Big Breakthroughs Come in Your Late 30s

http://m.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/big-breakthroughs-come-in-your-late-30s/283858/

by ghosh • 12 years ago

384 106 12 years ago

m.theatlantic.com

callmeed• 12 years ago

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

noname123• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

Sadly, twitch gaming is not something that improves with age. Think more strategic gaming (and no, Dota2 doesn't count).

jupiterjaz• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

What about Bukowski, that was working in a post office, til 49 years old, when he dropped out to start his first novel ?!

vinceguidry2• 12 years ago

He didn't 'drop out', he was incentivized to the tune of $100 a month for life to quit.

lkrubner• 12 years 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.

phillmv2• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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."

jballanc4• 12 years ago

Einstein, in particular, is an interesting case. He was 26 when he had his annus mirabilis (1905) in which he published 5 ground-breaking papers in physics, including the Special Theory of Relativity.

However it took another 11 years until he was able to grasp enough of the mathematics to finally formulate the General Theory of Relativity in 1916, at age 37. Of course, if you're going to use statistics from Nobel Prize winners' works, you have to keep in mind that Einstein won not for the General Theory nor the Special Theory of relativity with which we usually associate him. He won for his paper on the photoelectric effect, one of the other papers he published in 1905...at age 26.

Edit: It's probably also worth pointing out that, someday in the future, it's not inconceivable that we may eventually place the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox in the same league as Relativity. That paper was published in 1935, when Einstein was already 56 years old. If it is not currently considered of the same merit as Relativity, that is only because we still don't have a good handle on the full implications of that work. (And, yes, I realize that ultimately EPR will likely prove to be wrong, but a great scientist teaches as much by being wrong as by being right.)

elteto• 12 years ago

Could you elaborate a little on why is (or might be in the future) the EPR paradox as important as Relativity?

mason240• 12 years ago

I would buy you HN gold if I could.

jseliger• 12 years 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.

Galenson's book Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity discusses this point extensively, in addition to being a pleasure to read on its own.

elliptic• 12 years ago

This raises the question - are there fields in tech or software engineering that are mostly empirical or mostly conceptual?

z92• 12 years ago

mostly conceptual: Computer Science.

mostly empirical: Programming.

shiven• 12 years ago

Precisely the ideas discussed by S. Chandrasekhar (White dwarfs; Chandra X-ray telescope) in his book "Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivation in Science"[0]. The book draws a large number of examples from (astro)physicists, but he also expands into Beethoven and Shakespeare among others.

A must read if such ideas interest you. And even if they don't, it is an awesomely well written book, well worth a read!

[0]http://www.amazon.com/Truth-Beauty-Aesthetics-Motivations-Sc...

quickpost• 12 years ago

The conceptualist // empiricists seems to apply heavily to me as well, in my entrepreneurial career. Despite thinking I have good business concepts down, I've learned far more through practice than I have through books. For me, I have to apply something to truly learn it.

phillmv2• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

coldtea2• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

Flaw Of The Averages.

chubot• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

dhfjgkrgjg• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

basicallydan2• 12 years ago

I do! We've been doing it in the UK for decades, very few people complain about it.

coldtea2• 12 years ago

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.

That's why you don't ask brain dead people.

thewarrior• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

Keats similarly wrote all of his extant poetry between 19 and 25. (He died at 25.)

to3m• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

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

onmydesk• 12 years 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_• 12 years 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.

vidarh4• 12 years ago

When talking about people who have their breaks in later 30's etc., chances are high they've had kids already.

ForHackernews• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

einhverfr2• 12 years ago

Unlike the other respondants, I am going to be supportive but still a bit critical. They do have a point that when "cool" is too narrowly defined, everyone misses out.

But that being said, what is missing in our society right now is a more reasonable form of this, which says "invest in your children's businesses, help them achieve success, and see your children's economic life as your retirement plan." Your kids may have their own lives, and very often they are going to get to define what 'cool' means. But if there is mutual support there, they are far more likely to succeed.

mcantelon• 12 years ago

Yeah, a lot of motivation comes from recognizing that you've got a finite amount of time left to work with. Plus I think when you're older you may better understand the need for patience and for strategy (and have the experience needed to effectively strategize).

JoeAltmaier3• 12 years ago

But Thoreau also wrote of the value of living in the moment. So don't get too worked up about the destination.

run4_too• 12 years ago

That's not contradictory to what the quote says. In fact, "do it now" is pretty much exactly what he's saying when he says most men die with the song still in their heart.

Moot point however, the quote is a missed one. He never said this.

sobes2• 12 years 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

bhicks005• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

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

vidarh4• 12 years 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.

jlgaddis• 12 years ago

Wow, Trumpet Winsock. That brings back memories.

(For the "youngsters", this was how you got an IP connection to the Internet on Windows "back in the day".)

moens• 12 years ago

I created 4 reasonably successful companies in my life, and about 12 that fell flat. The first success was in high school. But the first million+ was at age 34. At first I thought the article was a little too academic, but... honestly it fits my life pattern. So... there you have it.

bananamansion• 12 years ago

12 fell flat? what made you keep going?

CmonDev• 12 years ago

Did you start as a developer?

kev009• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

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

ja30278• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

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

loceng• 12 years ago

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

kimonos• 12 years ago

Great post! I agree with this!

arikrak• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

flibertgibit• 12 years 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.

sobes2• 12 years 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. :)

dredmorbius5• 12 years 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

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.ht...

ekm2• 12 years ago

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

facepalm• 12 years ago

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

netcan• 12 years ago

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

sireat• 12 years 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.

Big Breakthroughs Come in Your Late 30s

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