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Big Breakthroughs Come in Your Late 30s

384 points by ghosh 13y ago

callmeed 13y ago
As a twenty-eighteen year old, this article made my Sunday.
- noname123 13y ago
  As a 27 year old, I can't help but wonder how much of the article was written to be aimed at the older millennial/Reddit crowd's insecurity of aging. But I welcome the prognosis and look forward to my days as a 37 year old still pwning young noobs in Dota2/League/CoD/2K.
  - shubb 13y ago
    My thought is that if the achievements of a 40 year old took 20 years to accumulate, then they must have been working at something for 20 years. That sort of achievement is one that is earned, rather than coming from luck. Which means it is the sort of success one can emulate, but only if we have the personality and determination to put the work in. The 22 year old that got bought out by yahoo for 1bn probably did nothing other start-up founders didn't. There is little that can be learned from him, except to throw the dice more often. The 44 year old who slowly built a property portfolio by living cheap and seizing opportunities (cheap mortgages, cheap properties) that come around only every decade or so, simply by playing the game so long... I could copy his example, but then I wouldn't be able to buy nice things with that money, or use it as startup runway. I'd have to make sure I was always in a stable (boring?) job to support the credit rating needed for several mortgages. So the difference between the two kinds of success is important, and we can learn from the second. But if what we learn is that you can spend your life buying success, is that cost too much?
  - dsuth 13y ago
    Sadly, twitch gaming is not something that improves with age. Think more strategic gaming (and no, Dota2 doesn't count).
jupiterjaz 13y ago
I just finished Marvel Comics: the untold story by Sean Howe. One thing I was really surprised to learn was that Stan Lee was in his 40's and had already been a comicbook editor for 20 years before he co-created all the famous Marvel heroes like Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and The Hulk.
- oscargrouch 13y ago
  What about Bukowski, that was working in a post office, til 49 years old, when he dropped out to start his first novel ?!
  - vinceguidry 13y ago
    He didn't 'drop out', he was incentivized to the tune of $100 a month for life to quit.
    - cwaniak 13y ago
      And that was when $100 was an equivalent of 3 ounces of gold which is about $4k today. Barrel of oil and S&P500 had roughly the same price in gold then as they do today.
      - vinceguidry 13y ago
        Both gold and oil are poor inflation metrics as their prices are fairly volatile, albeit for different reasons. Also, it's not like Bukowski was investing his monthly Franklin in commodities. This website suggests $656 as a more realistic figure. Enough to survive on while working furiously on your writing. http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm
      - dredmorbius 13y ago
        By CPI deflator, $100 in 1969 is worth $634.76 today. http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ Not sure if that calls into question your statement, or suggests that the CPI is drastically understating inflation.
lkrubner 13y ago
A distinction I read somewhere, that I think is useful, is that people tend to be either primarily conceptualist in their thinking, or they are empiricists who learn from experience. Conceptualists have their big breakthroughs before the age of 35, and empiricists have their big breakthroughs after 35. In conceptual fields, such as math and physics, the big breakthroughs happen young. Werner Heisenberg was 27 when he came up with the Uncertainty Principle, and Einstein was 26 when he discovered relativity. In fields where progress is primarily empirical, such as biology, the big breakthroughs tend to happen later. Alexander Fleming was 42 when he discovered penicillin and Jonas Salk was 40 when he invented the vaccine for polio. This distinction can be extended to artists. To write a great empirical novel, one rich in observed life experience, one must live a long time, and therefore Tolstoy was 41 when he wrote War and Peace. But to write a novel where one demonstrates new techniques for grammar and structure and pacing (a novel noteworthy for conceptual innovation) then one will be young, and therefore Hemmingway was only 26 when he wrote The Sun Also Rises.
- phillmv 13y ago
  Not so different from what TFA lays out: >What's more, people who excel in abstract fields, like art or physics, tend to be younger than those who win prizes in fields that require more context, like history or medicine.
- tokenrove 13y ago
  This is the thesis of David Galenson's "Old Masters and Young Geniuses", which is a good read. He also talks about how trying to find a single average age of peak creativity hides other possibilities, such as the one he suggests, where there are clusters among the young (conceptual innovations) and old (experimental innovations).
- rgbrenner 13y ago
  Which the article also mentions: "What's more, people who excel in abstract fields, like art or physics, tend to be younger than those who win prizes in fields that require more context, like history or medicine. Another 1977 study found that physics Nobel winners were 36 on average when they did their prize-winning work, while chemists were 39 and medical doctors were 41."
phillmv 13y ago
The corollary is Cheap, Easy To Exploit Labour Is Most Readily Available In Your Twenties™. (The VC lemma being, "Labour costs are a big majority of web startup input costs")
- Retric 13y ago
  That's assuming all labor is equivalent which seems ridiculous on the surface. I mean start-ups are hardly shoveling snow. Young founders get more free publicity seems far more realistic to me.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >That's assuming all labor is equivalent which seems ridiculous on the surface. I mean start-ups are hardly shoveling snow. They hardly do anything impressive computer-science or programming wise either. Programming like something Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr et co, including a lot of the early scaling challenges, is not that much removed from "shovelling snow".
danso 13y ago
