreciate the explanatory value of the dichotomy approach, even if it isn't particularly accurate -- it's dramatic, it's easy for people to understand (folks like dichotomies -- would "Hot or Not" have been as popular if it had included "Hottish" and "Maybe" options?) and it serves the main goal: To throw a big, dramatic spotlight on the late bloomers, who otherwise tend to be entirely ignored. In other words, two isn't the right number of categories, but I do think it is better than one.
- nihilocrat 18y agoNon-dichotomous abstractions that fail to get a deep personal response from the reader don't make good reading (or at least publishable reading). On a positive note, like you said, at least it's suggesting there's more than one group: thanks to Mr. Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley poster children, we assume that everyone peaks in their 18-25 range, so it's actually refreshing to be reminded of cases in the past where this wasn't true. Actually seriously addressing the issue and trying to find a complicated system of abstractions to describe it would be far to... academic. In my mind, that means "refreshingly deep", but I bet in most minds it means "booooooooooooooooring".
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- ssanders82 18y agoAnyone else notice that the date on this article is 6 days into the future? And the url as well.
- icey 18y agoThis is common practice when the URL is meant to correlate with a printed version of a magazine, sometimes one that either hasn't been released yet, or releases a month earlier than the posted dates.