#572： The Unexpected Upsides of Being a Late Bloomer
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Summary
In his new book, Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement, author Rich Lichtenstein explores the benefits and disadvantages of being an early bloomer, and the benefits of being a late bloomer.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast there's an unspoken
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timeline that people supposedly need to follow to have a successful life be a good student high
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school get into a good college and then get a good job right after you graduate but you've
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probably met successful people whose lives didn't follow this kind of linear arc and neat timeline
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maybe yours didn't either the young adult years weren't very auspicious and they didn't come into
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their own and find their bearings until after college or even much later my guest day explores
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the upsides of this kind of directory in his book late bloomers the power of patience in a world
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obsessed with early achievement his name is rich carl guard and we begin our conversation discussing
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how he defines a late bloomer and a few examples of some famous late bloomers in history we then dig
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into how late bloomers got a bad rap and how society became increasingly obsessed with finding success at
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a young age rich then walks us through the disadvantages of being an early bloomer and the
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advantages of being a late bloomer including resilience self-awareness and a healthy motivating
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sense of self-doubt after the show's over check out our show notes at aom.is slash late bloomer
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all right rich carl guard welcome to the show thanks for having me brett so you just got a new book
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out late bloomers the power of patience in a world obsessed with early achievement what got you
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thinking about and wanting to write an entire book about late bloomers well i've always thought of
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myself as a late bloomer and i always wondered if sharing my late bloomer story would be of use to
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people and i've been thinking about this for not only years but decades because at age 25 i was a
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complete wreck incapable of holding an adult level job and i really didn't begin to form as a fully
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functioning adult until my late 20s and then when that happened i began to bloom pretty fast so i always
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wondered if that would be a useful story to share with a broader audience and what catalyzed my wanting
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to write the book now was simply picking up all these stories about the problems that parents were
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having with their teenagers and this rising rate of anxiety depression and even suicide among teens and
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young adults and a new kind of sufferer not not the people who were sort of predisposed because they
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were maybe bipolar or they got into trouble with drugs or things like that these were kids who were
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depressed anxious and some of them even contemplating ending their lives because they were feeling this
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enormous pressure to bloom early to just knock it out of the park and standardized tests straight a's and
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advanced placement courses getting into the most elite college that they could and i thought wait a
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minute this is this needs to be challenged this idea you have one window in your teens when you're
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supposed to demonstrate the capability of your whole lifetime in front of you and i and that's when i got
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off my butt and spent four years researching and writing the book late bloomers and you highlight in the
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book there hasn't been a lot written about late bloomers or even like research there's been a lot of
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research done about prodigies and what makes a prodigy a prodigy but nothing about late bloomers
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well i was kind of surprised brett that when i looked into the field that that nobody had claimed
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the term late bloomers i mean certainly it's a popular phrase in in our language i mean people use
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it all the time maybe they used it more in the past than they they do now but there was no clinical
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definition of what it meant to be a late bloomer and when you saw the phrase in the academic
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literature it would usually be in association with somebody you know some some sort of problem
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rather than an opportunity you know this poor late bloomer well you know we have no other
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diagnosis for the slow kid so let's just call him a late bloomer and i thought well this is a great
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chance to add a definition to a late bloomer and so i came up with a couple one was chronological and
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one is more metaphysical the chronological definition of late bloomer as i see it is somebody who comes into
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their own full talents and motivations simply later than expected now later than expected be can be
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contextual for example the greatest nfl quarterback of all time tom brady won a super bowl in his early
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20s i think when he was 24 you'd surely say therefore he was an early bloomer but in the context of
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football he was kind of a late bloomer not very highly recruited out of high school had to fight
