Years before he became a Silicon Valley insider and publisher of Forbes magazine, Rich Karlgaard was a complete mess. Those are his words.
“At age 25, I just couldn’t accept even the most basic responsibilities of adult life,��� he told The Post.
The Bismarck, North Dakota, native spent his 20s smoking weed, blowing off job offers, and when he did manage to land a gig, working at Runner’s World magazine in 1977 as an editorial assistant, making glaring errors in his stories and berating colleagues. “I just had a bad attitude,” Karlgaard says.
He worked as a security guard and a dishwasher, a technical writer at a Palo Alto research institute and a copywriter for a Silicon Valley ad agency. And he was terrible at all of it.
“At one of those jobs, I showed up for a client meeting and went around introducing myself as Keith Richards,” Karlgaard says. “Afterward my boss was like, ‘Why would you do that?’ I honestly didn’t know. I just thought it was funny.”
Everything changed for Karlgaard in 1989. At 34, he co-founded Upside, Silicon Valley’s first business magazine. He joined Forbes as an editor at 38, and by 44 he became the magazine’s publisher and began a speaking career that took him around the world.
What inspired the career transformation? As Karlgaard explains in his new book, “Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement” (Currency), out now, it wasn’t until his mid-30s that he felt “like I had a fully functioning brain at last … I could think both intuitively and logically and see the difference.”
He’s become convinced that his brain’s prefrontal cortex “was not fully developed,” he writes. “My brain, literally, was not ready to bloom.”
But when it happened, later than he would have liked, a “whole new world began to open up.”
Karlgaard, now 64 and living in Silicon Valley, says that he’s far from the only person to realize their potential late in life. There are endless examples of those who found success despite “not exploding out of the blocks like an Olympic sprinter.”
People like Grandma Moses, who only started painting at age 78, or Harland David Sanders, who founded Kentucky Fried Chicken at age 65, or Julia Child, who discovered her love for French cooking at 36.
But the elders who found their callings late aren’t held up as examples in today’s society. Instead, Karlgaard writes, our culture “crazily over-celebrates early achievement as the only or best kind of achievement.”
There’s been no shortage of precocious overachievers in recent years — from 17-year-old Malala Yousafzai, who became the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize in 2014, to 14-year-old Robert Nay, who earned $2 million in just two weeks with his mobile game Bubble Ball in 2010.
Even the word “wunderkind” — German for “child prodigy” — is growing in popularity. According to Google, references to “wunderkinds” in books, magazine stories and other media have increased by 1,000 percent since 1960.
There are plenty of media outlets eager to celebrate wunderkinds. Karlgaard’s own Forbes has published a “30 Under 30” list every year since 2011, and magazines like Fortune, The New Yorker and Inc. have similar annual lists celebrating young over-achievers. Time magazine even ranks the “Most Influential Teens” every December.
Karlgaard doesn’t regret the Forbes list — “it’s not wrong to applaud or encourage early success,” he says — but he worries that such excessive promotion of early achievement can have a dark flip-side. “For the twentysomethings among us, the message is clear,” Karlgaard writes. “Succeed right now or you never will.”
The timing of Karlgaard’s book couldn’t be more prescient, published on the heels of the college admission scandal.
“Late Bloomers” perfectly encapsulates the pressures not just on young people but the parents who want to see their kids rise to the top.
“If we or our kids haven’t knocked our SATs out of the park, gained admittance to a top-ten university, reinvented an industry or landed our first job at a cool company that is changing the world, we have somehow failed and are destined to be an also-ran for the rest of our life,” Karlgaard writes.
Karlgaard doesn’t condone the actions of parents accused of using bribery and fraud to get their children into Ivy League schools, but he understands it. “It’s an epidemic that isn’t just about the super-wealthy and elite,” he says. “Even middle and upper-middle-class people talk casually about spending $50,000 or more for college tutoring over the course of a kid’s high school career. It’s not about cheating the system. This is what the system is now. Be at the front of the pack, whatever the cost, or your kid gets left behind.”
The acceptance rates at many of the top colleges and universities are falling to record lows. Just 6 percent of applicants made it into schools like Yale and M.I.T. last year, and Karlgaard’s alma mater, Stanford, dropped from an 85 percent acceptance rate in 1950 to 22 percent in 1990 to just 4.6 percent last year, the lowest in the nation.
Getting into the right college is only half the battle. SAT scores have also become a mark of one’s future potential. Bill Gates scored 800 — a perfect score — on his math SAT. As did Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded Google, and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and the world’s richest man.
But Carl Brigham, the Princeton psychologist who helped develop the Scholastic Aptitude Test, would later dismiss the SATs as a “glorious fallacy,” claiming they didn’t actually measure pure intelligence. The test scores were skewed based on schooling, family background, familiarity with English and other factors. “The ‘native intelligence’ hypothesis is dead,” Brigham said.
Still, the pressure to be perfect at a young age has led to rising rates of suicide and depression among teens and young adults, which is up 70 percent in the past 25 years. Karlgaard thinks the anxiety of today’s young people has more to do with expectations than the state of the world.
“Rates of anxiety and depression among American adolescents and young adults were much lower during the Great Depression, World War II, and the conflict in Vietnam — during years when the US had the military draft — than they are today,” he writes.
