It's not too late to be a genius

In the web/tech world (and many other domains), it seems the Big Ideas belong to the Young. Barely 27, David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails framework, has changed the world and given the Ruby language a reason to live. Then there's Caterina and Stewart, creators of Flickr. And don't get me started on the creators of the blog service I'm entering this post in...Six Apart's Ben and Mena.

Then there's Larry and Sergey, the "boys" behind Google, and Jeff Bezos was just 30 when he founded Amazon. At O'Reilly's first Foo Camp, I learned later that the young guy who kept bugging Bert about games was Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent (named to the Time 100 Most Influential People list).

If you're over 40, is there still hope? Could you be a late bloomer like Doc Searls who said in response to being called an "A-List Gatekeeper":
"Nearly all of what I'm known for I've done since I was fifty."

Apparently yes. Frank Lloyd Wright did his best work at 70. Alfred Hitchcock got it all together just shy of 60. Beethoven's 9th? 50's. You get the idea.

An economics researcher named David Galenson (a late-bloomer himself) plodded along for years and eventually discovered a way to reverse-engineer creativity... finding that creative innovators come in two flavors: Conceptual and Experimental. Conceptual innovators, it seems, get their Big Ideas out early, many peaking out before they leave their 30's. They can change an industry (sometimes the world) almost overnight. Experimental innovators are those who quietly crunch along, doing creative trial and error but staying largely under the radar until much later, often having no visibility until their 50's or beyond.

There are, of course, some Big Idea people who've managed to start early and NOT peak out. Unlike many of their Conceptual counterparts, these folks didn't flame out after a spectacularly run through their twenties. My publisher and friend Tim O'Reilly is certainly one of those. Guy Kawasaki is another... as Apple's original Mac evangelist, he wrote a bestseller Selling the Dream (a classic, still useful!) in 1992 and just kept on going. And from what I know of David HH, he might just be getting warmed up. I reckon we'll be hearing (and using) more of his Big Ideas for years or decades to come.

All this is from an article (that most of you have probably already read) by one of my favorite people, Dan Pink, author of the life/business-changing book A Whole New Mind. The article titled, "What Kind of Genius Are You", appeared in the July issue of Wired, and you can read it online here.

I skimmed the article when it first came out, saving it for a long coffee break, but lost the magazine in the shuffle of moving and travelling, until this morning. I'll never be a genius, and given that the chances of me being in the "young/conceptual" camp are pretty much zero, I still found the article inspiring. There's hope for me-- and all of us who are past our 30's--still.

At the end of the article, he talks about how we need to make sure that the brash and bold aren't stifled by, say, their managers (or work policies too inflexible to handle a creative genius). So, yeah, another "duh" thing (one that all managers acknowledge but few really DO). He doesn't leave out the slow-starters, though, because he adds:

"But we should also leave room for those of us who have, er, avoided peaking too early, whose most innovative days lie ahead... we need to look at that more halting, less certain fellow and perhaps not write him off too early, give him a chance to ride the upward curve of middle age.
Of course, not every unaccomplished 65-year old is some undiscovered experimental innovator. This is a universal theory of creativity, not a Viagra for sagging baby boomer self-esteem. It's no justification for laziness or procrastination or indifference.
But it might bolster the resolve of the relentlessly curious, the constantly tinkering, the dedicated tortoises undaunted by the blur of the hares."

So... to all the hares out there... watch your back! We're coming. Just really, really s l o w l y. And we have an advantage today that previous generations didn't... the internet. Blogs. The opportunity to reach people online--across the globe--with nothing more than a free blogging account. See, there was actually more to Doc Searl's quote than I put at the beginning. What he really said was:

"Nearly all of what I'm known for I've done since I was fifty. And without the Net, there would hardly be any of it."

It's never too late to be creative. It's never too late to make a difference. Just...keep...trying s***. And remember the quote from the 90-something woman who, when asked about her regrets said, "If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken up the violin at 60. I'd have been playing for almost 40 years by now..."

So, what kind of genius are YOU?

(Whatever type you are--conceptual or experimental--note the computer both David and Doc are using in the pictures. I'm just sayin'...)

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Photo credit: pictures were taken by James Duncan Davidson who, uh, managed to create the Tomcat Java web container (and drove the astonishing effort that led Sun to donate it to Apache as open source), and Ant, all around the age of 30. Not content with being merely a tech genius, he recently launched a second part-time career as a pro photographer. Bastard! ; )