Late Bloomers: Why do we equate genius with precocity?

by: Malcolm Gladwell
Issue: Oct. 20

Everyone's reading Gladwell's new book, "Outliers: The Story of Success." But not everyone has read his piece in the New Yorker about the nature of genius. Fortunately, I have and now you can talk like you have too. Here's the basic idea: Gladwell outlines the various kinds of "genius" by comparing two writers who produced great works, but in very different ways.

Ben Fountain left his law firm to become a writer. He eventually found inspiration in Haiti. He went again and again, supported financially by his attorney wife. He was 48 when his collection of short stories, “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara,” received critical acclaim.

Jonathan Safran Foer, on the other hand, took his first creative writing class as a freshman at Princeton. Joyce Carol Oates encouraged him to keep writing. The summer after his sophomore year he took a trip to Europe, returned to the states and ten weeks later had produced "Everything is Illuminated."

"Both are works of art," Gladwell says of "Brief Encounters" and "Everything." "It’s just that, as artists, Fountain and Foer could not be less alike. Fountain went to Haiti thirty times. Foer went to Trachimbrod just once."

Foer describes his creative process as "explosive."

“Why does a dam with a crack in it leak so much?” Foer said. “There was just something in me, there was like a pressure.”

But for Fountain, fulfilling his creative potential required an entirely different set of circumstances.

“Sharie never once brought up money, not once—never,” Fountain, referring to his wife. “I never felt any pressure from her...Not even covert, not even implied.”