I'd like to see this data evaluated across different time frames. Maybe prodigy was more pronounced at a young age in the past century because people, well, became full adults and died at earlier ages? Now that in today's Western democracies, we've essentially delayed adulthood to at least the mid-20s, marriage until the 30s, and retirement into the 70s...this time delay, plus the fact that the discoveries we make now are more specialized and require more domain knowledge...it seems that the average age for breakthroughs will continue to rise.
- judk 13y ago
  Dying between 15 and 40 was almost never statistic-perturbingly common in human societies that were stable enough to support anyone doing creative work that survived to be noticed later. Most variation in average lifespan is explained by infant mortality and life estension of the elderly.
  - sitkack 13y ago
    Flaw Of The Averages.
- chubot 13y ago
  Did you read the article? It addresses exactly that point and has a graph. Innovators have been peaking slightly later in life as the 20th century has progressed, in part because today's scientists have more to learn than their predecessors did ...
cscheid 13y ago
But look at the variance on those distributions. "Late 30s" is a poor description. How about "half of the winners are between 28 and 45"? Not so exciting then, I would guess. Better yet: look at distribution of "age when paper was written", modeling the generating process is scientist X at age Y writes a paper with Z=0 if no award is won, Z=1 if award is won. Is it obvious that this distribution conditioned on Z=1 is different from the unconditional one? Not to me.
snyk00 13y ago
I don't understand what's the big news here. It's pretty obvious if you also think that by your late 30's you have a lot of experience on your shoulders, and you can use that to plan what's ahead.
mjehanzeb 13y ago
Innovation can happen at any age. The only key is to keep yourself active, focused and relevant. Even though Steve Jobs got success in his 20s but he mentioned that last 10 years of his life was most productive and creatively satisfying.
dhfjgkrgjg 13y ago
Who would have thought? That in your late thirties, you have gained experience, knowledge, contacts, maybe even a degree of financial support, all of which lend towards the formation of breakthrough ideas. Now, where is my prize?
- poolpool 13y ago
  Its common sense that universal health care and higher taxes for everyone is a great idea. Depending on who you ask its also common sense that universal health care is a ridiculous concept and no one wants to pay for other people's hospital visits.
  - basicallydan 13y ago
    I do! We've been doing it in the UK for decades, very few people complain about it.
    - 10feet 13y ago
      If you really lived in the UK you would now that lots of people complain about everything, all the time. Especially the NHS. Now, that doesn't change the point that universal health care exists in most countries, and they are better of for it.
      - basicallydan 13y ago
        Actually, strictly speaking I do live in France at the moment, so your bizarre implication is actually true - but I did just move here 7 days ago. Anyway, yes people do complain about the NHS in general, for all sorts of reasons, but I'd wager that most people don't complain about the fact that we have the NHS, and realise that it's actually really great compared to the situations in countries which don't have universal healthcare. Just a clarification, really.
        cwaniak 13y ago
        I'm a Polish guy with US passport who spent many, many years in the USA and my feeling is as follows: In the US people complain about one single thing regarding the healthcare - cost. In Poland they'll complain about long waiting lists, not enough doctors, not sufficient care, basically everything is worse than in the US - except the cost. I for one don't think that the major objective of healthcare system is not to bankrupt people. Its main objective is to safe life. I wish more people would be worried about saving lives more than money.
thewarrior 13y ago
Here's an interesting exception : The poet Rimbaud wrote all of his poetry before the age of 20 and is considered to be one of the greatest poets of all time.
- new_test 13y ago
  No way! I just picked up a book of his poems at my local second hand shop, come back home, open hacker news and see him mentioned. What are the odds!
- scarmig 13y ago
  Keats similarly wrote all of his extant poetry between 19 and 25. (He died at 25.)
  - to3m 13y ago
    "Last December 13th, there appeared in the newspapers the juiciest, spiciest, raciest obituary it has ever been my pleasure to read. "It was that of a lady named Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, who had, in her lifetime, managed to acquire as lovers practically all of the top creative men in central Europe. And, among these lovers, who were listed in the obituary, by the way, which is what made it so interesting, there were three whom she went so far as to marry: One of the leading composers of the day, Gustav Mahler, composer of "Das Lied von der Erde" and other light classics, one of the leading architects, Walter Gropius, of the "Bauhaus" school of design, and one of the leading writers, Franz Werfel, author of the "Song of Bernadette" and other masterpieces. "It's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years." (Tom Lehrer)
jv22222 13y ago
What I took away from the OP was... the curve keeps going after 35. Phew.
onmydesk 13y ago
As someone in my late 30s I think the main reason is this- Its time then to stop fking around and just get it done. It dawns on you at this age where you are in your life, how far you've got to go and it annoys you that thus far you didn't get 'it' done yet. You're not staring death in the face but you're close enough to feel its influence. If not now when? That spurs you on, beyond any motivation you ever had at any age before. The experience helps, the realisation that those before you weren't any more special than you helps, but the ticking clock motivates like nothing else. Here's my own personal motivator that has meant the most at this age.. — 'Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.' - Henry David Thoreau. That should scare the hell out of you, unless you're not old enough yet.
- _random_ 13y ago
  There is always a back-up plan of having kids, focusing on raising them well and hoping that maybe they will come up with something cool.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    When talking about people who have their breaks in later 30's etc., chances are high they've had kids already.
  - ForHackernews 13y ago
    I find this attitude really obnoxious. "Oh my little darling might be the next great _______!" Why don't you go do that? Having kids is a just a way of kicking the can down the road.
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    That's a really heavy load to put on your kids. They should be free to live their lives as they want to live them and not shoulder the weight of mommy & daddy's unfulfilled dreams.
    - dllthomas 13y ago
sobes 13y ago
Seems to be corroborated in tech by some nice examples: Jimmy Wales: founded Wikipedia at 35 and Wikia at 38; Marc Benioff: started Salesforce at 35; Mark Pincus: started Zynga at 41; Reid Hoffman: founded Linkedin at 36; Robert Noyce: started Intel at 41 with a 39 year old Gordon Moore; Irwin Jacobs was 52 and Andrew Viterbi was 50 when they founded Qualcomm; Pradeep Sindhu: founded Juniper Networks at 42; Tim Westergren: started Pandora at 35; Robin Chase: founded Zipcar at 42; Michael Arrington: started TechCrunch at 35; Om Malik: started GigaOm at 39; Reed Hastings: started Netflix at 37; Craig Newmark: started craigslist at 42 ... and the list goes on and on. check out this Quora post (source of the above) for more interesting examples: http://qr.ae/tG78W http://qr.ae/tG78W
bhicks005 13y ago
Is it possible that studying Nobel Laureates skews these numbers? It would be extremely difficult to receive a Nobel for an achievement late in life because of the usual lag time between the achievement and the award and the fact that Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously.
- 6cxs2hd6 13y ago
  It's possible. Furthermore, the article talks about noted achievements -- the case where someone's work is recognized as particularly good. Your best or most-creative work isn't necessarily the most-recognized. Being better-recognized probably also correlates with having built a network of connections, understanding institutional politics, having built up social capital (favors to call in), and so on. And it wouldn't be shocking if that tends to skew stronger among older, more experienced people.
kevinalexbrown 13y ago
Most of these people were working extraordinarily hard up to that point, though. Not necessarily hard at one thing. But hard.
vidarh 13y ago
I co-founded my first startup at 19, and several more before I was 25. I've done a couple since. I'm now nearly 39. Not had the big payoff, but I'll try again sometime. To me, it feels like the biggest thing is the combination of willingness to take risks coupled with outlook on life and experience. At 19 I had no business experience, no experience at the business I went into (4 of us started an ISP), had never set up a router or a Linux server. We all had to learn everything from scratch. I ran board meetings, did phone sales, configured Cisco routers, took support calls from users using Trumpet Winsock - a program I'd never seen on anything but screenshot - using Windows 3.x, an OS I'd never spent more than 10 minutes consecutively with. I negotiated with suppliers, and creditors at times. I negotiated contracts with partners. And so on. Five years later, I knew just how unprepared we had been. Had I known what I did then about how tough it was at 19, I would likely not have started the company (but had I known what it led to in terms of contacts and opportunities - I still would have; did not get an exit, but it still paid off). Had I had the knowledge and experience I have now on the other hand, with the willingness to take a risk and life situation I had then, I'd have jumped right into it. What has changed apart from having had 20 years to learn is partly that I make far more money and have far greater outgoings, and a family. I can't take the same risks, and my potential loss if a company can't pay a good salary is far greater. I'm also more risk averse simply because my experience makes me far more likely to spot fatal problems with many potential startups I might have jumped at in my youth. But of course there's also the risk that I'll overlook things because of changes in perspective or because I misjudge the risks, or because I would have gotten lucky if I'd taken the risk. Another major change is simply life outlook. While I was never the totally reckless type, and never all that obsessed with money, today the money just isn't particularly important. I want enough to ensure security, and it'd be nice to have enough to just work on my own projects, but I don't particularly care if I get rich. That changes my assessment of any startups drastically - I'm no longer prepared to jump at an opportunity to get rich if it's not something I'm sufficiently excited by. I don't feel I'm in a hurry to prove anything. I have what I need, and then some. I'm far more secure in myself in every way than I was at 19. I'm not going to pretend like I wouldn't love to get that multi-million exit, but it's not something that matters to me now (I'm sure it'd matter to me if it happened, though). Instead, what I do think about, are ideas that fascinates me. And some of those ideas have been germinating for 20 years. Maybe none of them, nor any new ideas will ever click. If so, no big deal. But if something "clicks" I am vastly better prepared, and I believe I'd be far more likely to succeed.
kev009 13y ago
Correlation != causation To me, a lot of these folks are artificially limited by slow and encumbered education methodologies. The data seems to confirm that, as a physicist can more easily begin independent work, while the others need to wait until they have accreditation/equipment/funding/etc. I think this delay of productivity would be especially avoidable in high school and undergrad programs. If you could begin advanced fields in your early 20s, instead of your 30s, I speculate the distribution would shift left quite a bit.
nraynaud 13y ago
- Mom, it's not that I'm a slacker, it's just that I'm only 34!
ja30278 13y ago
I am in my middle thirties now, and I feel that I'm probably the best I've ever been. Part of this, I think, is that true understanding comes from the ability to contextualize ideas into some larger framework of knowledge. I find myself revisiting things that I've learned earlier in life, but am now able to see them in a more meaningful way because of the experience and knowledge that I've gained in the interim. In some ways, the idea that knowledge in combinatorial is perfectly obvious, but it can be really encouraging to realize that the things you learn today are making you more capable of learning and internalizing new things later.
notastartup 13y ago
I wish that I could have a breakthrough this year, at the age of 27 my life's mission was to make it before turning 30 and times running out and I'm super anxious that I have not had much success.
olsonea 13y ago
The timing of this submission is impeccable. My 36th birthday was yesterday. Thanks for the inspiration!
loceng 13y ago
It's mostly just related to having had enough time to work on a problem.
kimonos 13y ago
Great post! I agree with this!
arikrak 13y ago
A 25-year old brain may have more raw "horsepower" than a 45-year-old brain, which would make a big difference in math and physics, but wouldn't matter as much in e.g. poetry.
- taurath 13y ago
  It doesn't have more horsepower, a 25 year old brain has a lot more gaps in its knowledge that is skipped over, whereas the 45 year old brain has more to connect and consider.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
flibertgibit 13y ago
There may be hope for me yet according to this, but at the moment, I really have no fucking clue what to do. My early thirties were filled with great ideas for startups. My early fourties are filled with depression that I'm past my prime, don't have the energy, risk tolerance, or money to do a startup, and don't have money to go back to school, so it really doesn't matter what my passion is. Somehow I still need to find a passion and change, though, because my death is impending. Maybe my fifties will be the realization that I am who I am and I'm fine just being bad at everything.
- blindhippo 13y ago
  Why do you think you even have a 'prime'? The concept of a "prime" period in your life is entirely relative to the context of any given situation in your life at a specific point in time. Shift your thinking to the present, don't pine over the past or worry about the future. At any given moment, you are capable of being the best you can be for the situation you are in. These are the variables you can control - so control them. And frankly, the older you get, the more capable of handling the present you become due to experience. "Somehow I still need to find a passion and change" Why? What are you doing that you need to change? What do you mean by "passion" and why do you need to find it? What are you doing that is preventing you from finding your "passion"? I'm not asking these questions for my benefit - ask them of yourself. And most importantly, follow through on the answers. There is absolutely no reason to be depressed about being in your 40's - you have double the experience and way more resources now then you did when you were 20. Put it another way, you have another 20 years until you are in your sixties, and that's when you will REALLY be out of energy.
- sobes 13y ago
  Just because you find a passion, doesn't mean you have to spend money on it. There are an insane amount of free learning resources online (in tech/dev, which I'm assuming what your pro background is). Similarly, I'm seeing an increasing number of bootstrapped startups (they just don't make as much noise as the funded ones). My twenties were about realizing and coming to terms with the fact that there are people who are smarter, more clever, and more knowledgeable than me. My thirties are about figuring out how to work with these people as much as possible. I do feel that I'm late to the game on this. If I got over my ego earlier and/or had a more collaborative mindset I'd be in a better spot. Keep looking for that passion. But don't do it alone. Once you find it, it'll be with a group of people "better" than you to help you figure out what to do with it. :)
dredmorbius 13y ago
Actually, Khazan is losing the plot. The whole point of the research she's referencing through 3 levels of indirection (the Atlantic, NBC News, Nature News, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) is that key breakthroughs in Phyiscs are occurring at ever increasing age with time. Granted, the research looks only at Nobel Prize winners in physics, but the general reason stated: that there's more information to learn and assimilate, suggests a general principle of increasing complexity and decreasing returns to innovation, which is a key point raised by Joseph Tainter (The Collapse of Complex Societies). See Weinberg & Jones: "Age dynamics in scientific creativity" http://www.pnas.org/content/108/47/18910 http://www.pnas.org/content/108/47/18910 Also highlighted in an earlier Nature News item on W&J is the increasing reliance of breakthroughs on expensive equipment, not always accessible to the most junior researchers, an observation also consistent with increasing complexity and diminishing returns with time: Other experts in scientific creativity welcomed the study but note other reasons why the age of laureates might have increased, such as improvements in health or the fact that, in many fields, research now requires expensive equipment. "21- and 22-year-olds simply don't get access to this kind of equipment," says Paula Stephan at Georgia State University in Atlanta, who provided some data for the Nobel study. She adds that it isn't always possible to pinpoint "one magic date" when scientists made their discoveries. http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111107/full/news.2011.632.html http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111107/full/news.2011.632.ht...
ekm2 13y ago
For immigrants from relatively underdeveloped nations,add another 10 years.
facepalm 13y ago
Or not - I'm over 40 without any big breakthroughs.
netcan 13y ago
We ned to to make some serious progress on extending youth!
sireat 13y ago
It goes without saying those achieving breakthroughs have been building up to that moment basically all their adult (and most likely teenage) life. As a soon to be 40 year old jack of many trades but master of none, I am still looking for someone achieving anything meaningful starting from scratch later in life. What I mean by this is someone achieving a mastery of some skill, when one has not done deliberate practice previously. I suspect the answer is that unless you have been building your inner pattern recognition for basics of your field of expertise since late teens/early twenties, you are unlikely to get very far starting at the later age. For example Einstein already had fluid mastery of calculus at 15 (just like Feynman), which was a nice building block for later work. I am not even going to start on Von Neumann.

