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. Mozart’s 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, that’s 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.
“It’s
very impressive, what they’ve 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. “It’s 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.
That
is to say: keeping productivity equal, the scientists were as likely to
score a hit at age 50 as at age 25. The distribution was random;
choosing the right project to pursue at the right time was a matter of
luck.
Yet
turning that fortuitous choice into an influential, widely recognized
contribution depended on another element, one the researchers called Q.
Q
could be translated loosely as “skill,” and most likely includes a
broad variety of factors, such as I.Q., drive, motivation, openness to
new ideas and an ability to work well with others. Or, simply, an
ability to make the most of the work at hand: to find some relevance in a
humdrum experiment, and to make an elegant idea glow.
“This
Q factor is so interesting because it potentially includes abilities
people have but may not recognize as central,” said Zach Hambrick, a
professor of psychology at Michigan State University. “Clear writing,
for instance. Take the field of mathematical psychology. You may publish
an interesting finding, but if the paper is unreadable, as so many are,
you can’t have wide impact because no one understands what you’re
talking about.”
The
startling thing about this Q property, the researchers said, is that it
remains constant over time. Contrary to common assumption, experience
does not significantly raise a person’s ability to make the most out of a
given project. “It’s shocking to think about,” Dr. Barabasi said. “We
found that these three factors — Q, productivity and luck — are
independent of each other.”
The researchers gathered career data from other scientific fields and found that the same relationships held up.
Pulling
these results together, the study concluded that hit papers were a
product of Q, the person’s particular strengths, and luck: that is,
finding an important project that flares to life in the furnace of
precisely those abilities. A match of scientist to experiment or, more
broadly, of writer to subject, musician to composition, of the dancer to
the dance.
So
it is that highly productive people may never hit the charts, and high
Qs may spend a career feeling thwarted. “The composition of this Q
quality, whatever you call it, is likely to vary in different fields,”
Dr. Simonton said. “That’s why you can see people who are highly
successful in one field switch careers and not do so well.”
One
important factor often does increase with age, in many endeavors:
status, and with it the freedom to take risks, said Frank Sulloway, a
psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Jean-Baptiste
Lamarck was 57 when he first published on the subject of evolution in
1801, and he was 66 when he finally published his great book
‘Philosophie Zoologique’ in support of the theory of evolution,” Dr.
Sulloway said in an email. “This example seems to fit with my argument
that one needs to take into account the social context of a given theory
as well, as controversial theories tend to be published when scientists
are older and have more intellectual ammunition and reputational status
to back them up.”
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment