How to Find Joy and Success as a Late Bloomer  ## Metadata - Author: [[TED Radio Hour]] - Full Title: How to Find Joy and Success as a Late Bloomer - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/4e18ac31-3322-4992-b957-2c2f65ecb2dd ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Doree’s Late Bloomer Journey** - Doree Shafrir shares feeling late to social and career milestones as a young adult. - She struggled with the societal expectations of marriage, career, and family by certain ages. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi Late. Doree Shafrir Oh, yes. This idea of like having to keep up with my peers was something that I felt very deeply. Manoush Zomorodi Late to becoming a hip teenage girl. Doree Shafrir It was like all the girls were shaving their legs. They were making out with boys. Like they were doing all these things that like weren't even on my radar. Manoush Zomorodi And late to hitting the milestones of young adulthood. Yeah. Doree Shafrir So, you know, I graduated college kind of bright eyed and bushy tailed and moved to New York and thought, OK, I'm going to have this like great career in media. But I was kind of flying blind. I opened up the New York Times classified section and I was like, I guess this is how I find a job. I just didn't know anything. But at the same time, I was like, well, I guess I have all these things I need to do before I turn 30. Write a book, maybe get married, buy an apartment. I mean, it was just like this list of things with no understanding of like what it actually took to get those things or why I even really wanted them. When I was in my late 20s, I went back to school. And as part of that, I worked as an intern. And I was older than the assistants. I was older than a lot of the editors. And then I was like, oh, wait, what's happening here? ([Time 0:01:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c7c88d57-5064-4146-99e9-806a12b21b5f)) - **Creativity Linked to Productivity** - Albert-László Barabási found scientific creativity peaks in the first 15-20 years due to productivity. - Creativity doesn’t decline with age; scientists who keep producing maintain chances of high-impact work. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi Success. Albert-László Barabási You don't have to search too much in Wikipedia to realize that I passed 55. Manoush Zomorodi This is Professor Albert Laszlo Barabashi. He's worked in academia for 30 years as a physicist and network scientist. And about a decade ago, he started asking himself a very tough question. Albert-László Barabási I was always wondering, how long can I keep up what I'm doing? That is kind of running a research group, making discoveries, publishing papers, and having an impact. Manoush Zomorodi So he did a little digging around. Albert-László Barabási And I was surprised to see that a fellow physicist, his name is Albert Einstein, has made a very interesting observation. He claimed that a person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so. First, I was curious, why would he say that? Yeah, yeah. And when he looked around himself, the people he knew and he admired, he saw lots of young people, people who were kind of in the mid-20s to late 30s, maybe early 30s, at which point they Made their big discoveries. And he just generalized from this relatively limited observation. Manoush Zomorodi I should say, it's not entirely clear if that quote does indeed come from Einstein. But the idea was compelling to Laszlo, because he had found a lot of early success himself. But he wondered, was this always the case? What about other scientists and other professionals? Albert-László Barabási So about 10 years ago, we started exploring when and how do scientists succeed. We looked at the career of many, many scientists, asking many questions about how early we can say that the scientists will make a phenomenal discovery. At what age do they make those discoveries? And in general, how do we spot a promising scientist? Manoush Zomorodi So you started with what you knew, the careers of scientists. But how did you go about trying to figure out whether Einstein's assumption that younger people achieve more was correct? Albert-László Barabási Well, the first thing we wanted to ask is, is this true only for highly accomplished individuals? Or is creativity really piques for ordinary scientists as well? So the first thing we did is that we reconstructed the career of hundreds of thousands of scientists, starting with physicists, then biologists, and so on, and ask, when did people Make their best discovery? We didn't care whether there was a Nobel Prize discovery or something that was forgotten immediately. We just wanted to know that within a person's career, what was their best? Manoush Zomorodi And you're saying the best is equated with the most public accolades that they got or the most citations? Albert-László Barabási The most citations, because that's kind of a very measurable quantity that we can assign to scientific. In fact, it's debatable whether that really captures impact, but it's a very good proxy of that. And when we analyze all these careers, we were surprised that the vast majority of the scientists published