384 points by ghosh 13y ago

callmeed 13y ago

As a twenty-eighteen year old, this article made my Sunday.

noname123 13y ago
As a 27 year old, I can't help but wonder how much of the article was written to be aimed at the older millennial/Reddit crowd's insecurity of aging. But I welcome the prognosis and look forward to my days as a 37 year old still pwning young noobs in Dota2/League/CoD/2K.
- shubb 13y ago
  My thought is that if the achievements of a 40 year old took 20 years to accumulate, then they must have been working at something for 20 years. That sort of achievement is one that is earned, rather than coming from luck. Which means it is the sort of success one can emulate, but only if we have the personality and determination to put the work in. The 22 year old that got bought out by yahoo for 1bn probably did nothing other start-up founders didn't. There is little that can be learned from him, except to throw the dice more often. The 44 year old who slowly built a property portfolio by living cheap and seizing opportunities (cheap mortgages, cheap properties) that come around only every decade or so, simply by playing the game so long... I could copy his example, but then I wouldn't be able to buy nice things with that money, or use it as startup runway. I'd have to make sure I was always in a stable (boring?) job to support the credit rating needed for several mortgages. So the difference between the two kinds of success is important, and we can learn from the second. But if what we learn is that you can spend your life buying success, is that cost too much?
- dsuth 13y ago
  Sadly, twitch gaming is not something that improves with age. Think more strategic gaming (and no, Dota2 doesn't count).

jupiterjaz 13y ago

I just finished Marvel Comics: the untold story by Sean Howe. One thing I was really surprised to learn was that Stan Lee was in his 40's and had already been a comicbook editor for 20 years before he co-created all the famous Marvel heroes like Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and The Hulk.

oscargrouch 13y ago
What about Bukowski, that was working in a post office, til 49 years old, when he dropped out to start his first novel ?!
- vinceguidry 13y ago
  He didn't 'drop out', he was incentivized to the tune of $100 a month for life to quit.
  - cwaniak 13y ago
    And that was when $100 was an equivalent of 3 ounces of gold which is about $4k today. Barrel of oil and S&P500 had roughly the same price in gold then as they do today.
    - vinceguidry 13y ago
      Both gold and oil are poor inflation metrics as their prices are fairly volatile, albeit for different reasons. Also, it's not like Bukowski was investing his monthly Franklin in commodities. This website suggests $656 as a more realistic figure. Enough to survive on while working furiously on your writing. http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm
    - dredmorbius 13y ago
      By CPI deflator, $100 in 1969 is worth $634.76 today. http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ Not sure if that calls into question your statement, or suggests that the CPI is drastically understating inflation.

lkrubner 13y ago

A distinction I read somewhere, that I think is useful, is that people tend to be either primarily conceptualist in their thinking, or they are empiricists who learn from experience. Conceptualists have their big breakthroughs before the age of 35, and empiricists have their big breakthroughs after 35. In conceptual fields, such as math and physics, the big breakthroughs happen young. Werner Heisenberg was 27 when he came up with the Uncertainty Principle, and Einstein was 26 when he discovered relativity. In fields where progress is primarily empirical, such as biology, the big breakthroughs tend to happen later. Alexander Fleming was 42 when he discovered penicillin and Jonas Salk was 40 when he invented the vaccine for polio. This distinction can be extended to artists. To write a great empirical novel, one rich in observed life experience, one must live a long time, and therefore Tolstoy was 41 when he wrote War and Peace. But to write a novel where one demonstrates new techniques for grammar and structure and pacing (a novel noteworthy for conceptual innovation) then one will be young, and therefore Hemmingway was only 26 when he wrote The Sun Also Rises.

phillmv 13y ago
Not so different from what TFA lays out: >What's more, people who excel in abstract fields, like art or physics, tend to be younger than those who win prizes in fields that require more context, like history or medicine.
tokenrove 13y ago
This is the thesis of David Galenson's "Old Masters and Young Geniuses", which is a good read. He also talks about how trying to find a single average age of peak creativity hides other possibilities, such as the one he suggests, where there are clusters among the young (conceptual innovations) and old (experimental innovations).
rgbrenner 13y ago
Which the article also mentions: "What's more, people who excel in abstract fields, like art or physics, tend to be younger than those who win prizes in fields that require more context, like history or medicine. Another 1977 study found that physics Nobel winners were 36 on average when they did their prize-winning work, while chemists were 39 and medical doctors were 41."

phillmv 13y ago

The corollary is Cheap, Easy To Exploit Labour Is Most Readily Available In Your Twenties™. (The VC lemma being, "Labour costs are a big majority of web startup input costs")

Retric 13y ago
That's assuming all labor is equivalent which seems ridiculous on the surface. I mean start-ups are hardly shoveling snow. Young founders get more free publicity seems far more realistic to me.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >That's assuming all labor is equivalent which seems ridiculous on the surface. I mean start-ups are hardly shoveling snow. They hardly do anything impressive computer-science or programming wise either. Programming like something Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr et co, including a lot of the early scaling challenges, is not that much removed from "shovelling snow".