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to win the starting job at michigan only started in his senior year you know i think he was the sixth
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quarterback taken in his draft year he went uh there i do know that there were 199 players taken before
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tom brady he was the 200th or so player taken in the nfl draft in his year and so now he becomes the
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most famous quarterback of all time so is tom brady an early bloomer a late bloomer and that's why i think
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is contextual it's contextual to your expectations the more metaphysical definition of late bloomer and
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one that really jazzes me up is that you reach this perfect intersection of your god-given gifts
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and your deepest motivations your sense of purpose a passion so deep you're willing to sacrifice for it
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and when you hit that intersection you feel like you're being pulled toward your destiny as opposed to
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being pushed by others and when you have that feeling of being pulled toward your destiny you
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never burn out on that it only it's only additive and when you feel like you're being pushed by others
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there is going to be a reckoning someday in the future where you're going to self-sabotage
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or or realize it in your consciousness that this is the wrong path and in the book you you highlight and
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you make the point that there was a time in american culture or we can say western culture where
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the late bloomer was seen as in a positive light right maybe he's not you know thriving right now
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but he will eventually but then there was a point in our history in our culture where that you know
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the late bloomers looked down upon and this sort of this idea of the early bloomer that you have to
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hit your prime in your early 20s that became the go-to ideal how did that happen what are all the
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different cultural influences that led to that yeah i think the late bloomer was once more lauded
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and recognized in society when you when i googled late bloomers and this is when i began the research
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of the book about four years ago i mean i was kind of astonished it was the same old stories had been
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around for decades colonel sanders starting you know what became kentucky fried chicken in his 60s
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ray crock franchising the mcdonald brothers hamburger stand again in his 60s grandma moses coming into her own
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as a painter in her 70s and 80s and i go wow these are kind of dated dated stories where are the more
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recent stories they've kind of disappeared in our culture i'd also say that you know when i grew up
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it was common that a kid some teenage boy usually would have problems with authority would maybe get
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into some minor scrapes and some minor troubles and then would go off and join the military and
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would come back you know they were straightened up they were that kind of a late bloomer they came into
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their adult capacities later and i just noticed that in contemporary society the terms seemed to fall
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out there were no recent examples on google in particular maybe you might come up with a morgan freeman
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who didn't achieve hollywood fame and until his 50s uh kind of the same with brian cranston much later
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in life but by and large i thought that this is a term that needs to be rescued and elevated and and
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and used as a motivational tool for people who don't feel like they're coming out of the gates
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all that fast as i did not come out of the gates fast at all and what do you think caused that shift
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like i mean was did like was something did something happen where you're like yeah that's
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where you start seeing this emphasis on you have to peak early instead of blooming late yeah well
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i have my own theory here which i put forth in the book and that is it has to do with the economy if
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you look at the last 20 or 30 years of the u.s economy the two most reliably lucrative fields where you
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could make the most money the quickest way possible legally are in still today high finance let's just
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call it wall street hedge funds high level venture capital and in technology but particularly digital
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technology of the silicon valley sort and that's where your mark zuckerbergs have created you have
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become billionaires and in their 20s and before that bill gates and paul allen and steve jobs and people
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like that but unlike the era of steve jobs when he started apple in the 1970s with steve wozniak and
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they started it in jobs's garage today you know the age of the tinker is kind of gone and today in high
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finance and in silicon valley kinds of technology it's becoming more and more of a closed club of people
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who went to certain universities not exclusively but it is trending in that direction and trending at a
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rapid rate that if you didn't go to harvard or mit or stanford or caltech or a handful of schools like
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that that somehow you're going to have a hard time cracking these doors on wall street or in silicon
