
Middle-aged prodigies: Seven poster children over 40 - fuzzix
http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn21559-middle-age
======
edw519
I love articles like this. It reminds the 99% of us who didn't "hit it big" in
our youth that it's never too late.

Hopefully someday...

"edw519 toiled in obscurity writing software for over 30 years before he hit
it big when his proprietary NFL Play Calling Software enabled the Pittsburgh
Steelers to win 7 consecutive Super Bowls (American football). The string was
only stopped when Paul Allen put together a team to reverse engineer the
software, enabling the Seattle Seahawks to win their first Super Bowl in
2020."

~~~
ryanhuff
While your post was in jest, it is (somewhat) unfortunate that the NFL bans
this sort of technology from the game. I wonder if the top quantitatively
skilled talent would be more highly prized to NFL teams than a top-flight QB.

~~~
philwelch
No way. Playcalling isn't the limiting factor in the NFL. Top teams don't lose
because they fucked up their gameplan — they lose because the receivers drop
passes, the quarterback overthrows, or the linebackers don't tackle low
enough. And what you can do with playcalling is limited or expanded by the
limitations and abilities of your players.

------
hristov
The profile of Raymond Chandler is a bit misleading and over-simplified. It
suggest that he lost his lucrative oil company job due to the depression. That
was not the case.

Chandler is a very good example for the suggestion that one has to try to do
what one loves for a living. He was initially a very successful and well liked
oil company executive. But his own success seemed to cause him unhappiness. He
eventually started drinking showing up late for work, flirting with all women
in the office, etc. Eventually, even though the company owners liked him and
had a lot of respect for his abilities, they had to fire him.

He then returned to a life of poverty trying to hack it as a writer. But
eventually he became the brilliant writer who with Dashiel Hammett basically
defined the noir style. He never quite kicked his alcoholism but he was much
more fulfilled and productive than as an oil company executive.

------
DanielBMarkham
I especially enjoyed Mary Midgley's quote: _"I wrote no books until I was a
good 50, and I'm jolly glad because I didn't know what I thought before then_

I wonder how many of these folks were "big thinkers" just without the proper
stimulus? Or in other words, did most of them come up with various other ideas
throughout their life -- perhaps in various fields -- and it finally just
worked out where all the pieces were in place at the right time? Or did these
people undergo a personality change in their middle years? I suspect the
former. Midgley's and Kroc's stories especially sound like people who were
"accumulating" and working out ideas for many, many years before it finally
gelled, but it's just a guess.

When the 22-year-old hits it big with some idea we all say something like
"Look at that awesome kid! He was born for greatness" but when a 44-year-old
does the same thing, we can no longer use the "he's so special it's no wonder
he succeeded" rationale. Something else is at work.

~~~
epo
Perhaps it just takes a long time to work through the mistakes and mis-steps.
Or perhaps just something as mundane as having the kids grow up thus giving
you more free time.

~~~
kstenerud
Mostly you just look back in slack-jawed amazement at all the silly thoughts,
philosophies, and epiphanies you've had throughout your younger years, and
wonder what your future self will think of your present self.

------
philwelch
While some of these examples are rather remarkable, like the ultramarathoner,
it's kind of a reflection on the media's obsession with youth that this seems
like an oddity now, and I say this as a young person. Probably most serious
achievement in any field will be by older people, just because it takes time
to gain experience, knowledge, and wisdom. What's unusual is people achieving
very much in their 20's, unless they're professional athletes.

------
tzs
Cliff Young would be a good one to add to this list:
<http://www.elitefeet.com/the-legend-of-cliff-young>

More on him here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Young_(athlete)>

Summary: 61 year old sheep farmer, shows up at an 875 km (540 mile) ultra
marathon and enters. No sponsor, no fancy running equipment--he's in overalls
and work boots. He won, setting a new record for the race, knocking almost 2
days off the old record.

~~~
bootload
_"... No sponsor, no fancy running equipment--he's in overalls and work boots.
He won, setting a new record for the race, knocking almost 2 days off the old
record. ..."_

I saw Cliffy Young during that run. I was on a bus on the way to Canberra for
school when we passed him going up a hill. The way he won was by taking very
few rest stops, sleeping at most 2Hrs every 24. I'm pretty sure he had runners
on but did train in gumboots at home.

------
asmithmd1
King Gillette is another patron saint of late bloomers.

While walking around the Boston harbor recently I read the bio of him on a
plaque at the site of the first Gillette plant.

He was a middling salesman when he came up with the idea for disposable
razors. When he was 48 years old he sold 51 razors and 168 blades, 12 years
later he was selling 70 million per year:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Camp_Gillette>

------
amattn
I hate slideshows masquerading as articles. I hate them so much.

\- Raymond Chandler, author

\- Harry Kroto, chemist

\- Anton Bruckner, composer

\- Mary Midgley, author, scientist

\- Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald's

\- Jean Dubuffet, painter

\- Marco Olmo, runner

~~~
DrJokepu
You forgot image 8 of 8, which is an ad.

------
Androsynth
The first thing I thought of when reading this is the 10000 hour rule. These
people didn't come out of nowhere. Most of them appear to have been honing
their craft for a while prior to becoming famous/wealthy (or at least getting
practice in a similar field).

Malcolm Gladwell's article on late bloomers is also relevant
[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all)

~~~
scotch_drinker
I was going to write something similar but I don't think it's most. Of the 7,
only the Nobel Laureate, Ray Kroc and the runner seem to have been working on
their "art" for lack of a better term for years beforehand.

Bruckner and Midgley seem to have at least been in related fields though the
difference between being a lecturer/teacher and an author/composer is more
vast than I think we might think.

Chandler and DuBuffet seem to be the most likely to be deemed prodigies.
Chandler especially having been in a completely different field could be
considered a prodigy.

------
MicahWedemeyer
Each "page" in this multi-page article is literally 1 image, about 50 words of
text, and 3 ads. The article content is fine, but there is no reason it has to
be spread across 7 different pages. Publishers chasing pageview and ad
impression counts make the web a shitty place.