danso 13y ago

I'd like to see this data evaluated across different time frames. Maybe prodigy was more pronounced at a young age in the past century because people, well, became full adults and died at earlier ages? Now that in today's Western democracies, we've essentially delayed adulthood to at least the mid-20s, marriage until the 30s, and retirement into the 70s...this time delay, plus the fact that the discoveries we make now are more specialized and require more domain knowledge...it seems that the average age for breakthroughs will continue to rise.

judk 13y ago
Dying between 15 and 40 was almost never statistic-perturbingly common in human societies that were stable enough to support anyone doing creative work that survived to be noticed later. Most variation in average lifespan is explained by infant mortality and life estension of the elderly.
- sitkack 13y ago
  Flaw Of The Averages.
chubot 13y ago
Did you read the article? It addresses exactly that point and has a graph. Innovators have been peaking slightly later in life as the 20th century has progressed, in part because today's scientists have more to learn than their predecessors did ...

cscheid 13y ago

But look at the variance on those distributions. "Late 30s" is a poor description. How about "half of the winners are between 28 and 45"? Not so exciting then, I would guess. Better yet: look at distribution of "age when paper was written", modeling the generating process is scientist X at age Y writes a paper with Z=0 if no award is won, Z=1 if award is won. Is it obvious that this distribution conditioned on Z=1 is different from the unconditional one? Not to me.

snyk00 13y ago

I don't understand what's the big news here. It's pretty obvious if you also think that by your late 30's you have a lot of experience on your shoulders, and you can use that to plan what's ahead.

mjehanzeb 13y ago

Innovation can happen at any age. The only key is to keep yourself active, focused and relevant. Even though Steve Jobs got success in his 20s but he mentioned that last 10 years of his life was most productive and creatively satisfying.

dhfjgkrgjg 13y ago

Who would have thought? That in your late thirties, you have gained experience, knowledge, contacts, maybe even a degree of financial support, all of which lend towards the formation of breakthrough ideas. Now, where is my prize?

poolpool 13y ago
Its common sense that universal health care and higher taxes for everyone is a great idea. Depending on who you ask its also common sense that universal health care is a ridiculous concept and no one wants to pay for other people's hospital visits.
- basicallydan 13y ago
  I do! We've been doing it in the UK for decades, very few people complain about it.
  - 10feet 13y ago
    If you really lived in the UK you would now that lots of people complain about everything, all the time. Especially the NHS. Now, that doesn't change the point that universal health care exists in most countries, and they are better of for it.
    - basicallydan 13y ago
      Actually, strictly speaking I do live in France at the moment, so your bizarre implication is actually true - but I did just move here 7 days ago. Anyway, yes people do complain about the NHS in general, for all sorts of reasons, but I'd wager that most people don't complain about the fact that we have the NHS, and realise that it's actually really great compared to the situations in countries which don't have universal healthcare. Just a clarification, really.
      - cwaniak 13y ago
        I'm a Polish guy with US passport who spent many, many years in the USA and my feeling is as follows: In the US people complain about one single thing regarding the healthcare - cost. In Poland they'll complain about long waiting lists, not enough doctors, not sufficient care, basically everything is worse than in the US - except the cost. I for one don't think that the major objective of healthcare system is not to bankrupt people. Its main objective is to safe life. I wish more people would be worried about saving lives more than money.

thewarrior 13y ago

Here's an interesting exception : The poet Rimbaud wrote all of his poetry before the age of 20 and is considered to be one of the greatest poets of all time.

new_test 13y ago
No way! I just picked up a book of his poems at my local second hand shop, come back home, open hacker news and see him mentioned. What are the odds!
scarmig 13y ago
Keats similarly wrote all of his extant poetry between 19 and 25. (He died at 25.)
- to3m 13y ago
  "Last December 13th, there appeared in the newspapers the juiciest, spiciest, raciest obituary it has ever been my pleasure to read. "It was that of a lady named Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, who had, in her lifetime, managed to acquire as lovers practically all of the top creative men in central Europe. And, among these lovers, who were listed in the obituary, by the way, which is what made it so interesting, there were three whom she went so far as to marry: One of the leading composers of the day, Gustav Mahler, composer of "Das Lied von der Erde" and other light classics, one of the leading architects, Walter Gropius, of the "Bauhaus" school of design, and one of the leading writers, Franz Werfel, author of the "Song of Bernadette" and other masterpieces. "It's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years." (Tom Lehrer)

jv22222 13y ago

What I took away from the OP was... the curve keeps going after 35. Phew.

onmydesk 13y ago

As someone in my late 30s I think the main reason is this- Its time then to stop fking around and just get it done. It dawns on you at this age where you are in your life, how far you've got to go and it annoys you that thus far you didn't get 'it' done yet. You're not staring death in the face but you're close enough to feel its influence. If not now when? That spurs you on, beyond any motivation you ever had at any age before. The experience helps, the realisation that those before you weren't any more special than you helps, but the ticking clock motivates like nothing else. Here's my own personal motivator that has meant the most at this age.. — 'Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.' - Henry David Thoreau. That should scare the hell out of you, unless you're not old enough yet.