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valley at the highest levels and that created this intense competition for kids to get into these right
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schools it trickled down suddenly trickled down into society suddenly aspirational educated parents who
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you know became terrified that if their kids didn't get into these kinds of schools you know that they
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might the window might close on them that the best opportunities in the american economy unless their
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kids had some exceptional athletic skill or artistic skill or or just like were native-born entrepreneurs
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who were going to succeed anyway if they didn't have those other skills and then then they had to pursue
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this early achievement to be recognized by an economy that was recognizing these kinds of talents early
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and so what you're seeing is people spending just enormous sums of money on tutors private camps
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all the kinds of things that that parents do to give their kids an edge and it's just not in academia
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it's in sports you can't just show up and hey i think i'm going to try basketball in the ninth grade if you
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haven't been playing for an organized program before then unless you have exceptional talent
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you probably are going to be cut and never get a chance to play football the same baseball the same
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and everything is backing up into earlier early age groups where kids must show their promise
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and talent early or they the whole system kind of bypasses them right and i imagine also the research
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the psychological research that's been coming out sort of popular has reinforced that um you know
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this idea of deliberate practice and if this the earlier you start deliberately practicing whatever
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the the better you can do and so parents hear that it's like well we got to get johnny and signed up
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for elite sports camp or start him preparing for the lsat or the the sat when he's you know 15 or 14
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so they specialize early uh but the interesting thing is you highlight this research is that
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by doing that you're actually you're you're there's a downside to that right by specializing so early
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yeah david epstein in his new book called range does a pretty good job of debunking the 10 000
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hour theory that that was popularized by malcolm gladwell and developed by an
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academician whose name escapes me right now the idea that that which you alluded to that you better get
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those 10 000 hours in early that practicing with intent or uh or you're not going to be ready for
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prime time and now prime time being coming in an earlier and earlier age bracket but david epstein
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shows that actually it's the well-rounded sports kid the kid who played all sports who tends to do
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better as their career progresses both in college in the pros and so yeah i think there i think when you
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look at the what's gone on in the economy and how it's raised the profile of of these two industries
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that select most of their young talent from a very restricted number of schools and you look what's
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happened in sports that um you know it's led to this mania but more and more it's been debunked if you
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take the idea you look at google as sort of this example now google started by sergey brennan larry page
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were two stanford grad students and and the rest is history and they were both exceptionally bright
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academic people and they both scored 800 on their math sats and i can verify because i just talked to
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somebody last week again in addition to the research i did in my book in the early days of google when
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brennan page were still involved with recruiting people they would the first question out of their
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mouths would be what did you score on your math sat jeff bezos would do the same thing at amazon now
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they don't do that anymore because they know it's kind of a political hot potato to do that but more
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importantly at google google tests everything and google had a visionary hr guy named laszlo bach no
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longer there he's doing his own startup but he tested this idea that whether the high math sat people and
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the people who went to the elite schools were they actually performing better at google and he found
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out that yeah in the first three years they had they were doing slightly better than their peers
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but after three years or so that one's sat and one's diploma mattered almost to the point of
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insignificance it was lost in the statistical noise so there you have it you know whether it's david
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epstein with his book range or google's own testing that the early advantages kind of they they revert to
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the mean even lewis turman the stanford researcher who imported the iq test from france and began this
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longitudinal study called the stanford study of the gifted found out that the early iq high achievers
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reverted to the mean over the course of their lives that is to say they didn't do any better than
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the merely above average well so besides this pressure to excel in in today's economy there's
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also this concern that's driving this you know early bloomer mania that you have to do it while
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you're young because you're you have your faculty like all your mental faculties are there right if you
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if you wait too long then you're just gonna your brain gets slow because you get old does the research
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back that up uh the research doesn't back that up so where does that idea come from well it comes from
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ill-considered statements from people like mark zuckerberg who said when he was in his 20s face it
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people under 30 are just smarter now mark is in his 30s now you'll notice he doesn't say that anymore
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or how about vinod kosala brilliant man one of the founders of sun microsystems back in the 1980s
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became a very successful venture capitalist who said publicly basically people over 45 are brain
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dead and what he meant was brain dead in their ability to go out and start silicon valley kinds
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of companies well it's kind of refuted by a lot of examples out there you take a woman named diane green
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who co-founded vmware with her husband in her 40s diane didn't even go back and get a computer science
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degree as a master's degree until her tell her 30s and then tell the beginning of this year diane
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at age 64 was the ceo of google cloud or you take tom siebel who founded siebel systems in the 1990s in
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his 40s he's now ceo of one of the leading enterprise level ai companies c3.ai and tom just turned 67
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the founder of service now which is 30 billion dollar market cap company
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was started by a guy a week before his 50th birthday so you have plenty examples even even in
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high technology fields i mean jim goodnight who the founder of sass institute big analytics company
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in north carolina was still leading it in his mid 70s still giving keynote speeches at industry
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conferences so it's kind of a refuted now the science refutes it even more deeply there was a
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2015 study led by mit and harvard two postdoc researchers who had their degrees at those
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institutions and were working with massachusetts general hospital and they asked the simple question
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at which age do we cognitively peak to get to your point that there's this window that we have all of
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our you know that we're at our cognitive best well it turns out to be much more complex than that
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it's certain things yes we're best in our late teens and early 20s rapid cognitive processing speed
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working memory those peak pretty early and other a whole other set of skills that support executive
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functioning leadership communication skills etc only begin to peak in our 30s and 40s and 50s and then
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what we call wisdom those skills begin to peak in our 70s 60s and 70s the question is then once we're
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past peak how rapidly do we fall off our peak because the implication you know that if by this fear about
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if you don't hit a window early you're not never going to hit it is that post peak we fall off rapidly
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let's say like a professional sports player who suddenly when they fall they fall rapidly well we don't
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the research that mit harvard study suggested we fall off peak whether it's rapid cognitive
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processing speed or working memory at about a rate of 0.2 percent per year so it's this slow slow i mean
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for all intents and purposes over any given five-year period it looks like a plateau and then five years
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the plateau may be a little lower but in fact if you're a software programmer in your 20s and 30s and
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you're going to advance in your career you're probably going to become a manager anyway in
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your 30s 40s and 50s where you're going to need these new skills that most people don't get until
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their 30s 40s and 50s leadership skills empathetic skills communication skills and the rest so yeah
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there's different parts of our life where we're going to be good at certain different things and
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like that's the other thing to point out is that you could peak at say that you know that that sort of
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information processing working memory later than some other people right some people might peak when
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they're 20 it might you might not do it until you're 24 because that's a misconception a lot
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of people think that you become an adult once you are 18 but biologically the brain is still forming
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into an adult that might happen until you're 25 oh and 25 is seem to be a median age for when the
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prefrontal cortex is fully developed and some young adults will fully mature into recognizable adult
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capacities earlier than that and some later than that there's a neuroscientist at nyu named el conan
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goldberg who believes that with each generation for some reason he can't quite figure out whether it's
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driven by biology or driven by our environment but with each generation the prefrontal cortex seems to be
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appearing about 12 to 18 months later so the median age might be moving toward the mid
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20s goldberg even has an intriguing theory that somehow the body knows that the full adulthood
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should come about one third of the way through a person's life and as life expectations keep
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growing in the west you know that this is happening anyway he he's conducting a number of tests to see if
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that is that is possible or whether things like social media and other things are delaying the onset of
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full adult maturity could be any number of reasons but 25 moving upward is the median which means that
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some will mature faster some will mature slower i can tell you in my own life that i was very conscious
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of the fact that i only began to think and comport myself like an adult until i was 26 or 7 and only then
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did i began a pretty rapid process of blooming but i was incapable of blooming much at all from
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adolescence through my middle and late 20s with a few little exceptions you know along the way some
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low level you know accomplishments in sports pulling an upset and getting into stanford at a time when
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frankly it was a lot easier to get into stanford than it is now a few things like that but but nothing
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that took root nothing that took root until my late 20s and beyond we're gonna take a quick break for
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a word from our sponsors and now back to the show i'm curious in your research in the book and talking
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to different late bloomers like do we what did you find like why did late bloomers become late bloomers
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or is it sort of like tolstoy right in his families like every unhappy family is unhappy in its own ways
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like every late bloomer different in its like a late bloomer in its own way oh i think you asked a great
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question because i i don't think there's a single answer to that some i'm pretty convinced in my case
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that two things slowed my development one was simply i had a you know a whole history going
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back to childhood of being a really slow to physically mature kid when i was in eighth grade
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i was five foot two and 80 pounds five foot two and 80 pounds i mean i got the snot kicked out of me
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playing junior high school football i i never got playing games you know i was the poor kid who was got
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to play safety and just got the you know got blocked you know and the wind knocked out of me
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on every practice play and you know i'm six feet and one half inch today and i mean so you know from
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five two to my full spurt happened happened rather late people could grow up in dysfunctional families
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people could grow up with some undiagnosed problem like dyslexia where people were slow to catch it
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ronald reagan i was reading ronald reagan's biography and ronald reagan had really poor vision
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and but he came from a kind of a poor family and he didn't have glasses until high school and only in
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high school did he begin to show any love of reading and things like that so there could be any number of
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reasons why people are slow out of the gate and but the important thing is is that being slow out of
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the gate doesn't dictate where you're where you're going to go unless we let this stupid societal
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narrative right now win the argument and i'm determined to not to let that not happen and part
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of that in your book the second half you talk about the problem of this early bloomer narrative
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but then you make the case for late bloomers that there are lots of benefits and strengths that late
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bloomers have i mean what are some of the what are a few of the those strengths that stood out to you
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in your research curiosity i think is one of the great attributes of of late bloomers now why would
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why would late bloomers have more curiosity which is something i assert but i will admit that i can't
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prove this one this one goes into the area of anecdotal you know the best that i can do speculation but
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i'm sticking with it why do late bloomers as i assert have more curiosity than early bloomers well think
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about this whole early blooming conveyor belt track that we're putting kids on today where they're
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supposed to demonstrate their excellence in sports or school or playing an instrument in an orchestra
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whatever it is earlier and earlier what is the process that makes that possible the process that
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makes that possible for them to do well early is that they focus they approach everything that they do
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whether academics or sports or music with a determined focus well what what what is the price of a
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determined focus the price is your lateral vision you know determined focus is you're looking straight
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ahead with with a focused vision you lose your lateral vision you lose your curiosity you lose even the
