Creativity and greatness can be fostered at any age. I’m just hoping American’s obsession with youth dies down enough to promote the worth of our entire population instead of the “lucky” ones who are under 25.

“Age is another factor which the physicists particularly worry about. They always are saying that you have got to do it when you are young or you will never do it. Einstein did things very early, and all the quantum mechanic fellows were disgustingly young when they did their best work. Most mathematicians, theoretical physicists, and astrophysicists do what we consider their best work when they are young. It is not that they don’t do good work in their old age but what we value most is often what they did early. On the other hand, in music, politics and literature, often what we consider their best work was done late. I don’t know how whatever field you are in fits this scale, but age has some effect.

But let me say why age seems to have the effect it does. In the first place if you do some good work you will find yourself on all kinds of committees and unable to do any more work. You may find yourself as I saw Brattain when he got a Nobel Prize. The day the prize was announced we all assembled in Arnold Auditorium; all three winners got up and made speeches. The third one, Brattain, practically with tears in his eyes, said, “I know about this Nobel-Prize effect and I am not going to let it affect me; I am going to remain good old Walter Brattain.” Well I said to myself, “That is nice.” But in a few weeks I saw it was affecting him. Now he could only work on great problems.

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn’t the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you.”

the speech was given at Bell Labs in 1986 and the entire text can be accessed here: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
the whole thing is worth reading.

Cheers,

QWG

For example, discounting Doogie Howser, medicine takes time to qualify in, hence its relatively autumnal career peak. On top of this, background and fate play their part in hampering or encouraging an individual’s realisation of their inquiries. The search for any “average” or “ideal” is however misleading and placing the human condition into a bell curve, implies the existence of a simplistic, rational world which most lines of inquiry are born in opposition to.

Photography is of course a physical activity, so someone who photographs war zones and teenage drug binges, is probably going to “peak” earlier than someone who photographs their family growing old or the changes in a city’s surface. But aside from these self evident
constraints, perhaps that there is actually far more play in the productive age range.

Whilst I genuinely believe that nearly every person who has contributed to this post, has already had their best ideas, probably when they were still a child, whether or not they have realised them to their full potential is an entirely different matter. The idea of an artist’s peak is largely driven I feel, by the notion of success, something which weighs down upon the artist heavily, through both its presence and absence. Early success can lure an artist into the assumption that they have completed their line of inquiry, resulting in stagnation and repetition, lack of success can have a similar result, in that the artist stagnates through a perception of failure. Therefore I would argue that the “peak years” idea is not an immutable, physical reality, but an almost entirely social construction, that in fact imposes itself on our lives and unfortunately our work.