source: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/successs-late-bloomers-motivation/678798/
Notes
全文背诵，还是芒格的那句话，Learn and learn。人生是一场马拉松，很长的。保持热爱，坚持努力，就够了，往往是最简单的事难倒了最聪明的人。
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内在动机
内在动机。我们大多数的学校和工作场所都是围绕外在动机建立的：如果你努力工作，你就会获得好成绩、更好的薪水和绩效奖金。外在激励系统建立在这样的假设之上：虽然工作令人不愉快，但如果你给予人们外部激励，他们就会做出富有成效的反应。
那些服从这些外在奖励制度的人被鼓励养成一种功绩徽章心态。他们善于遵守别人的标准，遵循别人的方法，追求别人的目标。在这类系统中茁壮成长的人善于获得高 GPA——具有自律性，可以在所有科目上获得 A，即使是那些他们不感兴趣的科目。他们对公司来说很有价值，因为他们善于胜任完成摆在他们面前的任何任务。
受内在动机驱动的人不是这样的。他们不善于关注别人告诉他们要注意的事情。正是因为这个原因，温斯顿·丘吉尔是一个穷学生。 “如果我的理性、想象力或兴趣没有发挥作用，我就不会或无法学习，”他在自传《我的早年生活》中写道。
但这样的人很擅长关注他们感兴趣的事情。内在动机的人有强烈的自主需求。他们被自己的好奇心、自己的痴迷所驱使——这种动机的力量使由外在奖励激发的较小动机黯然失色。
具有外在动机的人往往会在青年时期奋力拼搏，那时的工作是取悦老师、老板和其他年长的人，但一旦目标实现，他们就会停止努力工作。如果可以让他们更快地达到目标，他们很可能会走捷径。
更糟糕的是，正如心理学家爱德华·L·德西（Edward L. Deci）等学者的研究表明，如果你从外在奖励人们，你最终可能会削弱人们的内在动机。如果你付钱给孩子们读书，他们可能会在短期内读得更多——但随着时间的推移，他们会认为阅读是一件令人不愉快的工作，最好避免。伦敦经济学院 2009 年的一项研究对 51 家企业的绩效薪酬计划进行了研究，发现财务激励措施“可能会对整体绩效产生负面影响”。
我曾经在著名大学的最后一天问一群学生，哪本书改变了他们过去四年的生活。接下来是一段漫长而尴尬的沉默。最后一个学生说：“你必须明白，我们不是那样读书的。我们只对每本书进行足够的采样以完成课堂教学。”这些学生急于取得足够的成绩以获得奖章，但对任何科目的了解还不够深入，无法进行转变。他们不喜欢学习的过程本身，而如果你想年复一年地不断自我教育，这就是你所需要的——反过来，当世界没有给你回报时，你也需要不断进步。令人印象深刻的成绩和奖项。
相比之下，具有内在动机的人是自我导向的，并且常常沉迷于某些主题或任务。他们发现学习某个科目或从事一项活动是对自己的奖励，因此他们不太可能走捷径。正如文森特·梵高（Vincent van Gogh）——一位大器晚成的人，他一直在努力寻找自己的道路，直到生命的最后两年才创作出大部分标志性作品，直到 37 岁去世——他在给弟弟的信中写道：“我正在寻找。我正在努力。我全心全意地投入其中。”
InDrive 的作者丹尼尔·平克 (Daniel Pink) 认为，当任务是例行公事、无聊和技术性时，外在动机模型效果很好。但他引用了大量研究表明，具有内在动机的人效率更高、更持久，而且不太可能精疲力竭。他们还表现出更高水平的幸福感。平克总结道，从长远来看，“有内在动机的人通常会比寻求奖励的人取得更大的成就。”
文章《生命的秘密：晚熟者的故事》由大卫·布鲁克斯撰写，探讨了晚熟者在生活中的成长与成功。晚熟者通常在中年或更晚才显示出自己的潜力，与早熟者相比，他们的成功往往更具深度与内涵。文章主要围绕两个问题展开：为什么这些人没有早早展现才华？他们具备哪些特质使他们能够在晚年绽放光彩？
文章提出的重点包括：
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晚熟者的特质：晚熟者通常具备不同于早熟者的能力，尤其是对过程的热爱和对学习的持久动力。他们的成功往往建立在不断的试验和学习上。
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内在动机与好奇心：晚熟者往往是由内在动机驱动，具备强烈的好奇心和探索精神。他们在面对工作和学习时，充满兴趣，而非仅为外部奖励而努力。
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适应性与多样化：晚熟者能在早期经历多个职业的探索，这种“多样性好奇心”让他们在事业上实现了跨界整合，最终形成独特的见解和解决方案。
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自我教育能力：许多晚熟者在传统教育体系之外寻找自己的道路，他们的学习过程往往更为深入和持久，能够在年长时实现自我提升。
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生活的试验性：晚熟者倾向于将生活视作一系列实验，通过不断尝试和调整来积累经验，最终在某个领域取得成功。
Origin
Being an ugly duckling in your youth can be the key to becoming a successful swan later in life
年轻时成为丑小鸭可能是以后成为成功天鹅的关键
(Illustration by Ben Kothe)
（本·科特插图）
Paul Cézanne always knew he wanted to be an artist. His father compelled him to enter law school, but after two desultory years he withdrew. In 1861, at the age of 22, he went to Paris to pursue his artistic dreams but was rejected by the École des Beaux-Arts, struggled as a painter, and retreated back to his hometown in the south of France, where he worked as a clerk in his father’s bank.
保罗·塞尚一直知道他想成为一名艺术家。他的父亲强迫他进入法学院，但断断续续的两年后他退学了。 1861年，22岁的他前往巴黎追寻艺术梦想，却被巴黎美术学院拒绝，苦苦当画家，隐居法国南部家乡，在那里当画家。他父亲银行的职员。
He returned to Paris the next year and was turned down again by the École. His paintings were rejected by the Salon de Paris every year from 1864 to 1869. He continued to submit paintings until 1882, but none were accepted. He joined with the Impressionists, many of whose works were also being rejected, but soon stopped showing with them as well.
第二年他回到巴黎，再次被学校拒绝。从1864年到1869年，他的画作每年都被巴黎沙龙拒绝。直到1882年，他继续提交画作，但都没有被接受。他加入了印象派，他们的许多作品也被拒绝，但很快也不再与他们一起展出。
By middle age, he was discouraged. He wrote to a friend, “On this matter I must tell you that the numerous studies to which I devoted myself having produced only negative results, and dreading criticism that is only too justified, I have resolved to work in silence, until the day when I should feel capable of defending theoretically the results of my endeavors.” No Cézanne paintings were put on public display when he was between 46 and 56, the prime years for many artists, including some of Cézanne’s most prominent contemporaries.