Our priorities have also shifted. “In the past, success was not about becoming rich or famous,” Karlgaard writes. “It was not about achieving as much as possible as early as possible.” Instead, both young and old were focused on lives that had meaning, where they felt they were contributing something of value to the world, rather than an end goal of being celebrated and financially rewarded.
“It was about being appreciated for who we are as individuals,” Karlgaard writes. “But it’s been corrupted by a Wunderkind Ideal that’s fomented through our obsession with testing, ranking and sorting young adults.”
American teens are encouraged to decide on a career trajectory while they’re still in high school. But the paths we pursue in our youth aren’t necessarily the right ones.
During the 1980s, Carol Fishman Cohen worked as a financial analyst for the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert. She took a maternity leave in 1990, and just as she was ready to return, she learned that the company had collapsed. So she had three more children, and after an 11-year sabbatical, at the age of 40, she decided the time was right to rejoin the workforce.
But it wasn’t that easy. She felt ostracized, locked out of an industry for which she once felt fully qualified. So instead, she started a company called iRelaunch, devoted to helping professionals return to work after a hiatus.
“Sometimes a career break is a gift,” she told The Post. “It’s the first time we allow ourselves to step back and reflect on whether we were even on the right career path to begin with.
The question of when we cognitively peak, at least in Silicon Valley, is not open to debate.
“They assume it’s in our 20s and 30s,” says Karlgaard. And as venture capitalist Vinod Khosla told an audience in 2011, “people over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.”
But it’s a bias that doesn’t hold up. Late bloomers — whether they’re returning to a career after an extended break or excelling in a new vocation at an age when conventional wisdom dictates they should be fading away — do exist. A 2015 Harvard study showed that rather than losing abilities as we age, we actually acquire a different and multifaceted range of skills.
Our 20s might be ideal for working memory and rapid processing speed, “but in our 30s, 40s and 50s, we develop cognitive capabilities like empathy that support being better managers, executives and communicators,” says Karlgaard. “And in our 60s, there’s cognitive evidence of real wisdom.”
In other words, the skills that make us special in our 20s don’t negate what we’re capable of in midlife, or vice-versa. “What you lose as you grow older is negligible,” says Karlgaard. “Because what you gain is so much more than what a 20-year-old can offer.”
The legendary author F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed, “There are no second acts in American lives.” But as Karlgaard points out, “Fitzgerald was an early bloomer snob.” He achieved literary success at a young age, but his reputation began to fall apart in his 30s, and by 44 he had died a bitter man, “the same age that Raymond Chandler began to write detective stories,” Karlgaard observes. “Chandler was 51 the year his first book, ‘The Big Sleep,’ was published.”
In his book, Karlgaard shows how following the F. Scott Fitzgerald model is a recipe for disaster. There’s pop-neuroscience writer Jonah Lehrer, who was 31 when he fell from grace after being exposed for fabricating Bob Dylan quotes. And Elizabeth Holmes, once picked by Forbes as the “richest self-made woman in the world,” at just 30, for helping concoct Theranos, a technology that (purportedly) could test for hundreds of diseases with just a finger pinprick. (As it turns out, the technology was bogus.)
“Holmes’ fatal flaw was an obsession with early success and the impatience that goes with it,” Karlgaard writes. “When Theranos’ success didn’t occur on her magical schedule, she didn’t stop to fix the technology. Rather, she doubled down on her young genius narrative.”
Still, the tide might be changing. Cohen notes that more companies are showing faith in older employees, who don’t have quite so much impetus to prove themselves as overnight creative geniuses. “I think we’re very much in the middle of it now,” she says. The return-to-work programs initiated by iRelaunch, in which older adults are being taken seriously for their contributions, are slowly but surely on the rise, from just one company offering mid-career internships in 2008 to well over 35 in 2018.
Karlgaard believes it may come down to rethinking how we quantify success. “How many young people out there might’ve been really great carpenters?” he asks. “But because of the traits we’re testing for, those tendencies would’ve been revealed as a weakness rather than a strength. The system we’re in, it’s leading them and their parents into thinking, ‘Uh-oh, this kid is destined for a second-rate life.’”
He points to Ken Fisher, who by all modern standards seemed doomed to be a loser. The future founder of Fisher Investments, which manages $100 billion in investments for 50,000 clients worldwide, “flunked out of junior college,” Karlgaard says. “I would submit that it takes some creativity to flunk out of junior college.”
Fisher wasted his 20s playing in bar bands and doing carpentry. “Then at 30 he began to blossom,” Karlgaard says.
But his ambition didn’t come out of thin air. “He’d been reading thirty trade magazines a week,” he says. “He was learning even though there was no immediate evidence of that.”
This is how Karlgaard says he also found his purpose in life. Years of reading books for pleasure, and trying to grasp ideas without the pressure of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg, helped him find his direction.
“Sometimes people are learning when they don’t know they’re learning and society is giving them no validation that they’re learning,” he says. “It’s a way of exercising your curiosity when society is basically saying, ‘Trade your curiosity for a determined focus.’ ” Karlgaard says.
Fostering this in kids often comes down to just getting out of their way, and not setting timetables for achievement. “Every person needs the chance — multiple chances, really — to match their own unique timeline of evolving brains, talents, and passions.”
Forget a determined focus, Karlgaard argues, and just embrace their — and your — curiosity. “Great things have a way of happening when you wander into the weeds.”