~~~
tnuc
There is an article you can read.

You just need to sign up. And then they send you spam to make you think "I'm
sure I ticked the no email box".

~~~
dailo10
And if you don't want to register, you can use bugmenot to sign in.

------
toddnessa
This article was encouraging. Being over 40 myself, I am very appreciative of
this post and was worth waiting for the page reloads to view all of it. I know
that those at younger ages have more mobility as they often have no families
or real roots established yet. While this is a benefit to them, I am grateful
for those who value the contributions that those a couple of decades older or
more can make.

------
iandanforth
My favorite is Tolkien. The Hobbit was published when he was 45.

To points made by others though he was a professor of English at Oxford for
many years prior and wrote copiously during that time.

~~~
saraid216
Yeah, I wouldn't call Tolkien a middle-aged bloomer. His books were extensions
of what he had already been doing that entire time, AFAIK: the stories were
part stories for his kids and part riffs off his philology work.

I guess you could point at his ambition to create an English mythology as his
middle-aged success, but I'm not sure he was actually successful at that.

------
hncommenter13
Roy Thomson, Canadian founder of what is now Thomson Reuters and the 1st Baron
Thomson of Fleet, was essentially bankrupt in his mid-to-late 30s, having
failed in a number of enterprises. At age 40, he bought the first of the
hundreds of newspapers he eventually would own because it was downstairs from
his fledgling radio station.

[http://www.scotsman.com/news/the-men-who-made-the-
scotsman-p...](http://www.scotsman.com/news/the-men-who-made-the-scotsman-
part-two-1-718332)

------
wslh
Don't forget Rabbi Akiva: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akiva_ben_Joseph>

"A reliable tradition (Ab. R. N. l.c.) narrates that Akiva at the age of
40..."

------
jacques_chester
When he crossed the Rubicon river, Gaius Julius Caesar was 51.

Earlier, when he was 31, Caesar allegedly cried upon seeing a statue, in
Spain, outlining the accomplishments that Alexander the Great had done before
he died at 33.

Great deeds are done at all ages.

The only reason we obsess over the great deeds of the young is because it is
_exceedingly_ rare to achieve greatness during youth.

~~~
run4yourlives
Our society also worships youth like few others in the past have.

~~~
joezydeco
Or, our society has learned how to take advantage of the energy and enthusiasm
of youth before those people get wise enough to figure it out.

------
lancefisher
That's one thing I love about ultrarunning. The old guys can compete with the
young guys. In what other sport is that possible?

~~~
wazoox
Cycling. (Jens Voigt, 40 y.o., just arrived 2nd at today stage on Paris-Nice).

~~~
run4yourlives
Aren't drugs wonderful? :)

------
Drbble
How old is Edward Kmett? He has been a major force in Haskell (fancy
type/algorithm stuff) in the past few years, but did not start his
contributions around age 20 like many top Haskellers of the past 15 years
(folks who were not on the original committee).

------
pelemele
As a life expectancy is much longer than it was 100 years ago (~30 years
difference - <http://demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/1918/figure2.html>) we will
see more and more "older" people doing stuff which was not imaginable just a
half century back.

~~~
adestefan
Not really. Life expectancy numbers were always skewed by the large number of
childhood deaths. If you lived past 5, you've always had a pretty good chance
of living a long life.

~~~
chronophile
I don't suppose you might have a link to a study to support this statement?
The way variations of this comment always appear without any sort of evidence
or substantiation has made me think that it might me a popular
misconception...

~~~
jonathansizz
Here's the first one I found by searching for 'life expectancy by age'. You
can see that child mortality was indeed very large, but adult mortality has
also declined sharply e.g. a 20-year-old white male today can expect to live
15 years longer than his counterpart in 1900:

<http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html>

------
tsunamifury
I'd like to think that most people are more successful later in life. We
obsess over young prodigies, but many work hard to achieve great things way
past their 40's

------
b_emery
Inspirational quote of the week: "Middle-aged people are arguably the pinnacle
of human evolution: they can do more, earn more and, in short, they run the
world."

------
aresant
40 seems like about the time you've got enough experience under your belt to
build something extraordinary and enough comfort with money (or access to
money) to realize your vision.

Steve Jobs would be an interesting one for this list.

He didn't change digital production history until he was 40 years old w/Toy
Story in 1995.

He didn't return to Apple until 1997 and turn it into the world's largest
consumer electronic's business.

Everything before that was marginal by comparison.

~~~
gruseom
The personal computer was not "marginal".

~~~
drats
It's true they made a decent contribution early on, but I hope you aren't
implying they invented the personal computer.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_computer#History>

~~~
gruseom
Apple up to the Mac is practically the prototype of the Silicon Valley young-
founders-in-a-garage startup. To depict Steve Jobs as a late bloomer who did
nothing big before 40 is silly.

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chbrown
Hey pg, why don't the guidelines have something about submissions behind
paywalls / sign-in-walls?

~~~
tfm
An interesting read is an interesting read, there are occasionally nuggets of
gold even on the most poorly designed slideshow ad trap. I like to imagine
that the "inverted pyramid" technique frontloads the best stuff on the landing
page and this discussion page (a man can dream, can't he?).

Etiquette might suggest a heads up in the submitted title (paywall, slideshow,
obnoxious popover ad that breaks the article on mobile, &c). If the article is
in fact paywalled then it's unlikely to rise far enough to get in many
peoples' way.

------
larrywright
As someone who just turned 40, I resent the use of the term "middle-aged" here
:)

