When It Comes to Success, Age Really Is Just a Number
The question hangs over the career of every ambitious soul: Is there still time to make a mark?
Charles Darwin was 29 when he came up with his theory of natural selection. Einstein had his annus mirabilis at age 26; Marie Curie made big discoveries about radiation in her late 20s. Mozarts Symphony No. 1 in E flat: 8 years old.
For years, scientists who study achievement have noted that in many fields the most electrifying work comes earlier in life rather than later. After all, younger people can devote their life to a project in a way that more senior people cannot, and young stars attract support, mentors and prestigious appointments.
Now, a big-data analysis of scientific careers appearing in the journal Science finds a host of factors that have nothing to do with age or early stardom. It is, they suggest, a combination of personality, persistence and pure luck, as well as intelligence, that leads to high-impact success at any age.
The bottom line is: Brother, never give up. When you give up, thats when your creativity ends, said Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, who with Roberta Sinatra led a team of researchers who conducted the analysis. Both were physicists at Northeastern University in Boston. Dr. Sinatra has since moved to Central European University in Budapest.
Previous work had found that a similar combination of elements lay behind the success of very top performers in a variety of fields. The new study illustrates that the same forces are at play at all levels of a discipline: the student, the young professional, the midcareer striver and beyond, to those old enough to wonder if their hand is played out.
Its very impressive, what theyve done, the size of the sample, said Dean Simonton, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, who did not contribute to the study. I have looked at the upper end of achievement; they have gone bottom-up, and found similar results applying to an entire profession, he said. The same relationships, Dr. Simonton said, emerge in a broad variety of work, including music composition, film, psychology and technical invention.
The research team began by focusing on career physicists. It ransacked the literature going back to 1893, identifying 2,856 physicists with careers of 20 years or more who published at least one paper every five years widely cited findings rated as impact papers and the team analyzed when in a career those emerged.
Sure enough, the physicists were more likely to produce hits earlier rather than later. But this had nothing to do with their age, the analysis found.
It was entirely because of productivity: Young scientists tried more experiments, increasingly the likelihood they would stumble on something good. Its not the age or order of the papers that matters, said Dr. Barabasi, who wrote the study with Dashun Wang, Pierre Deville and Chaoming Song, as well as Dr. Sinatra. All have appointments at Northeastern.
Source: www.nytimes.com