到了中年，他已经灰心丧气了。他在给朋友的信中写道：“在这件事上，我必须告诉你，我投入的大量研究只产生了负面结果，并且害怕有理有据的批评，我决心默默工作，直到有一天我应该感到有能力从理论上捍卫我努力的结果。”塞尚 46 岁至 56 岁期间没有任何作品公开展出，这是许多艺术家的黄金时期，包括塞尚的一些最著名的同时代艺术家。
In 1886, when Cézanne was 47, the celebrated writer Émile Zola, the artist’s closest friend since adolescence, published a novel called The Oeuvre. It was about two young men, one who grows up to be a famous author and the other who grows up to be a failed painter and commits suicide. The painter character was based, at least in part, on Cézanne. (“I had grown up almost in the same cradle as my friend, my brother, Paul Cézanne,” Zola would later write in a French newspaper, “in whom one begins to realize only today the touches of genius of a great painter come to nothing.”) Upon publication of the novel, Zola sent a copy to Cézanne, who responded with a short, polite reply. After that, they rarely communicated.
1886 年，塞尚 47 岁，著名作家埃米尔·左拉（Émile Zola）——这位艺术家从青少年时期起最亲密的朋友——出版了一本名为《作品》的小说。这是关于两个年轻人的故事，一个长大后成为著名作家，另一个长大后成为失败的画家并自杀。这位画家的性格至少部分是基于塞尚的。 （“我和我的朋友、我的兄弟保罗·塞尚几乎在同一个摇篮里长大，”佐拉后来在一份法国报纸上写道，“直到今天，人们才开始意识到，一位伟大画家的天才触感已经在他身上显现出来了。”没什么。”）小说出版后，左拉给塞尚寄了一份副本，塞尚给出了简短而礼貌的答复。此后，他们就很少联系了。
Things began to turn around in 1895, when, at the age of 56, Cézanne had his first one-man show. Two years later, one of his paintings was purchased by a museum in Berlin, the first time any museum had shown that kind of interest in his work. By the time he was 60, his paintings had started selling, though for much lower prices than those fetched by Manet or Renoir. Soon he was famous, revered. Fellow artists made pilgrimages to watch him work.
1895 年，情况开始出现转变，塞尚 56 岁那年举办了他的第一场个人画展。两年后，他的一幅作品被柏林一家博物馆购买，这是博物馆第一次对他的作品表现出如此大的兴趣。当他 60 岁的时候，他的画作已经开始出售，尽管价格比马奈或雷诺阿的画作要低得多。很快他就出名了，受人尊敬。艺术家同行们纷纷前来观看他的作品。
What drove the man through all those decades of setbacks and obscurity? One biographer attributed it to his “inquiétude”—his drive, restlessness, anxiety. He just kept pushing himself to get better.
是什么驱使这个人经历了这几十年的挫折和默默无闻？一位传记作者将其归因于他的“不安”——他的干劲、焦躁、焦虑。他只是不断鞭策自己，让自己变得更好。
His continual sense of dissatisfaction was evident in a letter he wrote to his son in 1906, at age 67, a month before he died: “I want to tell you that as a painter I am becoming more clairvoyant to nature, but that it is always very difficult for me to realize my feelings. I cannot reach the intensity that unfolds before my senses. I do not possess that wonderful richness of color that animates nature.” He was still at it on the day he died, still working on his paintings, still teaching himself to improve.
1906 年，67 岁的他在去世前一个月写给儿子的一封信中，可以明显看出他持续不断的不满情绪：“我想告诉你，作为一名画家，我对自然的洞察力越来越强，但我总是很难意识到自己的感受。我无法达到在我的感官中展现的强度。我不具备那种让大自然充满生机的美妙丰富的色彩。”直到他去世的那天，他仍在继续创作，仍在创作，仍在自学提高。
The year after his death, a retrospective of his work was mounted in Paris. Before long, he would be widely recognized as one of the founders of modern art: “Cézanne is the father of us all,” both Matisse and Picasso are said to have declared.
他去世后的第二年，他的作品回顾展在巴黎举办。不久之后，他被广泛认为是现代艺术的创始人之一：“塞尚是我们所有人的父亲，”据说马蒂斯和毕加索都曾宣称。
Today we live in a society structured to promote early bloomers. Our school system has sorted people by the time they are 18, using grades and SAT scores. Some of these people zoom to prestigious academic launching pads while others get left behind. Many of our most prominent models of success made it big while young—Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, Michael Jordan. Magazines publish lists with headlines like “30 Under 30” to glamorize youthful superstars on the rise. Age discrimination is a fact of life. In California in 2010, for example, more people filed claims with the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing for age discrimination than for racial discrimination or sexual harassment. “Young people are just smarter,” Zuckerberg once said, in possibly the dumbest statement in American history. “There are no second acts in American lives,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed, in what might be the next dumbest.
今天，我们生活在一个提倡早开花的社会。我们的学校系统根据学生的 18 岁年龄、成绩和 SAT 成绩对他们进行分类。其中一些人跻身著名的学术起点，而另一些人则被抛在后面。我们许多最著名的成功典范在年轻时就取得了巨大成功——比尔·盖茨、马克·扎克伯格、埃隆·马斯克、泰勒·斯威夫特、迈克尔·乔丹。杂志会发布诸如“30 Under 30”这样的标题的榜单，以美化正在崛起的年轻超级明星。年龄歧视是生活中的一个事实。例如，2010 年在加利福尼亚州，向州公平就业和住房部提出年龄歧视索赔的人数多于种族歧视或性骚扰索赔的人数。 “年轻人只是更聪明，”扎克伯格曾经说过，这可能是美国历史上最愚蠢的言论。 “美国人的生活中没有第二幕”，F·斯科特·菲茨杰拉德（F. Scott Fitzgerald）曾经评论道，这可能是下一个最愚蠢的行为。
But for many people, the talents that bloom later in life are more consequential than the ones that bloom early. A 2019 study by researchers in Denmark found that, on average, Nobel Prize winners made their crucial discoveries at the age of 44. Even brilliant people apparently need at least a couple of decades to master their field.
但对许多人来说，晚年绽放的才华比早年绽放的才华更重要。丹麦研究人员 2019 年的一项研究发现，诺贝尔奖获得者平均在 44 岁时做出了重大发现。即使是才华横溢的人显然也至少需要几十年的时间才能掌握自己的领域。
The average age of a U.S. patent applicant is 47. A 45-year-old is twice as likely to produce a scientific breakthrough as a 25-year-old. A study published in The American Economic Review found 45 to be the average age of an entrepreneur–and found furthermore that the likelihood that an entrepreneur’s start-up will succeed increases significantly between ages 25 and 35, with the odds of success continuing to rise well into the 50s. A tech founder who is 50 is twice as likely to start a successful company as one who is 30. A study by researchers at Northwestern University, MIT, and the U.S. Census Bureau found that the fastest-growing start-ups were founded by people whose average age was 45 when their company was launched. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation produced a study that found that the peak innovation age is the late 40s.