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sense that going out wandering and playing and trying things you know has a justification anymore
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society would appear to tell you it has no justification whatsoever well you lose your curiosity
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kids have it in abundance but you lose your curiosity throughout your childhood and adolescence
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young adulthood when you need it it's kind of hard to get it back if you've always been the rote learner
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the one always marching to adults tunes it gets hard to get it back now is that a lot real loss yeah i say it is
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and i go to this uh it's a 2017 cover story in fortune magazine and their annual best places to work
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issue and they asked a bunch of ceos of high performing companies the very kinds of companies
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that recruit for high iq people companies like genentech intuit and they asked the ceos of these
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companies what's the number one attribute that you'd like to see an employee and the ceos of both of
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those companies said curiosity and so did other ceos because without curiosity there's no learning
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without learning there's no there's no human development inside of the organization and if
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people are people are stuck then teams get stuck then the organization gets stuck you know you fail
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to recognize when to disrupt yourself you fail to recognize a new competitor coming out of left field
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all of those kinds of things vanish when you are so focused and you don't have curiosity that goes with it
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so curiosity late bloomers tend to have more curiosity simply because either inherently or through blind
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luck they resisted the siren call to put their butts down on the chairs and concentrate and and with a
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determined focus that their early blooming brethren were doing another benefit that stood out to me that
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you wrote about in the book was that early blooming you know you look at these kids and you look at
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they're doing awesome they're amazing but they're also really fragile because they experienced success
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early they might not have experienced too much failure so it makes them less resilient but a late
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bloomer they probably experienced failure after failure in their early life and so at a certain point
00:27:17.880
they built up a tough skin yeah leading leading to some resilience again i speculate perhaps more
00:27:26.520
than some of these early bloomers now i don't mean the early bloomer who followed the path of
00:27:31.780
of pluck and grit and and found that they could do things on their own i'm talking about the mass of of early
00:27:39.380
bloomers in an affluent society or simply been pushed to early blooming by their parents by the school
00:27:45.380
system let me tell you one of the most important interviews that i did for the book it really opened my eyes
00:27:51.160
on a lot of subjects it was carol dweck now carol dweck if you're not familiar with the name
00:27:56.720
wrote a best-selling book called mindset in 2006 where she differentiates a growth mindset from a fixed
00:28:06.340
mindset you want a growth mindset to jump to the to her conclusion and this book has been embraced by
00:28:14.300
by leading corporations satya nadella the ceo at microsoft as everybody at microsoft read
00:28:20.080
mindset it's that good a book well carol teaches psychology at stanford university and she has a
00:28:26.440
freshman introductory class when i interviewed her for my book late bloomers it was 10 years after
00:28:32.920
mindset came out it was in the late summer of 2016 and she said something that was just kind of
00:28:41.620
shocking to me and answered the question of has anything changed and she came out with mindset
00:28:46.100
in 2006 and she leaned forward and slapped the table and she said it's gotten worse i said what
00:28:53.680
do you how does it got worse you know more than a million people have bought and read your book and
00:28:57.960
satya nadella you know you've changed the way companies are thinking about this you said it's not
00:29:02.880
companies it's it's the the school system system and the incentives there for students has got worse
00:29:09.620
so i said well give me an example and she said well the kids i see coming into stanford today
00:29:15.600
the ones i see in my introductory freshman course in psychology are and then i quoted her are exhausted
00:29:23.260
brittle and don't want to wreck their perfect records now stop and think about that if that's the if
00:29:32.560
that's the spoils of victory of you know because stanford you know school that i could never get into
00:29:39.520
today but you could and heart and a lot of people don't it only has a three percent admissions rate
00:29:44.680
so it's a very prestigious school to get into today and you're spending your whole high school career
00:29:50.420
trying to get into an elite school like that and then the price of winning that prize is that you arrive
00:29:56.220
brittle and exhausted not wanting to mar your perfect record you know what kind of a win is that
00:30:02.820
that's not a win that's a fixed mindset that's somebody who's traded in their curiosity for focus
00:30:09.280
and now is exhausted another attribute that i thought was surprising you talked about it can be
00:30:13.620
a benefit to late bloomers is this idea of self-doubt now we live in a world where like people are you
00:30:19.440
know googling for articles on how to be more confident more assertive but you're saying late bloomers they
00:30:24.680
understand how self-doubt can actually propel them to success how so well late bloomers have to openly
00:30:31.000
face their self-doubt because society isn't praising them the way they're praising the early bloomers so
00:30:36.060
it's out there in the open now the question is what do you do with your self-doubt and there's a lot of
00:30:42.520
pop literature around the idea that you simply ignore it or bull your way past it you know you you puff
00:30:49.040
yourself up you tell yourself some slogans you go to some some conferences by some very popular
00:30:54.740
speakers uh whom i won't name because i think they act in good faith but but uh and that can have a
00:31:01.460
short-term effect sometimes we need to bull our way through a period of period of doubt but as a
00:31:07.420
long-term strategy self-doubt is going to creep back in i look at self-doubt like the weather you can't
00:31:14.460
control the weather you can't control your mood all the time it's going to creep in the clouds are going
00:31:19.940
to creep in now what do you do with it then when it's impossible to keep self-doubt away do you try
00:31:25.940
to bull yourself through it well maybe you can but maybe maybe that's like the equivalent of anaerobic
00:31:32.620
sports and you need an aerobic strategy to go along with that and the aerobic strategy to go along with
00:31:38.780
that the marathon strategy for dealing with self-doubt and simply coming to terms with it in a way
00:31:43.540
and the number one thing you need to do is not let self-doubt infect your self-worth you need to draw
00:31:50.740
a wall between your self-doubt and your self-worth you have inherent self-worth you know i mean i
00:31:56.680
personally believe that we're all creatures of god and that alone gives us all the self-worth that we'll
00:32:02.300
ever need but even if you don't have that have that religious belief about your values as a human
00:32:09.360
being just accept that you have self-worth self-doubt is information we should we're here
00:32:15.780
human beings have evolved because our our forebearers had self-doubt the ones that rushed into you know
00:32:24.020
rushed across a raging river to chase the animals to get protein perished they drowned and so being
00:32:32.020
skeptical of things or being skeptical having doubt about a scam artist all of those kinds of things
00:32:37.200
having doubt if somebody's telling you to jump off a cliff and into the water and it's a 50-foot drop
00:32:43.040
that's good so self-doubt is information it's evolved into us as part of our survival mechanism
00:32:49.180
and so we need to do with self-doubt about anything is step back and say as uncomfortable as it is to feel
00:32:56.280
the self-doubt what information value can i get from it you know carol dweck going back to her again
00:33:02.920
says that she teaches a technique of uh imagining self-doubt is the annoying friend who shows up at
00:33:10.080
the wrong time at the worst possible time right before you're going to give a speech right before
00:33:15.080
you're going to do a job interview right before you're going to take a major test right before
00:33:19.220
you're going to make the biggest sales presentation of your career you know this annoying friend self-doubt
00:33:24.300
shows up and you just simply you know you oh you again okay what what do you have to tell me
00:33:31.640
spit it out okay thanks go sit down and move forward right and you may i like how you make
00:33:36.760
this distinction uh between self-doubt and self-efficacy just because you don't think maybe
00:33:41.460
you have doubts about your you know how it's going to turn out the people late bloomers who doubt
00:33:46.820
themselves they still have confidence that they're able to figure out a way to make it work even though
00:33:52.080
it looks like it's going to be hard they still exercise their agency to get it done yeah self-efficacy
00:33:57.860
it was a great concept put forward by a stanford psychologist of an older generation he's still
00:34:03.220
alive he's in his 90s named albert bandura one of the great psychologists who ever ever lived and
00:34:09.640
self-efficacy exactly as you describe it is this idea that the people who accomplish things are not
00:34:16.480
people who are free of self-doubt they're the people who move forward despite their self-doubt
00:34:21.100
and they start at their point of efficacy and they expand their circles of efficacy they learn
00:34:26.580
the habit you know even even in self-doubt go to that thing that you know you can do well
00:34:31.740
even when you have self-doubt and then use the information value that self-doubt is bringing you
00:34:37.400
to say well how now do i expand that circle you know maybe the self-doubt you're feeling about your
00:34:43.160
startup company let's say is your worry that you're really not good in some areas that the company needs
00:34:49.560
to be good at and you're the founder and you think you're supposed to be good in all the areas
00:34:53.680
finance raising money making the product selling the product marketing all of that and the fact of
00:35:00.620
the matter is very few people can do it all so you're feeling a vague sense of self-doubt
00:35:05.040
listen to what the self-doubt is saying it may tell you okay you know you're strong here you're weak
00:35:10.540
there okay self-efficacy is going to your strengths and building from there and then figuring out how do i
00:35:17.380
build the bridge to solve the things that i'm not good at maybe i need to bring in a partner maybe i
00:35:21.900
need you know a really good employee in this area so self-efficacy go to the thing you know you can
00:35:28.000
always count on you know and get some get some momentum going and then begin to expand the circles
00:35:34.940
and develop the habit of knowing a technique of proceeding when you feel this self-doubt and then
00:35:41.980
also you know understand that self-doubt is information right it can be useful information
00:35:46.620
to help you make a wise decision so imagine when you're young you don't have a lot of self-doubt
00:35:51.660
you're confident and so you tend to be sometimes there's a tendency to make decisions that aren't
00:35:56.740
good in the long run and can actually come back and bite you in the butt later on yeah one of my
00:36:01.120
heroes that i wrote about in the book a man who if you met him was a man who wore self-doubt on his
00:36:07.120
sleeve and seemed almost neurotic and you'd think well you know that generally doesn't describe
00:36:13.780
successful people and certainly would never describe an nfl football coach and one of the
00:36:19.880
greatest nfl football coaches and innovators of all time bill walsh but bill walsh you know um had
00:36:28.140
this very professorial demeanor he was a great innovator everybody talks about the west coast offense
00:36:35.860
today and you know as many different iterations including the kansas city chiefs and and patrick
00:36:42.800
mahomes today doing it on a level that no one dreamed it could happen but it was really bill walsh uh
00:36:48.900
back in the early 1980s of the san francisco 49ers and before that as an assistant coach of the
00:36:54.460
cincinnati bangles in the late 1960s who pioneered all of this so anyway i got to know walsh quite well
00:37:01.620
and i would see that you know a great example of how walsh would would deal with a self-doubt
00:37:08.660
walsh knew that he would feel a sense of panic at the beginning of a game all the tension all the
00:37:15.300
adrenaline all of that and finally the kickoff and and he felt overwhelmed but he admitted that he was
00:37:21.400
overwhelmed how did he respond to it he scripted the first 20 plays of every game he did it for himself
00:37:28.020
he did it for his quarterback he did it to give the team a sense of calm you know not to be overwhelmed