their highest impact work within the 15, maybe 20 years of their career, The first 15 or 20 years. And then after 20 years, the likelihood of publishing something of high impact falls dramatically. So, for example, I'm about 30 years into my career, and the chances of me publishing a paper whose impact would overcome my earlier papers is less than 1%. That's depressing, huh? On the face value, it's very depressing, and so was for me. Manoush Zomorodi In a moment, how Albert Laszlo Barabashi found a silver lining for scientists and some lessons for all late bloomers. I'm Manoush Zamorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. Speaker 6 This message comes from Amazon. When you're on hold with a doctor's office or pharmacy and the operator says, your call is very important to us, after the 10th time, well, suddenly your call doesn't seem very important To them at all. Amazon One Medical has 24-7 virtual care, and Amazon Pharmacy delivers meds right to you fast, without any horrible hold music. Thanks to Amazon, healthcare just got less painful. This message comes from Smalls. Smalls cat food is protein-packed recipes made with preservative-free ingredients you'd find in your fridge, and it's delivered right to your door. That's why Cats.com named Smalls their best overall cat food. Give your cat the food they deserve. To get 60% off your first order and free shipping, head to smalls.com/trh. Ashton Applewhite This message comes from Capital One with the Venture X Card. Earn unlimited double miles on everything you buy. Plus, get premium benefits at a collection of hotels when booking through Capital One travel. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. Details at CapitalOne.com. Manoush Zomorodi This message comes from Square. Square knows that local business can be big business, but with growth comes more complexity. As things get more complex, Square meets you at every opportunity, whether it's expanding to new locations, building a loyal following, or covering cash flow gaps. What started as a little white card reader is now powering things behind the scenes. Square knocks out today's to-dos and unlocks tomorrow's what-ifs. Go to square.com/go slash radio hour to learn more. It's ([Time 0:08:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/71f191fc-39fa-473d-8949-971f1d42d5d0)) - **Gender Career Attrition in Science** - Women leave scientific careers about 3% more likely each year than men, impacting productivity and career length. - This attrition explains much of the productivity and impact differences between genders in science. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi And child care. And black and brown people who may not have been given the same opportunities. So how do you factor in those two groups of people into your idea that success can come later in life? Albert-László Barabási This is actually a very important topic of research in my lab. And we specifically ask the question, what really distinguishes women and men scientists? Ethnicity and race is much harder to quantify, but gender is something that we can easily distinguish. And when we started this research, there were lots of previous results that were not encouraging. It indicated that when you look at the career of a woman scientist versus a men scientist, women have smaller career impact and smaller productivity. But when we looked much more carefully at the data, we realized that when we look at the yearly productivity of men and women, they are largely indistinguishable. Then why there is a career difference? Well, that's because at any year of their career, women have about 3% higher chance of leaving academia than men. You know, at every year, people leave because they go to industry, because they have personal reasons, but at every year of their career, women are 3% more likely to leave the scientific Career than men. As a result, women have shorter career as a group, seem to have lower productivity, and that explains the bulk of the difference in the impact as well. Manoush Zomorodi Okay, so let's talk about a field where, ([Time 0:21:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5a9a8ee6-61e3-4ca1-9152-197048a13ed9)) - **Persistence Ensures Late Success** - Persist in creative and professional endeavors regardless of age. - Overcome the waning willingness to try to keep chances of success alive. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi And I'm guessing the next thing that you would say is be persistent. Albert-László Barabási That's the key to the story, right? Because don't believe that creativity vanishes with age. Creativity doesn't. The willingness to try, that's what vanishes. And if you can overcome that, you have a chance for success no matter your age. ([Time 0:26:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/932ddb83-3916-4ef1-bb03-40d09c920b08)) - **Ageism's Hidden Influence** - Ashton Applewhite highlights cultural ageism as a cause of negative views on aging. - Recognizing age as neutral rather than derogatory can improve attitudes and mental health when growing older. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi Are? I just turned 70. I don't know whether, like, so I'm of an age when I remember when it was impolite to ask a lady how old they were. Ashton Applewhite Well, and there you have hit also on the aspect that aging is gendered and that women are doubly penalized for not only being older, but being an older woman. I just had a comment on Facebook where a woman said she liked everything about the article except the fact that the 70-year man who was being interviewed was described as old. And I said, well, by what measure is 70 not old? It happens to be my age as well. And there is a lot more road behind us than ahead. And she said, by my measure, I don't like the word. Oh. In an ageist culture, age is derogatory. It should be neutral. Manoush Zomorodi This is Ashton Applewhite. Ashton Applewhite I am an anti-ageism activist and the author of This Chair Rocks, a manifesto against ageism. Manoush Zomorodi But it took Ashton a long time to get to this point. Ashton Applewhite These are new ideas to most of us. We live in a culture that barrages us with negative messages about how awful it's going to be to get old, and we all internalize those messages. They become part of our identity unless we stop to challenge them. Manoush Zomorodi Okay, I want to start with how you got into thinking and writing about the way we treat people of a certain age? Old people. Ashton Applewhite Go ahead. Say it. Old people. Yes. How did it happen? There's not a meet-cute moment. I was in my mid-50s, and I realized that this getting old thing was happening to me, and I was really apprehensive about it. And being a bull-by kind of person, I started looking into longevity and talking to older people. It's not that our apprehensions about aging are without basis, but our fears are way out of proportion to reality. Manoush Zomorodi Ashton Applewhite continues from the TED stage. Ashton Applewhite What's one thing that every person in this room is going to become? Older. And most of us are scared, stiff at the prospect. I used to feel the same way. What was I most worried about? Ending up drooling in some grim institutional hallway. And then I learned that only 4 percent of older Americans are living in nursing homes, and the percentage is dropping. What else was I worried about? Dementia. Turns out that most of us can think just fine to the end. Dementia rates are dropping, too. The real epidemic is anxiety over memory loss. I also figured that old people were depressed because they were old, and they were going to die soon. It turns out that the longer people live, the less they fear dying and that people are happiest at the beginnings and the ends of their lives. It's called the U-curve of happiness. And it's been borne out by dozens of studies around the world. Manoush Zomorodi So you go on this mission to just learn more about aging and you discover that there's actually a lot less to worry about than maybe many of us assume, even though, you know, not to diminish It, yeah, getting older does have its challenges. Yeah. Ashton Applewhite There are legitimate and real reasons to worry about getting older, getting sick, running out of money, ending up a loan. But, you know, only two bad things about aging are inevitable. One is that people you've known all your life are going to die. And the other is that some part of your body is going to fall apart. Carl Pillemer at Cornell interviewed, I think, over a thousand older people. What advice did they have for younger people? And they said, don't worry so much. And they said, don't worry so much about getting older. People with more accurate attitudes towards aging live longer, an average of seven and a half years longer. We walk faster. Equate aging with disease and decline, are less likely to develop Alzheimer's, even if they have the gene that predisposes them to the disease. Wow. So I started feeling a lot better about getting older, and I started obsessing about why so few people know these things. The reason is ageism. We experience it anytime someone assumes we're too old for something, instead of finding out who we are and what we're capable of. Or too young. Ageism cuts both ways. All prejudice relies on othering, seeing a group of people as other than ourselves, other race, other religion, other nationality. The strange thing about ageism, that other is us. Ageism feeds on denial, our reluctance to acknowledge that we are going to become that older person. It's denial when we try to pass for younger, or when we believe in anti-aging products, or when we feel like our bodies are betraying us simply because they are changing. The sooner we get off this hamster wheel of age denial, the better off we are. Older people can be the most ageist of all because we've had a lifetime to internalize these messages and we've never thought to challenge them. I had to acknowledge ([Time 0:27:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fde2b654-bd96-4869-b7e0-4676589cc792)) - **Challenge Your Age Attitudes** - Reflect on your own attitudes toward age and aging. - Notice how language and societal messages shape your age-related perceptions and responses. Transcript: Ashton Applewhite The most important thing we can each do is to look at our own attitudes towards age and aging. Think about