Late Bloomers and Masters: A Path to Success Remains Open
It’s not too late for you to master a career, skill, or lifestyle
Happy Labor Day! Today begins are book study/review of Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. This week we cover the introductory chapter.
Do you feel it’s too late to master a new skill or become a new type of person? Maybe you think it’s too late to change careers. Perhaps you had an idea of the trajectory for your life at a younger age, but now you look back and see you’re in a completely different place than your more youthful self imagined. Maybe you’re right where you thought you’d be.
Regardless, a common misconception about the success of elites, experts, and professionals is the innate skills and obsessions they seem to be born with. Since they seem to have been “special” all their lives in a way the rest of us weren’t, we’re prone to limit ourselves and the possibilities of what we can become or accomplish based on the past trajectory of our lives. Or worse, as a coach, I witness parents who sometimes push their kids hard and early to master a specific skill or trade as soon as possible so they can become masters later in life.
Though there are examples of kids pushed early in life, like Tiger Woods (as David Epstein points out in the introduction of his book Range), most champions, specialists, and experts don’t figure out their ability to master a sport, craft, or career early in life. And that’s great news for you and me.
Epstein counters the Tiger Woods golf savant legend with the relatively ordinary childhood story of Roger Federer—a 20-time Grand Slam tennis singles champion who recently retired. Federer’s mother was a tennis coach but never coached him early. She never even pushed him to play the sport. Federer’s parents allowed him to explore all kinds of sports as a kid. Later, his amassing of learned skills helped him develop varying hand-eye-coordinated skills. When Roger finally started focusing on tennis later in his formative years, his parents began to push him—to stop taking tennis so seriously. But the more his parents pushed him to relax, the more obsessed he grew to dominate the sport. He eventually dominated the sport well into his mid-thirties while other players his age were retiring.
Study after study (including the entirety of Epstein’s book, Range) suggests that late specialization is more crucial to success than early hyper-specialization, as detailed in Epstein’s introduction. But more attention is paid to the early hyper-specialists like Tiger Woods. Their stories are fascinating, perhaps because a child mastering a skill with maturity and seriousness is more entertaining than the unremarkable path the rest of us take. But we aren’t destined for mediocrity if our life course is a common way of life. It just means we’ve accumulated skills, analysis, and knowledge throughout the range of our experiences in life that are ready for refinement and specialization.
Yet even when we begin attempting to specialize in a new career, sport, or lifestyle, the progression of our success may not always look or feel so efficient at first. In Epstein’s research, he discovers that “The most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.”
I guess this is why, as a track and field coach, I often want to see athletes fail in their training. Coaches like me like their athletes participating in other sports and learning different skill sets to diversify how they compete, even when it’s frustrating or they aren’t the best at what they do. I want to see athletes giving maximum effort and falling short so we can identify their weaknesses and build them for competition when it matters.
Difficulties and setbacks are inevitable when developing new skills. We should embrace them. Failing is not a character flaw. Failing is always an opportunity to grow. So, if multidisciplinary engagement doesn’t look great for us at first, it can be what helps us specialize in whatever we want to do later in life (or today because there’s no better time than the present).
So whether you’re trying a new skill, career, lifestyle habit, or just thinking about it, don’t let the prospect that you’re not a master at it keep you from trying. I’m as guilty as almost everyone else of succumbing to this thinking. But we need not let our past determine what our futures can become. It’s not too late to develop something new. There’s no better time to start than now.