Malcolm Gladwell writes about late-bloomers and prodigies in this New Yorker article. He has an interesting take on how culture has shaped us to somehow be surprised by child prodigies - geniuses who seem to have an inborn talent to do something remarkably - and not so much by people who 'bloom into their newly-found geniuses within them later' in life.
I consider myself a late-bloomer in a lot of aspects. I was forced at 15 to make a choice on what to take on at the Ateneo de Manila. I was torn - what did I know about medicine, or being an engineer, or being an architect or a biologist? - and I was supposed to do this at 15?
That was how the educational system in the Philippines worked: at 15 - whilst in your senior (or junior) year in high school, you'd be required to declare what you wanted to study in the university.
Isn't it a bit too young?
Anyway, I ended up with computing sciences - then psychology - then a few more pre-med units. But I guess the point really is "you're asking a 15year-old me to make a life-changing decision?"
Reading this article about late-bloomers, I can relate: it's only later in life (well, now...) that I have rediscovered my passion for for painting and sketching and doodling. I remember that I used to draw a lot when I was in grade school - I drew at the back of my notebooks during long, boring lectures. I even tried to do my own superhero comic-book. In high school, I did pretty well in drafting class - and did pretty good in all those "draw this electrical circuit with this bulb and make sure that you have measured them correctly".
Then university came.
And there were books. Lots of books. Lots of readings. Lots of numbers. Lots of questions.
And doddling and sketching and painting became a luxury.
Until today.
I have just started painting. I bought myself a 200-dollar oil painting kit - with two brushes, linseed oil, and turpentine. I bought two canvasses - and ended up doing a pretty good start on one of them last night.
But there was this nagging feeling - someting at the back of my mind: "Am I really going to finish this? Will the drawing really be good? Will it be something worth hanging on the wall - or will it end up, like most of my other projects, in the bin?"
Then Malcolm Gladwell offers this snippet from a researcher, David Galenson from the University of Chicago:
But late bloomers, Galenson says, tend to work the other way around.
Their approach is experimental (as opposed to young geniuses, who tend to be conceptual). “Their goals are imprecise, so their
procedure is tentative and incremental,” Galenson writes in “Old
Masters and Young Geniuses,” and he goes on:
The
imprecision of their goals means that these artists rarely feel they
have succeeded, and their careers are consequently often dominated by
the pursuit of a single objective. These artists repeat themselves,
painting the same subject many times, and gradually changing its
treatment in an experimental process of trial and error. Each work
leads to the next, and none is generally privileged over others, so
experimental painters rarely make specific preparatory sketches or
plans for a painting. They consider the production of a painting as a
process of searching, in which they aim to discover the image in the
course of making it; they typically believe that learning is a more
important goal than making finished paintings. Experimental artists
build their skills gradually over the course of their careers,
improving their work slowly over long periods. These artists are
perfectionists and are typically plagued by frustration at their
inability to achieve their goal.
Where Picasso wanted to find, not search, Cézanne said the opposite: “I seek in painting.”
(Emphases mine.)
It sounded really... hmm, familiar.
But I guess that's how it works: tainted by pre-judgments - directly or indirectly said, or influenced by existing notions of what a good job and future is and what is not by others around us, late-bloomers (and I am not calling myself a late-bloomer just yet...) tend to build things slowly - and look at things critically.
With tainted, prejudging eyes.
Uncertainties within one's self exist - and questions abound: "What if I discover that I am not good enough in painting - and that my dad or my mom was right: had I chosen to do painting in college, I would have ended up penniless?"
Hmm.
As I pick up my brushes, the pallette, a tube of white, and of red (I still don't know if it is called red, indeed), I really don't care.
Perhaps, I was not meant to paint - and make a living out of painting. And that is fine. The questions and the uncertainties that I have learned throughout the years of dealing with sharks (and dolphins and fishes and crabs and shrimps) in the corporate world will still surely be there. But what the heck.
It's for me this time 'round.
I am painting for me.
Not to earn money. Not to earn a living.
But to try it out. And as Galenson said - to experiment. And experience.
Besides, as Gladwell points out,
Late bloomers’ stories are invariably love stories, and this may be why we have such difficulty with them.