how you use the words old and young, how you feel when someone, you know, calls you young lady or fails to call you young lady or cards you or doesn't card you. The zillions of ways in which age crops up in daily life, in the media, you name it. And think about your response. Think about where that message comes from and what purpose it serves. ([Time 0:40:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b9faede2-2d63-4880-b624-031e3199fb30)) - **Four Retirement Phases Described** - Riley Moynes describes four phases of retirement: vacation, loss, trial and error, and reinvention. - Experimenting in phase three enables many to find meaningful purpose in phase four. Transcript: Manoush Zomorodi We blossom during that period, we need to take some specific steps, according to author and retired educator Riley Moynes. Here he is on the TED stage in May 2022. Riley Moynes I belong to a walking group that meets early three mornings a week. As we walk, we've gotten the habit of choosing a topic for discussion. And one day the topic was, how do you squeeze all the juice out of retirement? How's that for seven o'clock in the morning? So we walk and we talk and the next day we go on to the next topic, but the question stayed with me because I was really having some challenges with retirement. I was busy enough, but I really didn't feel that I was doing very much that was significant or important. So I decided to dig deeper. And what I discovered was that much of the material on retirement focuses on the financial and or the estate side of things. And of course, they're both important, but just not what I was looking for. So I interviewed dozens and dozens of retirees, and I asked them the question, how do you squeeze all the juice out of retirement? What I discovered was that there are four distinct phases that most of us move through in retirement. And as you'll see, it's not always a smooth ride. Phase one is the vacation phase, and that's just what it's like. You wake up when you want, you do what you want all day, and the best part is that there is no set routine. And for most folks, phase one lasts for about a year or so. And then strangely, it begins to lose its luster. We begin to feel a bit bored. And we ask ourselves, is that all there is to retirement? Now, when these thoughts and feelings start to bubble up, you have already moved into phase two. Phase two is when we feel loss and we feel lost. We lose a sense of identity. We lose many of the relationships that we had established at work. We lose a sense of purpose. And for some people, there's depression and decline, both physical and mental. The result of all of this is that we can feel like we've been hit by a bus. Fortunately, at some point, most of us say to ourselves, hey, I can't go on like this. And when we do, we've turned a corner to phase three. Phase three is a time of trial and error. In phase three, we ask ourselves, how can I make my life meaningful again? The answer often is to do things that you love to do and do really well. But phase three can also deliver some disappointment and failure. For example, I spent a couple of years serving on a condo board until I finally got tired of being yelled at. I thought about law school, thinking perhaps of becoming a paralegal, and then I completed a program on dispute resolution. It all went nowhere. Now, I know all this can sound bad, but it's really important to keep trying and experimenting with different activities that'll make you want to get up in the morning again. Because if you don't, there's a real good chance of slipping back into phase two, and that is not a happy prospect. Not everyone breaks through to phase four, but those who do are some of the happiest people I have ever met. Phase four is a time to reinvent and rewire. But phase four involves answering some tough questions too. Like what's the purpose here? What's my mission? You see, it's important that we find activities that are meaningful to us and that give us a sense of accomplishment. And my experience is that it almost always involves service to others. Maybe it's helping a charity that you care about. Or maybe you'll be like my friend Bill. I met Bill a few years ago in a 55 plus activity group. In the summer, we golfed together and walked together and bicycled together. And Bill had this idea that we should exercise our brains as well. He believed that there was a tremendous pool of expertise and experience in our group. And so he approached a number of folks and asked if they would volunteer to teach some of the things that they love to do to others. Our members taught us to paint. They taught us to repair our bicycles. We tutored and mentored local school kids. We set up English as a second language programs for newcomers. We had book clubs. We had film clubs. We even had a few golf clubs. It's exhausting, but exhilarating. That's what's possible in phase four. It is magic to see magic So, I urge you to enjoy your vacation in phase one. Be prepared for the losses in phase two. Experiment and try as many different things as you can in phase three. And squeeze all the juice out of retirement in phase four. 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