I found another good read from Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker, this time on how late bloomers differ from “natural” geniuses.  As with his piece on innovation, there are hints of his latest book, Outliers, as he presents Mark Twain and Paul Cezanne as examples of legendary talents who took a longer, less celebrated path to success.  I would argue that most of us have to go this way, improving over years or decades through hard work and experimentation.

Here’s how the economics would support the case for late bloomers:

A painting done by Picasso in his mid-twenties was worth, he found, an average of four times as much as a painting done in his sixties. For Cézanne, the opposite was true. The paintings he created in his mid-sixties were valued fifteen times [emphasis mine] as highly as the paintings he created as a young man. The freshness, exuberance, and energy of youth did little for Cézanne. He was a late bloomer—and for some reason in our accounting of genius and creativity we have forgotten to make sense of the Cézannes of the world.

As our attention span gets shorter and our patience for long-term investment dwindles, it’s good to remind ourselves of this lesson.