美国专利申请人的平均年龄为 47 岁。45 岁的人取得科学突破的可能性是 25 岁的人的两倍。 《美国经济评论》发表的一项研究发现，企业家的平均年龄为 45 岁，此外还发现，在 25 岁至 35 岁之间，企业家的初创企业成功的可能性显着增加，并且成功的几率持续上升进入50年代。 50 岁的科技创始人创办一家成功公司的可能性是 30 岁的人的两倍。西北大学、麻省理工学院和美国人口普查局的研究人员进行的一项研究发现，发展最快的初创企业是由以下人士创立的：他们公司成立时的平均年龄为 45 岁。信息技术与创新基金会的一项研究发现，创新的高峰年龄是 40 岁末。
Successful late bloomers are all around us. Morgan Freeman had his breakthrough roles in Street Smart and Driving Miss Daisy in his early 50s. Colonel Harland Sanders started Kentucky Fried Chicken in his 60s. Isak Dinesen published the book that established her literary reputation, Out of Africa, at 52. Morris Chang founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the world’s leading chipmaker, at 55. If Samuel Johnson had died at 40, few would remember him, but now he is considered one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language. Copernicus came up with his theory of planetary motion in his 60s. Grandma Moses started painting at 77. Noah was around 600 when he built his ark (though Noah truthers dispute his birth certificate).
我们周围都是成功的大器晚成者。摩根·弗里曼在 50 岁出头的时候就在《聪明街头》和《为黛西小姐开车》中扮演了突破性的角色。哈兰·山德士上校在 60 多岁时创办了肯德基。伊萨克·迪内森 (Isak Dinesen) 在 52 岁时出版了《走出非洲》一书，奠定了她的文学声誉。张忠谋 (Morris Chang) 在 55 岁时创立了世界领先的芯片制造商台积电。如果塞缪尔·约翰逊 (Samuel Johnson) 在 40 岁时去世，很少有人会记得他，但现在他被认为是英语历史上最伟大的作家之一。哥白尼在 60 多岁时提出了行星运动理论。摩西奶奶 77 岁开始绘画。诺亚建造方舟时大约 600 岁（尽管诺亚真理论者对他的出生证明有争议）。
Why do some people hit their peak later than others? In his book Late Bloomers, the journalist Rich Karlgaard points out that this is really two questions: First, why didn’t these people bloom earlier? Second, what traits or skills did they possess that enabled them to bloom late? It turns out that late bloomers are not simply early bloomers on a delayed timetable—they didn’t just do the things early bloomers did but at a later age. Late bloomers tend to be qualitatively different, possessing a different set of abilities that are mostly invisible to or discouraged by our current education system. They usually have to invent their own paths. Late bloomers “fulfill their potential frequently in novel and unexpected ways,” Karlgaard writes, “surprising even those closest to them.”
为什么有些人比其他人更晚达到巅峰？记者里奇·卡尔加德（Rich Karlgaard）在他的《大器晚成》一书中指出，这实际上是两个问题：第一，为什么这些人没有早点开花？其次，他们拥有哪些特质或技能，使他们能够晚熟？事实证明，大器晚成者并不只是时间表上大器晚成的人——他们不仅做了大器早成者所做的事情，而且在更晚的年龄做这些事情。大器晚成的人往往在本质上有所不同，拥有一套不同的能力，而这些能力大多是我们当前的教育体系所看不见或不鼓励的。他们通常必须发明自己的道路。卡尔加德写道，大器晚成的人“经常以新颖和意想不到的方式发挥自己的潜力，甚至让最亲近的人都感到惊讶。”
Jim VandeHei: What I wish someone had told me 30 years ago Jim VandeHei：我希望 30 年前有人告诉我的话
If you survey history, a taxonomy of achievement emerges. In the first category are the early bloomers, the precocious geniuses. These are people like Picasso or Fitzgerald who succeeded young. As the University of Chicago economist David Galenson has pointed out, these high achievers usually made a conceptual breakthrough. They came up with a new idea and then executed it. Picasso had a clear idea of Cubism, and how he was going to revolutionize art, in his mid-20s. Then he went out and painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
如果你回顾历史，就会出现一种成就分类法。第一类是早熟的天才。这些人都是像毕加索或菲茨杰拉德这样年轻时就取得成功的人。正如芝加哥大学经济学家戴维·盖伦森（David Galenson）指出的那样，这些高成就者通常会取得概念上的突破。他们提出了一个新想法，然后执行了它。毕加索在 20 多岁的时候就对立体主义有了清晰的认识，也知道他将如何彻底改变艺术。然后他出去画了《阿维尼翁少女》。
Then there are the “second-mountain people,” exemplified by, say, Albert Schweitzer. First, they conquer their career mountain; Schweitzer, for instance, was an accomplished musician and scholar. But these people find their career success unsatisfying, so they leave their career mountain to serve humanity—their whole motivational structure shifts from acquisition to altruism. Schweitzer became a doctor in the poorest parts of Africa, and won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in 1952.
还有“第二山人”，比如阿尔伯特·史怀哲（Albert Schweitzer）。首先，他们征服了事业的大山；例如，施韦策是一位卓有成就的音乐家和学者。但这些人发现自己的职业成功并不令人满意，因此他们离开职业大山去为人类服务——他们的整个动机结构从获取转向利他主义。施韦策成为非洲最贫困地区的一名医生，并因其工作于 1952 年获得诺贝尔和平奖。
Finally, there are the people Galenson calls “the masters.” In his book Old Masters and Young Geniuses, he writes about people like Cézanne or Alfred Hitchcock or Charles Darwin, who were not all that successful—and in some cases just not even very good at what they did—when they were young. This could have been discouraging, but they just kept improving.
最后，还有被盖伦森称为“大师”的人。在他的《古代大师和年轻天才》一书中，他描写了像塞尚、阿尔弗雷德·希区柯克或查尔斯·达尔文这样的人，他们在年轻时并不那么成功，在某些情况下甚至不擅长自己所做的事情。这可能令人沮丧，但他们一直在不断进步。
These people don’t do as much advanced planning as the conceptual geniuses, but they regard their entire lives as experiments. They try something and learn, and then they try something else and learn more. Their focus is not on their finished work, which they often toss away haphazardly. Their focus is on the process of learning itself: Am I closer to understanding, to mastering? They live their lives as a long period of trial and error, trying this and trying that, a slow process of accumulation and elaboration, so the quality of their work peaks late in life. They are the ugly ducklings of human achievement, who, over the decades, turn themselves into swans.
这些人不像概念天才那样做那么多超前的计划，但他们把自己的一生当作实验。他们尝试一些东西并学习，然后尝试其他东西并学习更多。他们的注意力不在于完成的工作，他们经常随意扔掉工作。他们的重点是学习过程本身：我是否更接近理解、掌握？他们的一生就是一个漫长的尝试和错误的过程，尝试这个、尝试那个，一个缓慢的积累和精心制作的过程，所以他们的工作质量在晚年达到顶峰。他们是人类成就中的丑小鸭，几十年来，他们把自己变成了天鹅。
Let’s look at some of the traits that tend to distinguish late bloomers from early bloomers—the qualities that cause them to lag early in life but surge ahead over the long haul.
