Is It Too Late?

I remember back at school, we had a seminar where a guest speaker started his speech by declaring: "Anyone who has ever done anything significant in life started before the age of 16. By then, they had already exhibited brilliance of some sort." I was three months away from turning 16 at the time. I remember panicking — trying to whip up a miracle in some field, to establish a competitive advantage, to be an outlier of some kind. I began counting the days and hours until eventually that milestone passed and I stopped caring about it.

Yet the idea stayed. The earlier you fixate yourself on a certain path, the more likely you are to have a competitive advantage and become an outlier. I constantly battled to "find my calling" and create something substantial. Every stage of life that passed felt like it might already be too late to start something new.

We see similar mindsets everywhere — from parents building hectic schedules filled with abacus classes, piano lessons, and coaching classes from an early age to ensure their children don't fall behind. The assumption: get a head start, and you'll have a competitive advantage.

Yet most of these "head starts" appear to do the opposite.

When Sloboda and a colleague conducted a study with students at a British boarding school that recruited from around the country — where admission rested entirely on audition — they were surprised to find that the students classified as exceptional came from families that didn't provide any sort of head start. Compared to less accomplished students, the exceptional ones had not started playing at a younger age, were less likely to have had an instrument in the home early on, had taken fewer lessons before entering the school, and had practiced less overall before arriving — often considerably less.

Why starting late can be an advantage

This phenomenon is explored at length in the book Range by David Epstein. Several reasons emerge for why people with impactful, fulfilling careers often start late:

1. Self-discovery: They are able to explore several alternative paths, switch across domains a couple of times, and truly discover the careers best suited to their individual personalities. This process of self-discovery can extend well into later life depending on your circumstances. Some who discover their calling early have had the privilege of testing various domains and finding a match. But many of us don't get that opportunity earlier due to socioeconomic conditions — meaning the process of genuine self-discovery begins much later.
2. Finding grit: The most important factor defining our ability to persevere toward a passion. It's unlikely that a career you fixate on in your teens — chosen from a narrow set of options — is the one you'll be perfectly matched with for life. Much of our personality evolves between 18 and our late twenties, meaning that later in life, with more exploration, we're far more likely to find a career we can pursue with genuine, sustained passion.
3. Critical thinking: People who specialise early tend to spend an exorbitant amount of time within a very narrow field. As a result, they can become accustomed to a single way of thinking — which limits their ability to draw on ideas from elsewhere. People who start late and explore broadly tend to develop stronger critical thinking because they've been exposed to many different ways of framing and solving problems. The breadth of experience becomes the edge.

The fear of starting late is almost always more damaging than the late start itself. The people who've made the most meaningful contributions to their fields are rarely the ones who got there first — they're the ones who got there with the most range.