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Athletes peak in their late 20s and early 30s. In intellectual endeavors (despite prominent counterexamples, half of whom were like Keats or Galois and died on
by time_management 18y ago
Athletes peak in their late 20s and early 30s. In intellectual endeavors (despite prominent counterexamples, half of whom were like Keats or Galois and died on ascent) most people peak in their late 40s or 50s. So there isn't the same call to quit after a few years of success.
- ph0rque 18y agoInteresting... what about endeavors where the biggest factor in the eventual success is commitment to the venture? I think that as one grows older, one is more critical of oneself and thus liable of giving up earlier.
- gaius 18y agoWell, yes and no. Mathematicians for example are notorious for burning out young.
- jjs 18y agoChalk poisoning. ;)
- time_management 18y agoThis is more of a popular myth than reality. It's more common in math than in other fields, and mathematicians peak earlier than, say, writers (35, as opposed to 55, would be my guesses) but it's not actually the norm for a mathematician to do his best work in his 20s. Those stories are cases of the exception proving the rule.
- rfurmani 18y agoMaybe not in eir early- or mid- 20s, since nowadays at that age it is hard to even have enough familiarity to be able to define the major open problems (most of my colleagues focus a lot on devouring book to try to get ahead of this curve). Still, major work is generally done by one in eir late 20s or early 30s. It has long been the case, and still continues to be (Green and Tao proved their famous theorem at the age of 29). Hardy lamented that math is a young person's game. The book "A Beautiful Mind" discusses how Nash's 30th birthday was a gloomy one, since it generally means the end of one's major contributions to the field. You can't even win the Fields medal unless you're under 40. Now, of course there will be counter-examples, but these are not the majority, and generally come in those fields where you have to digest a great amount of material and push your way through for long stretches of time (grad students and post-docs also tend to figure prominently in these cases)
- ahoyhere 18y agoThis really isn't a useful generalization. Nor factual. If people are genuinely interested in peaking, read "Overachievement" and "Talent Isn't Everything".
- rthrehe 17y agoi think this web site is sooooooooooooooo fake so dont you try 2 fool other people cause i know