让我们来看看一些区分大器晚成者和早熟者的特征——这些特征导致他们在生命早期落后，但在长期内却突飞猛进。
Intrinsic motivation. Most of our schools and workplaces are built around extrinsic motivation: If you work hard, you will be rewarded with good grades, better salaries, and performance bonuses. Extrinsic-motivation systems are built on the assumption that while work is unpleasant, if you give people external incentives to perform they will respond productively.
内在动机。我们大多数的学校和工作场所都是围绕外在动机建立的：如果你努力工作，你就会获得好成绩、更好的薪水和绩效奖金。外在激励系统建立在这样的假设之上：虽然工作令人不愉快，但如果你给予人们外部激励，他们就会做出富有成效的反应。
People who submit to these extrinsic-reward systems are encouraged to develop a merit-badge mentality. They get good at complying with other people’s standards, following other people’s methods, and pursuing other people’s goals. The people who thrive in these sorts of systems are good at earning high GPAs—having the self-discipline to get A’s in all subjects, even the ones that don’t interest them. They are valuable to companies precisely because they’re good at competently completing whatever tasks are put in front of them.
那些服从这些外在奖励制度的人被鼓励养成一种功绩徽章心态。他们善于遵守别人的标准，遵循别人的方法，追求别人的目标。在这类系统中茁壮成长的人善于获得高 GPA——具有自律性，可以在所有科目上获得 A，即使是那些他们不感兴趣的科目。他们对公司来说很有价值，因为他们善于胜任完成摆在他们面前的任何任务。
People driven by intrinsic motivation are not like that. They are bad at paying attention to what other people tell them to pay attention to. Winston Churchill was a poor student for just this reason. “Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn,” he wrote in his autobiography, My Early Life.
受内在动机驱动的人不是这样的。他们不善于关注别人告诉他们要注意的事情。正是因为这个原因，温斯顿·丘吉尔是一个穷学生。 “如果我的理性、想象力或兴趣没有发挥作用，我就不会或无法学习，”他在自传《我的早年生活》中写道。
But such people can be great at paying attention to things that do interest them. The intrinsically motivated have a strong need for autonomy. They are driven by their own curiosity, their own obsessions—and the power of this motivation eclipses the lesser ones fired by extrinsic rewards.
但这样的人很擅长关注他们感兴趣的事情。内在动机的人有强烈的自主需求。他们被自己的好奇心、自己的痴迷所驱使——这种动机的力量使由外在奖励激发的较小动机黯然失色。
Extrinsically motivated people tend to race ahead during young adulthood, when the job is to please teachers, bosses, and other older people, but then stop working as hard once that goal is met. They’re likely to take short cuts if it can get them more quickly to the goal.
具有外在动机的人往往会在青年时期奋力拼搏，那时的工作是取悦老师、老板和其他年长的人，但一旦目标实现，他们就会停止努力工作。如果可以让他们更快地达到目标，他们很可能会走捷径。
Worse, as research by scholars like the psychologist Edward L. Deci has established, if you reward people extrinsically, you can end up crushing the person’s capacity for intrinsic motivation. If you pay kids to read, they might read more in the short term—but over time they’ll regard reading as unpleasant work, best avoided. A 2009 London School of Economics study that looked at 51 corporate pay-for-performance plans found that financial incentives “can have a negative impact on overall performance.”
更糟糕的是，正如心理学家爱德华·L·德西（Edward L. Deci）等学者的研究表明，如果你从外在奖励人们，你最终可能会削弱人们的内在动机。如果你付钱给孩子们读书，他们可能会在短期内读得更多——但随着时间的推移，他们会认为阅读是一件令人不愉快的工作，最好避免。伦敦经济学院 2009 年的一项研究对 51 家企业的绩效薪酬计划进行了研究，发现财务激励措施“可能会对整体绩效产生负面影响”。
I once asked a group of students on their final day at their prestigious university what book had changed their life over the previous four years. A long, awkward silence followed. Finally a student said, “You have to understand, we don’t read like that. We only sample enough of each book to get through class.” These students were hurrying to be good enough to get their merit badges, but not getting deep enough into any subject to be transformed. They didn’t love the process of learning itself, which is what you need if you’re going to keep educating yourself decade after decade—which, in turn, is what you need to keep advancing when the world isn’t rewarding you with impressive grades and prizes.
我曾经在著名大学的最后一天问一群学生，哪本书改变了他们过去四年的生活。接下来是一段漫长而尴尬的沉默。最后一个学生说：“你必须明白，我们不是那样读书的。我们只对每本书进行足够的采样以完成课堂教学。”这些学生急于取得足够的成绩以获得奖章，但对任何科目的了解还不够深入，无法进行转变。他们不喜欢学习的过程本身，而如果你想年复一年地不断自我教育，这就是你所需要的——反过来，当世界没有给你回报时，你也需要不断进步。令人印象深刻的成绩和奖项。
Intrinsically motivated people, by contrast, are self-directed and often obsessed, burying themselves deep into some subject or task. They find learning about a subject or doing an activity to be their own reward, so they are less likely to cut corners. As Vincent van Gogh—a kind of early late bloomer, who struggled to find his way and didn’t create most of his signature works until the last two years of his life before dying at 37—wrote to his brother, “I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.”
相比之下，具有内在动机的人是自我导向的，并且常常沉迷于某些主题或任务。他们发现学习某个科目或从事一项活动是对自己的奖励，因此他们不太可能走捷径。正如文森特·梵高（Vincent van Gogh）——一位大器晚成的人，他一直在努力寻找自己的道路，直到生命的最后两年才创作出大部分标志性作品，直到 37 岁去世——他在给弟弟的信中写道：“我正在寻找。我正在努力。我全心全意地投入其中。”
In Drive, the writer Daniel Pink argues that extrinsic-motivation models work fine when tasks are routine, boring, and technical. But he cites a vast body of research showing that intrinsically motivated people are more productive, more persistent, and less likely to burn out. They also exhibit higher levels of well-being. Over the long run, Pink concludes, “intrinsically motivated people usually achieve more than their reward-seeking counterparts.”
