3 subtle traits of successful late bloomers

Katharine Graham became the CEO of the Washington Post Company – a major publishing business that owned radio and television stations, as well as Newsweek and the Washington Post – one summer afternoon in 1962, at the age of forty-five, when her husband shot himself. She had no idea what was going to happen. For most of her life, she had been so denigrated and mocked by her mother and husband that she lacked the confidence to dress herself for a party, let alone believe herself capable of running a major corporation. Despite the fact that her father had owned the Post, and nurtured her talent, she believed that running a business was never in her blood. She said that when she bought a house in her late twenties, she did not know the difference between income and capital. She was obsessed by news and politics but bored by advertising and balance sheets. And so, when she woke up from a nap that August afternoon to find her husband – alcoholic, manic depressive, adulterous, verbally abusive – shot dead, Katharine Graham faced a transformative moment. For the six months before Phil Graham died, Katharine had worried that he would take the Post away from her, after he started a bitter-minded legal attempt to take control of the company. In her grief, she faced a challenge. She could either run the business herself or let it go out of the family. She was advised to sell. She declined.

Katharine Graham went on to become one of the most successful CEOs of the twentieth century, and one of the few women of her time to hold so much commercial and political power.

To the people around her – and perhaps to herself – Katharine Graham’s success as a CEO came out of the blue. She had no training in business. She lacked confidence. But she had everything a late bloomer needs to succeed. She didn’t come out of the blue at all. She had just been overlooked. Her talents were always there, but they were unappreciated.

Katharine Graham never lacked the qualities she needed for success. What was missing was opportunity. In among the long years of self-doubt, there were many flashes of the steel, signals of the character that would later see her acclaimed as one of the most powerful people in Washington and one of the most successful CEOs in the United States, in whose company Warren Buffett confidently invested and whose salons became essential attendance for new presidents. From her abusers, she drew resilience. From her elite background she had acquired the skills for success. Circumstances that might have crushed other people didn’t quite crush Katharine Graham.

Graham’s story exemplifies many of the ways in which late bloomers flourish. Because she was a woman, she wasn’t going to be just given the opportunity to run the company. In a perverse, tragic way, she got a lucky break. But she was prepared to take that break. She was well educated, knew the newspaper business in detail, had been acquainted with the Post from her childhood. She was networked with the right people and learned from the good influences of her upbringing and education. Above all, she was resilient. Persistence is a perpetual theme of late blooming, and Katharine Graham persisted and persisted and persisted, no matter what. She shows us that simply deciding to act when faced with a challenge can reveal new depths of capability. The more she did, the more capable she became. ‘Do your work,’ said Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘and you shall reinforce yourself.’

This book is going to examine the factors that made Katharine Graham – and others like her, in fields ranging from painting to entrepreneurship – a late bloomer, so that we can better understand what a late bloomer is and how we might find more of them.

Graham’s life pivoted on a single tragic moment. But she chose to make the switch, from one life to another. By deciding to own the Washington Post Company, rather than sell it, she chose to move from the drawing room to the boardroom. This wasn’t so much a transition as a translocation. It was as if Fate snapped its fingers and she found herself in strange new surroundings.

How then did she become one of the most successful CEOs of the twentieth century?

The answer can be found in a recent study of the careers of scientists, film directors and artists. This study, which was conducted by academics at Northwestern University, looked at hot streaks in people’s careers – intense periods of high achievement, lasting a decade or more. What conditions have to be present for a hot streak to occur? The study found that before the hot streak begins there is an exploration phase, when new ideas are gathered, which is followed by a period of exploitation, when those new ideas are turned into original and impactful work.

This is similar to the explore/exploit dynamic, an idea from computer science, which says that to make the best decisions we should find the correct balance between gathering information (exploring our options) and making the most of what we know (exploiting that information). To make the best decisions, we need to balance exploration and exploitation.

What the research on artists, filmmakers, and scientists found was not that either exploration or exploitation alone was critical to a hot streak: it was the transition from explore to exploit that mattered. Exploring before exploiting means you can discover the most productive ideas and expand your creative possibilities. What matters is the switch.

