Middle-aged prodigies: Seven poster children over 40

I love articles like this. It reminds the 99% of us who didn't "hit it big" in our youth that it's never too late.

Hopefully someday...

"edw519 toiled in obscurity writing software for over 30 years before he hit it big when his proprietary NFL Play Calling Software enabled the Pittsburgh Steelers to win 7 consecutive Super Bowls (American football). The string was only stopped when Paul Allen put together a team to reverse engineer the software, enabling the Seattle Seahawks to win their first Super Bowl in 2020."

The profile of Raymond Chandler is a bit misleading and over-simplified. It suggest that he lost his lucrative oil company job due to the depression. That was not the case.

Chandler is a very good example for the suggestion that one has to try to do what one loves for a living. He was initially a very successful and well liked oil company executive. But his own success seemed to cause him unhappiness. He eventually started drinking showing up late for work, flirting with all women in the office, etc. Eventually, even though the company owners liked him and had a lot of respect for his abilities, they had to fire him.

He then returned to a life of poverty trying to hack it as a writer. But eventually he became the brilliant writer who with Dashiel Hammett basically defined the noir style. He never quite kicked his alcoholism but he was much more fulfilled and productive than as an oil company executive.

I especially enjoyed Mary Midgley's quote: "I wrote no books until I was a good 50, and I'm jolly glad because I didn't know what I thought before then

I wonder how many of these folks were "big thinkers" just without the proper stimulus? Or in other words, did most of them come up with various other ideas throughout their life -- perhaps in various fields -- and it finally just worked out where all the pieces were in place at the right time? Or did these people undergo a personality change in their middle years? I suspect the former. Midgley's and Kroc's stories especially sound like people who were "accumulating" and working out ideas for many, many years before it finally gelled, but it's just a guess.

When the 22-year-old hits it big with some idea we all say something like "Look at that awesome kid! He was born for greatness" but when a 44-year-old does the same thing, we can no longer use the "he's so special it's no wonder he succeeded" rationale. Something else is at work.

While some of these examples are rather remarkable, like the ultramarathoner, it's kind of a reflection on the media's obsession with youth that this seems like an oddity now, and I say this as a young person. Probably most serious achievement in any field will be by older people, just because it takes time to gain experience, knowledge, and wisdom. What's unusual is people achieving very much in their 20's, unless they're professional athletes.

Cliff Young would be a good one to add to this list: http://www.elitefeet.com/the-legend-of-cliff-young

More on him here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Young_(athlete)

Summary: 61 year old sheep farmer, shows up at an 875 km (540 mile) ultra marathon and enters. No sponsor, no fancy running equipment--he's in overalls and work boots. He won, setting a new record for the race, knocking almost 2 days off the old record.

King Gillette is another patron saint of late bloomers.

While walking around the Boston harbor recently I read the bio of him on a plaque at the site of the first Gillette plant.

He was a middling salesman when he came up with the idea for disposable razors. When he was 48 years old he sold 51 razors and 168 blades, 12 years later he was selling 70 million per year:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Camp_Gillette

I hate slideshows masquerading as articles. I hate them so much.

- Raymond Chandler, author

- Harry Kroto, chemist

- Anton Bruckner, composer

- Mary Midgley, author, scientist

- Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald's

- Jean Dubuffet, painter

- Marco Olmo, runner

The first thing I thought of when reading this is the 10000 hour rule. These people didn't come out of nowhere. Most of them appear to have been honing their craft for a while prior to becoming famous/wealthy (or at least getting practice in a similar field).

Malcolm Gladwell's article on late bloomers is also relevant http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_...

Each "page" in this multi-page article is literally 1 image, about 50 words of text, and 3 ads. The article content is fine, but there is no reason it has to be spread across 7 different pages. Publishers chasing pageview and ad impression counts make the web a shitty place.

This article was encouraging. Being over 40 myself, I am very appreciative of this post and was worth waiting for the page reloads to view all of it. I know that those at younger ages have more mobility as they often have no families or real roots established yet. While this is a benefit to them, I am grateful for those who value the contributions that those a couple of decades older or more can make.

My favorite is Tolkien. The Hobbit was published when he was 45.

To points made by others though he was a professor of English at Oxford for many years prior and wrote copiously during that time.

Roy Thomson, Canadian founder of what is now Thomson Reuters and the 1st Baron Thomson of Fleet, was essentially bankrupt in his mid-to-late 30s, having failed in a number of enterprises. At age 40, he bought the first of the hundreds of newspapers he eventually would own because it was downstairs from his fledgling radio station.

http://www.scotsman.com/news/the-men-who-made-the-scotsman-p...

Don't forget Rabbi Akiva: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akiva_ben_Joseph

"A reliable tradition (Ab. R. N. l.c.) narrates that Akiva at the age of 40..."

When he crossed the Rubicon river, Gaius Julius Caesar was 51.

Earlier, when he was 31, Caesar allegedly cried upon seeing a statue, in Spain, outlining the accomplishments that Alexander the Great had done before he died at 33.

Great deeds are done at all ages.

The only reason we obsess over the great deeds of the young is because it is exceedingly rare to achieve greatness during youth.

That's one thing I love about ultrarunning. The old guys can compete with the young guys. In what other sport is that possible?

How old is Edward Kmett? He has been a major force in Haskell (fancy type/algorithm stuff) in the past few years, but did not start his contributions around age 20 like many top Haskellers of the past 15 years (folks who were not on the original committee).

As a life expectancy is much longer than it was 100 years ago (~30 years difference - http://demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/1918/figure2.html) we will see more and more "older" people doing stuff which was not imaginable just a half century back.

I'd like to think that most people are more successful later in life. We obsess over young prodigies, but many work hard to achieve great things way past their 40's

Inspirational quote of the week: "Middle-aged people are arguably the pinnacle of human evolution: they can do more, earn more and, in short, they run the world."

40 seems like about the time you've got enough experience under your belt to build something extraordinary and enough comfort with money (or access to money) to realize your vision.

Steve Jobs would be an interesting one for this list.

He didn't change digital production history until he was 40 years old w/Toy Story in 1995.

He didn't return to Apple until 1997 and turn it into the world's largest consumer electronic's business.

Everything before that was marginal by comparison.

Hey pg, why don't the guidelines have something about submissions behind paywalls / sign-in-walls?

As someone who just turned 40, I resent the use of the term "middle-aged" here :)