InDrive 的作者丹尼尔·平克 (Daniel Pink) 认为，当任务是例行公事、无聊和技术性时，外在动机模型效果很好。但他引用了大量研究表明，具有内在动机的人效率更高、更持久，而且不太可能精疲力竭。他们还表现出更高水平的幸福感。平克总结道，从长远来看，“有内在动机的人通常会比寻求奖励的人取得更大的成就。”
Early screw-ups. Late bloomers often don’t fit into existing systems. To use William Deresiewicz’s term, they are bad at being “excellent sheep”—bad at following the conventional rules of success. Or to put it another way, they can be assholes. Buckminster Fuller was expelled from college twice, lost his job in the building business when he was 32, and later contemplated suicide so his family could live off his life insurance. But then he moved to Greenwich Village, took a teaching job at Black Mountain College, and eventually emerged as an architect, designer, futurist, and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Colonel Sanders was fired for insubordination when he was a railway engineer, and then fired again for brawling with a colleague while working as a fireman. His career as a lawyer ended when he got into a fistfight with a client, and he lost his job as an insurance salesman because he was unsuited to working for other people. Then, at 62, he created the recipe for what became Kentucky Fried Chicken, began to succeed as a franchiser at 69, and sold the company for $2 million when he was 73.
早期搞砸了。大器晚成的人往往不适合现有的系统。用威廉·德雷谢维奇的话来说，他们不善于成为“优秀的绵羊”——不善于遵循传统的成功规则。或者换句话说，他们可能是混蛋。巴克明斯特·富勒 (Buckminster Fuller) 两次被大学开除，32 岁时失去了建筑行业的工作，后来考虑自杀，这样他的家人就能靠他的人寿保险过活。但后来他搬到格林威治村，在黑山学院担任教职，最终成为一名建筑师、设计师、未来学家和总统自由勋章获得者。桑德斯上校在担任铁路工程师时因不服从命令而被解雇，随后在担任消防员时因与同事争吵而再次被解雇。他的律师生涯因与客户打架而结束，并因不适合为别人工作而失去了保险推销员的工作。然后，在 62 岁时，他发明了肯德基的配方，并在 69 岁时作为特许经营商开始取得成功，并在 73 岁时以 200 万美元的价格出售了公司。
Late bloomers often have an edge to them, a willingness to battle with authority.
大器晚成的人往往有一个优势，那就是愿意与权威斗争。
“Diversive curiosity.” Our culture pushes people to specialize early: Be like Tiger Woods driving golf balls as a toddler. Concentrate on one thing and get really good, really fast—whether it is golf or physics or investing. In the academic world, specialization is rewarded: Don’t be a scholar of Europe, be a scholar of Dutch basket weaving in the 16th century.
“多样化的好奇心。”我们的文化促使人们尽早专业化：就像泰格·伍兹（Tiger Woods）在蹒跚学步时打高尔夫球一样。专注于一件事，无论是高尔夫、物理还是投资，都能变得非常好、非常快。在学术界，专业化是有回报的：不要成为欧洲的学者，而要成为 16 世纪荷兰篮子编织的学者。
Yet when the journalist David Epstein looked at the lives of professional athletes, he found that most of them were less like Tiger Woods and more like Roger Federer, who played a lot of different sports when he was young. These athletes went through what researchers call a “sampling period” and only narrowed their focus to one sport later on. In his book Range, Epstein writes that people who went through a sampling period ended up enjoying greater success over the long run: “One study showed that early career specializers jumped out to an earning lead after college, but that later specializers made up for the head start by finding work that better fitted their skills and personalities.”
然而，当记者大卫·爱泼斯坦观察职业运动员的生活时，他发现他们中的大多数人不太像泰格·伍兹，而更像罗杰·费德勒，后者在年轻时参加过许多不同的运动。这些运动员经历了研究人员所说的“采样期”，后来只将注意力集中在一项运动上。爱泼斯坦在他的著作《范围》中写道，从长远来看，经历过抽样期的人最终会获得更大的成功：“一项研究表明，早期职业专业人士在大学毕业后收入领先，但后来的专业人士弥补了这一差距。”首先找到更适合他们技能和个性的工作。”
[Jessica Lahey and Tim Lahey: How middle school failures lead to medical school success
杰西卡·莱希和蒂姆·莱希：中学的失败如何导致医学院的成功](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/03/how-middle-school-failures-lead-to-medical-school-success/274163/)
Many late bloomers endure a brutal wandering period, as they cast about for a vocation. Julia Child made hats, worked for U.S. intelligence (where she was part of a team trying to develop an effective shark repellent), and thought about trying to become a novelist before enrolling in a French cooking school at 37. Van Gogh was an art dealer, a teacher, a bookseller, and a street preacher before taking up painting at 27. During those wandering years, he was a miserable failure. His family watched his repeated downward spirals with embarrassment.
许多大器晚成的人在寻找职业时都会经历一段残酷的流浪期。朱莉娅·柴尔德 (Julia Child) 制作过帽子，曾为美国情报部门工作（她是一个试图开发有效鲨鱼驱避剂的团队的一员），并在 37 岁入读法国烹饪学校之前曾考虑过成为一名小说家。梵高是一名艺术品经销商在27岁开始绘画之前，他曾当过教师、书商和街头传教士。在那段流浪的岁月里，他是一个悲惨的失败者。他的家人尴尬地看着他一再走下坡路。
During these early periods, late bloomers try and then quit so many jobs that the people around them might conclude that they lack resilience. But these are exactly the years when the late bloomers are developing what psychologists call “diversive curiosity”—the ability to wander into a broad range of interests in a manner that seems to have no rhyme or reason.
在这些早期阶段，大器晚成的人会尝试然后辞掉很多工作，以至于周围的人可能会认为他们缺乏适应力。但这些年正是大器晚成的人正在发展心理学家所说的“多元化好奇心”——以一种似乎没有规律或理由的方式游走于广泛的兴趣领域的能力。
The benefits of this kind of curiosity might be hard to see in the short term, but they become obvious once the late bloomer begins to take advantage of their breadth of knowledge by putting discordant ideas together in new ways. When the psychologist Howard Gruber studied the diaries of Charles Darwin, he found that in the decades before he published On the Origin of Species, Darwin was “pen pals” (as David Epstein puts it) with at least 231 scientists, whose worked ranged across 13 broad streams, from economics to geology, the biology of barnacles to the sex life of birds. Darwin couldn’t have written his great masterworks if he hadn’t been able to combine these vastly different intellectual currents.
这种好奇心的好处在短期内可能很难看到，但一旦大器晚成的人开始利用他们的知识广度，以新的方式将不和谐的想法组合在一起，它们就会变得显而易见。心理学家霍华德·格鲁伯（Howard Gruber）研究查尔斯·达尔文（Charles Darwin）的日记时发现，在他发表《物种起源》之前的几十年里，达尔文与至少 231 名科学家是“笔友”（正如大卫·爱泼斯坦所说），他们的工作范围涵盖各个领域。 13 个主要分支，从经济学到地质学，从藤壶生物学到鸟类性生活。如果达尔文不能将这些截然不同的思想潮流结合起来，他就不可能写出他伟大的杰作。
Epstein notes that many of the most successful scientists have had diverse interests, and especially in different kinds of performing: Nobel Prize winners are 22 times more likely to spend large chunks of time as an amateur actor, musician, magician, or other type of performer than non-Nobel-winning scientists are. Epstein quotes Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the founder of modern neuroscience: “To him who observes them from afar, it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies,” Cajal wrote, speaking of these late-blooming Nobelists, “while in reality they are channeling and strengthening them.”