Too much exploration can be risky: you end up as a dabbler, a dilettante. Too much exploitation can be boring: you don’t discover enough new information to do interesting, original work. To have a hot streak, a burst of your best work, you need to switch from explore to exploit. Importantly, these findings were robust whether the hot streak came early in a career or late. You can make the switch later in your career and still see the same effect.

This broad pattern, of shifting from exploring to exploiting, can be observed in the lives of late bloomers.

Like Katharine Graham, most late bloomers go through these two stages. First, they take a long and winding road, an essentially unplanned career path. Then, they get the opportunity for success through some combination of the right people, the right place and the right time. Their network, the culture they move to, a personal transformation – or some combination of these – take the disparate experiences of the first stage and turn them into the focused output of the second stage. They make the switch from explore to exploit and enter a hot streak. They just happen to do it later than their peers.

Late bloomers rarely take conventional career paths to success; if they did, perhaps they would not be late. Their progress is punctuated and disrupted, not smooth and steady. In this stage, their careers are often either dormant or patchwork, made of seemingly disparate parts. This might look listless, directionless or inefficient: rather than working towards a specific goal, late bloomers prepare for the unknown, the unexpected, the unstated. As with the explore mode, this stage has many influences, and what eventually triggers their transition to success might not be the most obvious or most expected thing. The idea that gets exploited is rarely the most popular, mostly highly cited or most recently discovered idea. It’s the most interesting.

Second, late bloomers find their niche or opportunity – some turn in their luck, some discovery, some change in their circumstances comes along and makes them a channel for their talents. They get direction, focus, challenge, resources, support, opportunity. This is when they exploit the capabilities and preparation from the first stage. We shall see, again and again, the importance of preparing for your luck – chance really does favor the prepared mind.

This second stage has three conditions, which are not all present in all cases, but which are reasonably consistent: right people, right place, right time. To understand how late bloomers leave the long and winding road and arrive at the place where they achieve so much, how they switch from explore to exploit, we need to look at their networks, the culture they live and work in, and the transformational moments in their lives, or their crisis points.

What we will see is that weak ties – the phrase sociologists use to describe people we are only slightly acquainted with – are the people who can change our prospects, but only if they are influential. Good networking is not about knowing all the best people, but the few who can be credible and persuasive to the people we need to reach.

Personal transformation happens through cultural immersion, sampling the world and changing our surroundings. In new circumstances, gradually sampling our way into a new mode of thinking, living or working, we can change our opportunities, perhaps even change ourselves.

Moments of crisis have to be taken advantage of, not ignored or suffered through, whether that’s a personal tragedy, a moment of inspiration, or a gradual attrition of your will, causing dissatisfaction that culminates in desperation to change. Sometimes there are good reasons to have a midlife crisis, not to accept a slump but to use it as a pivot point.

As we see examples of late bloomers making these transitions across various fields of endeavor, three characteristics will recur:

• Persistent. Though they often don’t work towards a specific goal, neither do late bloomers lavish their life away on useless trifles, in Samuel Johnson’s phrase. They persist in following their interests and ambitions; they are unable to let it go, but, sometimes by necessity, sometimes by choice, they have to be flexible about how and when this persistence accrues into a tangible achievement or accomplishment.
• Earnest. Late bloomers are serious, perhaps intense, obsessive, occasionally eccentric, volatile, or weird. Not infrequently, the people around them don’t quite understand who they are capable of being. Their earnestness can make them seem strange, off-putting, and makes it difficult to see how and where their talent could flourish: their capability often hides in plain sight.
• Quiet. Their ambitions are usually secret, or unknown to themselves for a long time. They pursue their interests quietly. Their ability and confidence grow with experience. It might be quite late in the day when they realize that their capabilities actually make them fit for some exceptional enterprise.

So, despite the fact that late bloomers are often overlooked, they are often quietly, persistently developing the qualities, on the long and winding road that will eventually lead them to success, when the right opportunity comes along. Importantly, the more active they are in this process, the more likely they are to find that opportunity and turn it to their advantage.