How to Be a Late Bloomer

Or better yet, how about being a repeat bloomer?

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

Why would you want to be a late bloomer, you ask? Why not? Even if you were an early bloomer, nothing is more liberating and life-giving than feeling that life can have a second act, or a third. Or more! In fact, instead of calling it late blooming, let’s call it repeat blooming. Why wouldn’t you want to be a repeat bloomer? If you’re feeling stuck or bored in life, or if you’re prone to existential despair at seeing your years slip away and your accomplishments remain mediocre, take heart. We are all capable of being repeat bloomers, and I’m going to tell you why that is and how to do it.

Let’s look at this through a lens of what holds us back from being late bloomers. First, we’re told our brainpower declines as we age, so we think there’s no way we’ll accomplish anything at a later age comparable with what we could have accomplished in youth – so why even try? Despite what we’re led to believe, overall cognitive function does not decline with age. One type does, but another type actually improves. The type that declines – it peaks around age 20, so it starts declining before life has even really fully begun – is called fluid intelligence. This is the basic reasoning capacities of our brains, the functions that don’t rely on prior learning. Crystallized intelligence, which is the kind that builds over time as you learn and experience life, continues to increase slowly and then remains stable for much of adult life. But even when it, too, begins to decline, this isn’t necessarily associated with the loss of an ability to continue functioning at a high level.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta tells a story about operating on the brain of a 93-year-old man who fell off a roof while using a leaf blower. Dr. Gupta found him waiting for the operation fully conscious and reading about elections in East Africa on his iPhone. This was clearly a very high functioning old guy, and Dr. Gupta was curious as to what shape he’d find his brain in. What do you think he saw in there? Here’s what: a shriveled-up 93-year-old brain. As Dr. Gupta puts it, this aged brain “had almost no correlation to his function… We think of our organs as having this natural deterioration, and they do, but that doesn’t mean they can’t function like they did when you were much younger.” The incredible plasticity of the brain well into old age is something new research is revealing. I don’t know about you, but it makes me feel a lot better about the prospect of aging.

But that’s just brain function. What holds most of us back from being late bloomers is psychological. Our culture tells us that we become irrelevant as we age, and that the time for achieving big successes or making great contributions has passed. The insidious part of this is that while it’s demonstrably false – there are plenty of examples of highly successful late bloomers – the fact that our culture believes it means that it has the power of truth in our lives. Dr. Nell Painter, a successful and lauded historian, found this out when she decided to get an MFA in art in her 60s. As she describes in her memoir, Old in Art School, her classmates, all many decades younger, weren’t even interested in evaluating her work during critique sessions, because her much advanced age created in them an “assumption of my inconsequence” (Dr. Painter is also Black, which added another dimension to this dismissal). Being a late bloomer means facing our own irrelevance in the eyes of the culture at large. As Dr. Painter’s experience shows, having the potential to be a “successful” artist is associated with being young. Indeed, potential is seen as equivalent with youth. And if you don’t have potential, i.e. youth, what’s the point?

Let’s take a closer look at potential. While youth is infused with hopes and dreams for the future, maturity is about having already arrived. As we mature and age, we are no longer looking at our potential as a future destination. We enter the era of living our potential. Knowing this is the key to being a late bloomer. When we start learning something new at an older age, we can leapfrog right over that stage where potential is something we are only ever grasping at and step right into the heart of it. The potential of youth is in the eyes of beholders, the gatekeepers who judge your progress and your possibility of future success. The potential of older age is something you possess and have sovereignty over. Put succinctly, you can do away with giving a shit what the gatekeepers and naysayers think. You’ve earned your right to define yourself and what your potential looks like.

In his book Late Bloomers, Rich Karlgaard lists the strengths of late bloomers, including insight, resilience, compassion, and wisdom, but one stands out to me more than others: late bloomers maintain a youthful and vigorous curiosity. Curiosity often appears as whims, and late bloomers tend to take those whims seriously, regardless of how “important” they seem or - and this is important - their future potential. Late bloomers know the secret, that pursuing your curiosity for the sake of appeasing it is what blooming is all about. The potential is in the pursuit. Something will come out of it, assuredly, because older people have more creative and wide-ranging cognitive resources at their disposal, but you can let that part develop naturally as you go along.

Being a late bloomer is a boon because there is less future ahead. It gives us reason to focus on what really matters about our activities: the process of actually doing them. Whereas a young “aspiring” artist may have big dreams about a career trajectory of prestige gallery showings and art-world esteem, an older artist can more easily understand and embrace the idea that it’s the practice that makes you an artist. And this goes for any activity you choose as your late-bloomer project. You no longer have the luxury of time to be “aspiring.” You must simply be. Being a late bloomer isn’t something you might be later if you accomplished something at some point. You must see yourself as a late bloomer now, as already having arrived there.