爱泼斯坦指出，许多最成功的科学家都有不同的兴趣，特别是对不同类型的表演：诺贝尔奖获得者花大量时间担任业余演员、音乐家、魔术师或其他类型表演者的可能性是普通人的 22 倍比非诺贝尔奖得主科学家还要多。爱泼斯坦引用了现代神经科学创始人圣地亚哥·拉蒙·卡哈尔的话：“对于从远处观察他们的人来说，他们似乎在分散和耗散能量，”卡哈尔在谈到这些晚熟的诺贝尔奖获得者时写道，“而实际上他们正在引导和加强他们。”
Late bloomers tend to have a high tolerance for ambiguity, and can bring multiple ways of thinking to bear on a single complex problem. They also have a high tolerance for inefficiency. They walk through life like a curious person browsing through a bookstore. In old age, the historian Daniel Boorstin wrote, “The amateur spirit has guided my thinking and writing.” He had wandered from subject to subject throughout his life, playing around.
大器晚成的人往往对模糊性有很高的容忍度，并且可以用多种思维方式来解决一个复杂的问题。他们对低效率也有很高的容忍度。他们就像一个好奇的人浏览书店一样走过生活。历史学家丹尼尔·布尔斯廷（Daniel Boorstin）晚年写道：“业余精神指导了我的思考和写作。”他一生都在从一个主题游荡到另一个主题，到处玩耍。
The ability to self-teach. Late bloomers don’t find their calling until they are too old for traditional education systems. So they have to teach themselves. Successful autodidacts start with what psychologists call a “high need for cognition”—in other words, they like to think a lot. In his book Curious, Ian Leslie presents a series of statements that, when answered in the affirmative, indicate a high need for cognition: “I would prefer complex to simple problems”; “I prefer my life be filled with puzzles that I can’t solve”; “I find satisfaction in deliberating hard and for long hours.”
自学能力。大器晚成的人直到年龄太大而无法适应传统教育体系时才找到自己的使命。所以他们必须自学。成功的自学者始于心理学家所说的“对认知的高度需求”，换句话说，他们喜欢思考很多。伊恩·莱斯利（Ian Leslie）在他的《好奇心》一书中提出了一系列陈述，如果得到肯定的回答，则表明对认知的高度需求：“与简单的问题相比，我更喜欢复杂的问题”； “我更喜欢我的生活充满我无法解决的谜题”； “我在长时间的艰苦思考中找到了满足感。”
Leonardo da Vinci is the poster child for high-cognition needs. Consider his famous lists of self-assigned research projects: “Ask the master of arithmetic how to square a triangle … examine a crossbow … ask about the measurement of the sun … draw Milan.” Benjamin Franklin was similar. After he was appointed U.S. ambassador to France, he could have relaxed on his transatlantic voyages between home and work. Instead, he turned them into scientific expeditions, measuring the temperature of the water as he went, which allowed him to discover and chart the Gulf Stream.
达芬奇是高认知需求的典型代表。想想他著名的自布置研究项目清单：“向算术大师询问如何算出三角形……检查十字弓……询问太阳的测量……画出米兰。”本杰明·富兰克林也有类似的情况。在他被任命为美国驻法国大使后，他可以在往返于家庭和工作之间的跨大西洋航行中放松下来。相反，他把它们变成了科学考察，边走边测量水温，这使他能够发现并绘制墨西哥湾流的图表。
Successful late bloomers combine this high need for cognition with a seemingly contradictory trait: epistemic humility. They are aggressive about wanting to acquire knowledge and learn—but they are also modest, possessing an accurate sense of how much they don’t know.
成功的大器晚成者将这种对认知的高度需求与看似矛盾的特质结合起来：认知上的谦逊。他们积极主动地想要获取知识和学习，但他们也很谦虚，对自己不知道的程度有准确的认识。
This mentality combines high self-belief (I can figure this out on my own; I know my standards are right and the world’s standards are wrong) with high self-doubt (There’s a lot I don’t know, and I am falling short in many ways).
这种心态结合了高度的自信（我可以自己解决这个问题；我知道我的标准是正确的，而世界的标准是错误的）和高度的自我怀疑（我不知道的东西很多，而且我还不够）在许多方面）。
The combination of a high need for cognition and epistemic humility is a recipe for lifelong learning. Late bloomers learn more slowly but also more deeply precisely because they’re exploring on their own. The benefits of acquiring this self-taught knowledge compound over time. The more you know about a subject, the faster you can learn. A chess grandmaster with thousands of past matches stored in their head will see a new strategy much faster than a chess beginner. Knowledge begets knowledge. Researchers call this “the Matthew effect”: “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance.” Pretty soon, the late bloomer is taking off.
对认知的高度需求和认知谦逊的结合是终身学习的秘诀。大器晚成的人学得更慢，但也更深入，因为他们在自己探索。随着时间的推移，获得这种自学知识复合的好处。你对某个学科了解得越多，你学得就越快。头脑中存储了数千场过去比赛的国际象棋大师会比国际象棋初学者更快地看到新策略。知识产生知识。研究人员将此称为“马太效应”：“凡有的，都会加给他，并且他将拥有更多。”很快，迟到的花朵就开始起飞了。
The ability to finally commit. Of course, late bloomers can’t just wander forever. At some point they must grab onto some challenge that engages their powerful intrinsic drive. They have to commit. Ray Kroc endured a classic wandering period. He got a job selling ribbons. He played piano in a bordello. He read the ticker tape at the Chicago stock exchange. He sold paper cups and then milkshake mixers. In that latter job he noticed that one restaurant was ordering a tremendous number of milkshake machines. Curious, he drove halfway across the country to see it, and found a fast-food restaurant that was more efficiently churning out meals than any he had ever encountered. “There was something almost religious about Kroc’s inspirational moment when he discovered McDonald’s,” Henry Oliver writes in his forthcoming book, Second Act. Kroc just cared about hamburgers and fries (and milkshakes) more than most people. He bought the restaurant, and brought to it his own form of genius, which was the ability to franchise it on a massive scale.
最终承诺的能力。当然，大器晚成的人不可能永远流浪。在某些时候，他们必须抓住一些挑战，激发他们强大的内在动力。他们必须做出承诺。雷·克罗克经历了一段典型的流浪时期。他找到了一份卖丝带的工作。他在妓院弹钢琴。他阅读了芝加哥证券交易所的行情纸带。他卖纸杯，然后卖奶昔搅拌机。在后一项工作中，他注意到一家餐厅订购了大量奶昔机。出于好奇，他开车穿越半个国家去看看，发现一家快餐店的制作效率比他遇到过的任何一家都高。亨利·奥利弗在他即将出版的新书《第二幕》中写道：“当克罗克发现麦当劳时，他的灵感时刻几乎带有宗教色彩。”克罗克只是比大多数人更关心汉堡包和薯条（以及奶昔）。他买下了这家餐厅，并带来了自己的天才，即大规模特许经营的能力。
The mind of the explorer. By middle age, many late bloomers have achieved lift-off and are getting to enjoy the pleasures of concentrated effort. They are absorbed, fascinated. But since they are freer from ties and associations than the early achiever, late bloomers can also change their mind and update their models without worrying about betraying any professional norms.