00:37:34.500
by the moment another thing he would do he knew that he and his team were prone to panic if let's say it
00:37:41.020
was first and 10 on their own two yard line particularly in an away game with a really loud
00:37:47.940
fan base you know of the other team you can't hear anything so he practiced it he said okay let's
00:37:55.160
take this problem head on and he would simulate that out on the practice field bringing in you know
00:38:00.680
rock concert size speakers with crowd noise and simulating what you'd like to be first and you
00:38:07.360
know first and 10 on your own two yard line in a very very noisy stadium and you know he would deal
00:38:13.500
in other words what walsh would do is he would anticipate those moments where he might feel doubt and
00:38:18.540
panic and simulate it before rather than run away from the doubt rather than puff up his chest and
00:38:24.240
tell his players we're all men here we're gonna you know bull our way through it which
00:38:27.960
i think is the equivalent that a lot of these uh rah rah speakers are telling some of the people who
00:38:33.100
are coming to their seminars all right so late bloomers can use self-doubt to their advantage
00:38:37.320
as long as they don't let up on the self-efficacy that's yeah that that that's absolutely critical i
00:38:42.960
mean just because you're a self-bloomer it may not be your fault that you're a self-bloomer you may have
00:38:47.440
been for any number of reasons the family you grew up in the fact that you were a late mature the fact
00:38:53.120
that you know you had to overcome some trauma in your own life whether a illness or accident or
00:38:57.820
your own addiction problems i mean you know that you still own your life you know it may not be your
00:39:04.780
fault but it's your life and and you are responsible for it so i don't want to leave anybody uh feeling
00:39:10.420
that i'm uh giving permission for people to run away and be passive waiting for that magic late blooming
00:39:15.760
moment to happen well in one way late bloomers if say someone is like they're they feel like they're a
00:39:20.520
late bloomer one thing they can do to exercise that self-efficacy is to change their environment
00:39:25.260
right their their environment might be the thing that's causing them to you know late bloom so maybe
00:39:30.560
maybe you have to move somewhere else or maybe you got to get away from friends who are holding you back
00:39:34.800
because they don't think what you want to do is good for whatever reason yeah i'll share my own story
00:39:40.660
so i grew up in bismark north dakota and my dad was a high school athletic director in the capital
00:39:47.260
city of north dakota so he was paid about at the level of a high school principal and my mom didn't
00:39:53.240
work so we were middle middle class but he was an esteemed guy around town and and he was a great
00:39:59.760
high school athlete himself one of those all-arounders football basketball baseball and the traditional
00:40:06.540
sports and and i was terrible in all of those traditional sports and i became you know pretty good
00:40:12.660
but not great in track and field and cross country i was good enough to run in the state track meet
00:40:16.660
in the fast heat the finals and the mile but you know then i was the kid that finished second to last
00:40:22.120
in the fast heat the state mile so that kind of tells you my my level but i always felt that this
00:40:28.020
mark north dakota was not a place where i was going to bloom number one you know there always be the
00:40:32.760
comparison with my own father a wonderful man but but but kind of a barrier for me because it informed how
00:40:39.840
i would see myself and it would inform how others might see me and then i began to realize that my
00:40:46.500
i love to read i love to debate people i love to all those kind of things that weren't weren't skills
00:40:53.420
that at the time i found of much that were valued much by society now i was maybe looking in the wrong
00:40:59.140
place but uh but people who really do well in north dakota are are people who are action figures i mean
00:41:07.240
they are they get into physical industries they become civil engineers they build dams roads
00:41:12.680
do construction projects they're good in those things they love to do those things and you know i just
00:41:20.200
wasn't more of those i was more of a cerebral creative introverted type and in fact the cerebral
00:41:27.520
introverted type particularly if you layer on the late bloomer aspect to that they're going to do better
00:41:32.720
university towns they're going to do better in in urban settings and i found i find that i was able
00:41:38.860
to take all my love of sports and the competitive angle that goes with sports and transfer that to the
00:41:45.560
the competitive landscape of silicon valley where i could put my cerebral and communication skills to work
00:41:52.960
and and a friend of mine and i founded a magazine at the dawn of the desktop publishing revolution and it was
00:41:58.840
was called upside magazine and it and it was my entrepreneurial breakthrough in my early 30s and it got the
00:42:04.840
attention of steve forbes who then hired me and has given me a 27 year career at forbes and all that's going along
00:42:11.740
with it but that couldn't have happened i mean upside is about silicon valley i wouldn't have been motivated
00:42:17.260
to start a magazine about building dams or doing construction projects or the ag industry in north dakota i mean it just
00:42:24.880
wouldn't have happened all right so yeah you you knew yourself well enough you're able to change your
00:42:29.600
environment to make something happen for yourself well rich where can people go to learn more about
00:42:34.640
the book and the rest of your work well thank you so much for that you can go to my website
00:42:41.180
richcarlgard.com be sure you get the spelling right r-a-c-h and then the last name is a little one of those
00:42:48.260
tricky scandinavian deals k-a-r-l-g-a-a-r-d you can ping me at richcarlgard at gmail.com if you want
00:42:58.500
you can go to my book website but i i haven't kept that up as well as i should with all the other things i'm
00:43:04.360
going on here but late bloomer singular late bloomer.com or just go to amazon and look up richcarlgard
00:43:10.580
late bloomers or go to your local bookstore and look it up fantastic well rich carlgard thanks so much time it's been a
00:43:17.040
pleasure yeah thank you so much brett uh it was a real honor to be on your show my guest today was rich
00:43:22.220
carlgard he is the author of the book late bloomer it's available on amazon.com and bookstores
00:43:26.280
everywhere you can find out more information about his work at his website richcarlgard.com
00:43:30.860
also check out our show notes at aom.is slash late bloomer where you can find links to resources
00:43:36.740
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast check out our website at art of manliest.com
00:43:48.320
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