_random_ 13y ago
There is always a back-up plan of having kids, focusing on raising them well and hoping that maybe they will come up with something cool.
- vidarh 13y ago
  When talking about people who have their breaks in later 30's etc., chances are high they've had kids already.
- ForHackernews 13y ago
  I find this attitude really obnoxious. "Oh my little darling might be the next great _______!" Why don't you go do that? Having kids is a just a way of kicking the can down the road.
- nostrademons 13y ago
  That's a really heavy load to put on your kids. They should be free to live their lives as they want to live them and not shoulder the weight of mommy & daddy's unfulfilled dreams.
  - dllthomas 13y ago

sobes 13y ago

Seems to be corroborated in tech by some nice examples: Jimmy Wales: founded Wikipedia at 35 and Wikia at 38; Marc Benioff: started Salesforce at 35; Mark Pincus: started Zynga at 41; Reid Hoffman: founded Linkedin at 36; Robert Noyce: started Intel at 41 with a 39 year old Gordon Moore; Irwin Jacobs was 52 and Andrew Viterbi was 50 when they founded Qualcomm; Pradeep Sindhu: founded Juniper Networks at 42; Tim Westergren: started Pandora at 35; Robin Chase: founded Zipcar at 42; Michael Arrington: started TechCrunch at 35; Om Malik: started GigaOm at 39; Reed Hastings: started Netflix at 37; Craig Newmark: started craigslist at 42 ... and the list goes on and on. check out this Quora post (source of the above) for more interesting examples: http://qr.ae/tG78W http://qr.ae/tG78W

bhicks005 13y ago

Is it possible that studying Nobel Laureates skews these numbers? It would be extremely difficult to receive a Nobel for an achievement late in life because of the usual lag time between the achievement and the award and the fact that Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously.

6cxs2hd6 13y ago
It's possible. Furthermore, the article talks about noted achievements -- the case where someone's work is recognized as particularly good. Your best or most-creative work isn't necessarily the most-recognized. Being better-recognized probably also correlates with having built a network of connections, understanding institutional politics, having built up social capital (favors to call in), and so on. And it wouldn't be shocking if that tends to skew stronger among older, more experienced people.

kevinalexbrown 13y ago

Most of these people were working extraordinarily hard up to that point, though. Not necessarily hard at one thing. But hard.

vidarh 13y ago

I co-founded my first startup at 19, and several more before I was 25. I've done a couple since. I'm now nearly 39. Not had the big payoff, but I'll try again sometime. To me, it feels like the biggest thing is the combination of willingness to take risks coupled with outlook on life and experience. At 19 I had no business experience, no experience at the business I went into (4 of us started an ISP), had never set up a router or a Linux server. We all had to learn everything from scratch. I ran board meetings, did phone sales, configured Cisco routers, took support calls from users using Trumpet Winsock - a program I'd never seen on anything but screenshot - using Windows 3.x, an OS I'd never spent more than 10 minutes consecutively with. I negotiated with suppliers, and creditors at times. I negotiated contracts with partners. And so on. Five years later, I knew just how unprepared we had been. Had I known what I did then about how tough it was at 19, I would likely not have started the company (but had I known what it led to in terms of contacts and opportunities - I still would have; did not get an exit, but it still paid off). Had I had the knowledge and experience I have now on the other hand, with the willingness to take a risk and life situation I had then, I'd have jumped right into it. What has changed apart from having had 20 years to learn is partly that I make far more money and have far greater outgoings, and a family. I can't take the same risks, and my potential loss if a company can't pay a good salary is far greater. I'm also more risk averse simply because my experience makes me far more likely to spot fatal problems with many potential startups I might have jumped at in my youth. But of course there's also the risk that I'll overlook things because of changes in perspective or because I misjudge the risks, or because I would have gotten lucky if I'd taken the risk. Another major change is simply life outlook. While I was never the totally reckless type, and never all that obsessed with money, today the money just isn't particularly important. I want enough to ensure security, and it'd be nice to have enough to just work on my own projects, but I don't particularly care if I get rich. That changes my assessment of any startups drastically - I'm no longer prepared to jump at an opportunity to get rich if it's not something I'm sufficiently excited by. I don't feel I'm in a hurry to prove anything. I have what I need, and then some. I'm far more secure in myself in every way than I was at 19. I'm not going to pretend like I wouldn't love to get that multi-million exit, but it's not something that matters to me now (I'm sure it'd matter to me if it happened, though). Instead, what I do think about, are ideas that fascinates me. And some of those ideas have been germinating for 20 years. Maybe none of them, nor any new ideas will ever click. If so, no big deal. But if something "clicks" I am vastly better prepared, and I believe I'd be far more likely to succeed.

kev009 13y ago

Correlation != causation To me, a lot of these folks are artificially limited by slow and encumbered education methodologies. The data seems to confirm that, as a physicist can more easily begin independent work, while the others need to wait until they have accreditation/equipment/funding/etc. I think this delay of productivity would be especially avoidable in high school and undergrad programs. If you could begin advanced fields in your early 20s, instead of your 30s, I speculate the distribution would shift left quite a bit.

nraynaud 13y ago

- Mom, it's not that I'm a slacker, it's just that I'm only 34!

ja30278 13y ago

I am in my middle thirties now, and I feel that I'm probably the best I've ever been. Part of this, I think, is that true understanding comes from the ability to contextualize ideas into some larger framework of knowledge. I find myself revisiting things that I've learned earlier in life, but am now able to see them in a more meaningful way because of the experience and knowledge that I've gained in the interim. In some ways, the idea that knowledge in combinatorial is perfectly obvious, but it can be really encouraging to realize that the things you learn today are making you more capable of learning and internalizing new things later.