探索者的心灵。到了中年，许多大器晚成的人已经事业蒸蒸日上，开始享受集中精力的乐趣。他们全神贯注、着迷。但由于他们比早期成就者更不受束缚和关联，所以大器晚成者也可以改变主意并更新他们的模型，而不必担心违背任何专业规范。
We have a notion that the happiest people are those who have aimed their life toward some goal and then attained it, like winning a championship trophy or achieving renown. But the best moments of life can be found within the lifelong learning or quest itself. It’s doing something so fulfilling that the work is its own reward. “Effort is the one thing that gives meaning to life,” the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck once wrote. “Effort means you care about something.”
我们有一个观念，最幸福的人是那些将自己的生活瞄准某个目标并最终实现的人，比如赢得冠军奖杯或获得声誉。但生命中最美好的时刻可以在终身学习或追求本身中找到。它所做的事情是如此令人满足，以至于工作本身就是回报。 “努力是赋予生命意义的一件事，”斯坦福大学心理学家卡罗尔·德韦克曾经写道。 “努力意味着你关心某件事。”
“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life,” the sculptor Henry Moore once told the poet Donald Hall. “And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do.”
雕塑家亨利·摩尔曾对诗人唐纳德·霍尔说：“生命的秘密就是有一项任务，你要为之奉献一生，为之投入一切，在余生中的每一分钟都投入其中。” “而且最重要的是——这一定是你不可能做到的事情。”
Crankiness in old age. So far, I’ve been describing late bloomers as if they were all openhearted curiosity and wonder. But remember that many of them have been butting against established institutions their whole lives—and they’ve naturally developed oppositional, chip-on-the-shoulder, even angry mindsets.
晚年脾气暴躁。到目前为止，我一直在描述大器晚成的人，就好像他们都是敞开心扉的好奇心和好奇心。但请记住，他们中的许多人一生都在与既定机构对抗——他们自然而然地形成了反对、指责、甚至愤怒的心态。
In his essay “The Artist Grows Old,” the great art critic Sir Kenneth Clark wrote about painters—like Titian, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Cézanne—who produced their best work at the end of their lives, sometimes in their 80s or even 90s. He noticed that while these older artists painted with passion, this passion was inflected with what he called “transcendental pessimism.” The artists who peak late, he found, “take a very poor view of human life.” They are energized by a holy rage. The British artist William Turner felt so hopeless late in life that he barely spoke. “Old artists are solitary,” Clark writes. “Like all old people they are bored and irritated by the company of their fellow bipeds and yet find their isolation depressing. They are also suspicious of interference.”
伟大的艺术评论家肯尼斯·克拉克爵士在他的文章《艺术家变老》中谈到了提香、米开朗基罗、伦勃朗和塞尚等画家，他们在生命的最后阶段创作出了最好的作品，有时是在 80 多岁甚至 90 多岁时。他注意到，虽然这些老艺术家充满激情地绘画，但这种激情受到了他所谓的“先验悲观主义”的影响。他发现，那些巅峰期较晚的艺术家“对人类生活的看法非常糟糕”。他们被神圣的愤怒所激励。英国艺术家威廉·特纳在晚年感到非常绝望，几乎不说话。 “老艺术家都是孤独的，”克拉克写道。 “像所有老年人一样，他们对两足动物同伴的陪伴感到无聊和恼怒，但又发现自己的孤独令人沮丧。他们还怀疑有干扰。”
The angry old artists fight back with their brushes. They retreat from realism. Their handling of paint grows freer. “Cézanne, who in middle life painted with the delicacy of a watercolorist, and was almost afraid, as he said, to sully the whiteness of a canvas, ended by attacking it with heavy and passionate strokes,” Clark writes. “The increased vitality of an aged hand is hard to explain.”
愤怒的老艺术家们拿起画笔进行反击。他们从现实主义中退缩。他们对油漆的处理变得更加自由。 “塞尚在中年时以水彩画家的细腻作画，正如他所说，他几乎害怕玷污画布的白色，最终以沉重而充满激情的笔触攻击它，”克拉克写道。 “衰老的手的活力增加很难解释。”
Younger painters, like younger workers in any field, are trying to learn the language of the craft. Older painters, like older expert practitioners in other fields, have mastered the language and are willing to bend it. Older painters feel free to jettison the rules that stifle their prophetic voice. They can express what they need to more purely.
年轻的画家，就像任何领域的年轻工人一样，正在努力学习工艺语言。老画家，就像其他领域的老专家从业者一样，已经掌握了语言并愿意改变它。年长的画家可以随意抛弃那些压制他们预言之声的规则。他们可以更纯粹地表达自己需要的东西。
Clark’s analysis is insightful, but I think he may be overgeneralizing. His theory applies to an angry, pessimistic painting like Michelangelo’s late work The Crucifixion of St. Peter, a painting of an old man raging against the inhumanity of the world. But Clark’s theory doesn’t really apply to, say, Rembrandt’s late work The Return of the Prodigal Son. By the time he painted it, Rembrandt was old, broke, and out of fashion; his wife and many of his children had preceded him to the grave. But Prodigal Son is infused with a spirit of holy forgiveness. It shows a father offering infinite love to a wayward, emaciated, and grateful son. It couldn’t be gentler.
克拉克的分析很有洞察力，但我认为他可能过于笼统。他的理论适用于愤怒、悲观的绘画，比如米开朗基罗的晚期作品《圣彼得受难》，这幅画描绘了一位老人对世界的不人道行为的愤怒。但克拉克的理论并不真正适用于伦勃朗的晚期作品《浪子回头》等作品。当伦勃朗画这幅画时，他已经年老、身无分文、不合时宜。他的妻子和许多孩子先于他入土。但浪子却充满了神圣宽恕的精神。表现了一位父亲对任性、憔悴、感恩的儿子无限的爱。再温柔不过了。
Wisdom. After a lifetime of experimentation, some late bloomers transcend their craft or career and achieve a kind of comprehensive wisdom.
智慧。经过一生的尝试，一些大器晚成的人超越了他们的手艺或职业，获得了一种综合智慧。
Wisdom is a complicated trait. It starts with pattern recognition—using experience to understand what is really going on. The neuroscientist Elkhonon Goldberg provides a classic expression of this ability in his book The Wisdom Paradox. “Frequently when I am faced with what would appear from the outside to be a challenging problem, the grinding mental computation is somehow circumvented, rendered, as if by magic, unnecessary,” he writes. “The solution comes effortlessly, seamlessly, seemingly by itself. What I have lost with age in my capacity for hard mental work, I seem to have gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight.”
