Late Bloomers The Hidden Strengths of Learning and Succeeding at Your Own Pace

A groundbreaking exploration of how finding one's way later in life can be an advantage to long-term achievement and happiness.. “What Yogi Berra observed about a baseball game—it ain't over till it's over—is true about life and [Late Bloomers] is the ultimate proof of this. . . . It’s a keeper.”—Forbes. We live in a society where kids and parents are obsessed with early achievement from getting perfect scores on SATs to getting into Ivy League colleges to landing an amazing job at Google or Facebook—or even better creating a start-up with the potential to be the next Google Facebook or Uber. We see coders and entrepreneurs become millionaires or billionaires before age thirty and feel we are failing if we are not one of them.. Late bloomers on the other hand are under-valued—in popular culture by educators and employers and even unwittingly by parents. Yet the fact is a lot of us—most of us—do not explode out of the gates in life. We have to discover our passions and talents and gifts. That was true for author Rich Karlgaard who had a mediocre academic career at Stanford (which he got into by a fluke) and after graduating worked as a dishwasher and night watchman before finding the inner motivation and drive that ultimately led him to start up a high-tech magazine in Silicon Valley and eventually to become the publisher of Forbes magazine.. There is a scientific explanation for why so many of us bloom later in life. The executive function of our brains doesn’t mature until age twenty-five and later for some. In fact our brain’s capabilities peak at different ages. We actually experience multiple periods of blooming in our lives. Moreover late bloomers enjoy hidden strengths because they take their time to discover their way in life—strengths coveted by many employers and partners—including curiosity insight compassion resilience and wisdom.. Based on years of research personal experience interviews with neuroscientists psychologists and countless people at different stages of their careers Late Bloomers reveals how and when we achieve our full potential.. Praise for Late Bloomers. “The underlying message that we should ‘consider a kinder clock for human development’ is a compelling one.”—Financial Times. “Late Bloomers spoke to me deeply as a parent of two millennials and as a coach to many new college grads (the children of my friends and associates). It’s a bracing tonic for the anxiety they are swimming through with a facts-based approach to help us all calm down.”—Robin Wolaner founder of Parenting magazine