notastartup 13y ago

I wish that I could have a breakthrough this year, at the age of 27 my life's mission was to make it before turning 30 and times running out and I'm super anxious that I have not had much success.

olsonea 13y ago

The timing of this submission is impeccable. My 36th birthday was yesterday. Thanks for the inspiration!

loceng 13y ago

It's mostly just related to having had enough time to work on a problem.

kimonos 13y ago

Great post! I agree with this!

arikrak 13y ago

A 25-year old brain may have more raw "horsepower" than a 45-year-old brain, which would make a big difference in math and physics, but wouldn't matter as much in e.g. poetry.

taurath 13y ago
It doesn't have more horsepower, a 25 year old brain has a lot more gaps in its knowledge that is skipped over, whereas the 45 year old brain has more to connect and consider.

deleted 13y ago

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flibertgibit 13y ago

There may be hope for me yet according to this, but at the moment, I really have no fucking clue what to do. My early thirties were filled with great ideas for startups. My early fourties are filled with depression that I'm past my prime, don't have the energy, risk tolerance, or money to do a startup, and don't have money to go back to school, so it really doesn't matter what my passion is. Somehow I still need to find a passion and change, though, because my death is impending. Maybe my fifties will be the realization that I am who I am and I'm fine just being bad at everything.

blindhippo 13y ago
Why do you think you even have a 'prime'? The concept of a "prime" period in your life is entirely relative to the context of any given situation in your life at a specific point in time. Shift your thinking to the present, don't pine over the past or worry about the future. At any given moment, you are capable of being the best you can be for the situation you are in. These are the variables you can control - so control them. And frankly, the older you get, the more capable of handling the present you become due to experience. "Somehow I still need to find a passion and change" Why? What are you doing that you need to change? What do you mean by "passion" and why do you need to find it? What are you doing that is preventing you from finding your "passion"? I'm not asking these questions for my benefit - ask them of yourself. And most importantly, follow through on the answers. There is absolutely no reason to be depressed about being in your 40's - you have double the experience and way more resources now then you did when you were 20. Put it another way, you have another 20 years until you are in your sixties, and that's when you will REALLY be out of energy.
sobes 13y ago
Just because you find a passion, doesn't mean you have to spend money on it. There are an insane amount of free learning resources online (in tech/dev, which I'm assuming what your pro background is). Similarly, I'm seeing an increasing number of bootstrapped startups (they just don't make as much noise as the funded ones). My twenties were about realizing and coming to terms with the fact that there are people who are smarter, more clever, and more knowledgeable than me. My thirties are about figuring out how to work with these people as much as possible. I do feel that I'm late to the game on this. If I got over my ego earlier and/or had a more collaborative mindset I'd be in a better spot. Keep looking for that passion. But don't do it alone. Once you find it, it'll be with a group of people "better" than you to help you figure out what to do with it. :)

dredmorbius 13y ago

Actually, Khazan is losing the plot. The whole point of the research she's referencing through 3 levels of indirection (the Atlantic, NBC News, Nature News, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) is that key breakthroughs in Phyiscs are occurring at ever increasing age with time. Granted, the research looks only at Nobel Prize winners in physics, but the general reason stated: that there's more information to learn and assimilate, suggests a general principle of increasing complexity and decreasing returns to innovation, which is a key point raised by Joseph Tainter (The Collapse of Complex Societies). See Weinberg & Jones: "Age dynamics in scientific creativity" http://www.pnas.org/content/108/47/18910 http://www.pnas.org/content/108/47/18910 Also highlighted in an earlier Nature News item on W&J is the increasing reliance of breakthroughs on expensive equipment, not always accessible to the most junior researchers, an observation also consistent with increasing complexity and diminishing returns with time: Other experts in scientific creativity welcomed the study but note other reasons why the age of laureates might have increased, such as improvements in health or the fact that, in many fields, research now requires expensive equipment. "21- and 22-year-olds simply don't get access to this kind of equipment," says Paula Stephan at Georgia State University in Atlanta, who provided some data for the Nobel study. She adds that it isn't always possible to pinpoint "one magic date" when scientists made their discoveries. http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111107/full/news.2011.632.html http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111107/full/news.2011.632.ht...

ekm2 13y ago

For immigrants from relatively underdeveloped nations,add another 10 years.

facepalm 13y ago

Or not - I'm over 40 without any big breakthroughs.

netcan 13y ago

We ned to to make some serious progress on extending youth!

sireat 13y ago

It goes without saying those achieving breakthroughs have been building up to that moment basically all their adult (and most likely teenage) life. As a soon to be 40 year old jack of many trades but master of none, I am still looking for someone achieving anything meaningful starting from scratch later in life. What I mean by this is someone achieving a mastery of some skill, when one has not done deliberate practice previously. I suspect the answer is that unless you have been building your inner pattern recognition for basics of your field of expertise since late teens/early twenties, you are unlikely to get very far starting at the later age. For example Einstein already had fluid mastery of calculus at 15 (just like Feynman), which was a nice building block for later work. I am not even going to start on Von Neumann.