智慧是一种复杂的特质。它从模式识别开始——利用经验来了解到底发生了什么。 神经科学家埃尔克霍农·戈德堡在他的著作《智慧悖论》中提供了这种能力的经典表达。他写道：“经常，当我面临从外部看来具有挑战性的问题时，令人费解的心算就会以某种方式被规避，就像魔法一样变得不必要。” “这个解决方案看起来毫不费力、无缝、似乎是自然而然地出现的。随着年龄的增长，我失去了艰苦的脑力劳动的能力，但我似乎获得了即时的、几乎不公平的简单洞察力的能力。”
But the trait we call wisdom is more than just pattern recognition; it’s the ability to see things from multiple points of view, the ability to aggregate perspectives and rest in the tensions between them. When he was in his 60s, Cézanne built a study in Provence and painted a series of paintings of a single mountain, Mont Sainte-Victoire, which are now often considered his greatest works. He painted the mountain at different times of day, in different sorts of light. He wasn’t so much painting the mountain as painting time. He was also painting perception itself, its continual flow, its uncertainties and evolutions. “I progress very slowly,” he wrote to the painter Émile Bernard, “for nature reveals herself to me in complex ways; and the progress needed is endless.”
但我们称之为智慧的特质不仅仅是模式识别；它还包括认知能力。它是从多个角度看待事物的能力，是汇总观点并在它们之间的紧张关系中休息的能力。 60多岁时，塞尚在普罗旺斯建立了一间书房，并画了一系列关于圣维克多山的画作，这些画现在通常被认为是他最伟大的作品。他在一天的不同时间、不同的光线下画了这座山。与其说他在画山，不如说他在画时间。他还描绘了感知本身、它的持续流动、它的不确定性和演变。 “我进步非常缓慢，”他写信给画家埃米尔·伯纳德，“因为大自然以复杂的方式向我展示自己；所需的进步是无止境的。”
“Old men ought to be explorers,” T. S. Eliot wrote in East Coker. “Here and there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion.” For some late bloomers, the exploration never ends. They have a certain distinct way of being in the world, but they express that way of being at greater and greater levels of complexity as they age.
“老年人应该成为探险家，”T.S.艾略特在《东科克》中写道。 “这里和那里并不重要/我们必须保持静止/继续前进/进入另一种强度/为了进一步的结合，更深的交流。”对于一些大器晚成的人来说，探索永无止境。他们在世界上有某种独特的存在方式，但随着年龄的增长，他们的存在方式变得越来越复杂。
Wisdom is an intellectual trait—the ability to see reality as it really is. But it is also a moral trait; we wouldn’t call a self-centered person wise. It is also a spiritual trait; the wise person possesses a certain tranquility, the ability to stay calm when others are overwhelmed with negative emotions.
智慧是一种智力特质——如实地看待现实的能力。但这也是一种道德品质；我们不会称一个以自我为中心的人是明智的。这也是一种精神特质；明智的人拥有一定的平静，即当别人被负面情绪淹没时保持冷静的能力。
[Arthur C. Brooks: How to succeed at failure
阿瑟·C·布鲁克斯：如何在失败中取得成功](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/01/happiness-after-failure/621236/)
When I was young I was mentored by William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman, both at that time approaching the end of their careers. Both men had changed history. Buckley created the modern conservative movement that led to the election of Ronald Reagan. Friedman changed economics and won the Nobel Prize. I had a chance to ask each of them, separately, if they ever felt completion, if they ever had a sense that they’d done their work and now they had crossed the finish line and could relax. Neither man even understood my question. They were never at rest, pushing for what they saw as a better society all the days of their lives.
当我年轻的时候，我受到威廉·F·巴克利（William F. Buckley）和米尔顿·弗里德曼（Milton Friedman）的指导，当时两人都已接近职业生涯的终点。两人都改变了历史。巴克利发起了现代保守主义运动，最终导致了罗纳德·里根的当选。弗里德曼改变了经济学并获得了诺贝尔奖。我有机会分别询问他们每个人，是否有过完成感，是否有过完成工作的感觉，现在他们已经冲过终点线，可以放松了。两个人都听不懂我的问题。他们从未休息过，终生致力于建设一个他们认为更美好的社会。
My friend Tim Keller, the late pastor, was in some ways not a classic late bloomer—his talents were already evident when he was a young man. But those talents weren’t afforded much public scope at the church in rural Virginia where his calling had taken him.
我的朋友蒂姆·凯勒（Tim Keller）是一位已故牧师，从某些方面来说，他并不是一个典型的大器晚成者——他的才华在他年轻时就已经显现出来。但在弗吉尼亚乡村的教堂里，这些才华并没有得到太多的公开关注，他的使命就是在那里发生的。
Tim didn’t feel qualified to publish his first major book until he was 58. Over the next 10 years he published nearly three dozen more, harvesting the wisdom he’d been gathering all along. His books have sold more than 25 million copies. During this same time, he founded Redeemer, the most influential church in New York and maybe America.
蒂姆直到 58 岁才觉得自己有资格出版他的第一本重要著作。在接下来的 10 年里，他又出版了近三打著作，收获了他一直以来积累的智慧。他的书已售出超过 2500 万册。与此同时，他创立了救世主教会，这是纽约乃至美国最有影响力的教会。
When Tim got pancreatic cancer at the age of 70, he was still in the prime of his late-blooming life. Under the shadow of death, as he wrote in _The Atlanti_c, his spiritual awareness grew deeper. He experienced more sadness and also more joy. But what I will always remember about those final years is how much more eager Tim was to talk about the state of the world than about the state of his own health. He had more to give, and he worked feverishly until the end. He left behind an agenda for how to repair the American church—a specific action plan for how to mend the Christian presence in our torn land.
当蒂姆 70 岁时患上胰腺癌时，他正值晚年的壮年。正如他在《大西洋月刊》中所写的那样，在死亡的阴影下，他的精神意识变得更加深刻。他经历了更多的悲伤，也经历了更多的快乐。但关于最后几年，我将永远记得蒂姆是多么渴望谈论世界的状况，而不是谈论他自己的健康状况。他有更多的东西可以奉献，他狂热地工作到最后。他留下了一个如何修复美国教会的议程——一个关于如何修复基督徒在我们撕裂的土地上的存在的具体行动计划。
I’ve noticed this pattern again and again: Slow at the start, late bloomers are still sprinting during that final lap—they do not slow down as age brings its decay. They are seeking. They are striving. They are in it with all their heart.
我一次又一次地注意到这种模式：起步缓慢，大器晚成的人在最后一圈仍然冲刺——他们不会随着年龄的衰退而放慢速度。他们正在寻找。他们正在努力。他们全心全意地投入其中。