Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash
Drawing from various journals and studies, Ms. Livni presents information about the two stages of creativity and when people peak.
The first is Conceptional Innovators. These twenty-somethings have learned just enough to be dangerous. With basic stills of their craft in hand, they make things. They don’t ask, they just do – breaking conventions left and right. The firebrands of the world. Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein. They spend their long (or short – depending on how the public receives their work) lives defining the fields they invent – painters, poets, scientists. Their visions are firm.
No doubt a lot of conceptional innovators actually just reinvent the wheel, since they never actual got to the point in their field to find the wheel has been around for centuries, and get lost in the background noise of their fields. Their passion pushes thing forward. And a lot of conceptional innovators make a wrong assumption – they learned enough to be dangerous, but in their case, was only dangerous to themselves.
Still, the groundbreaking work of the mid-twenty people change the world.
At the other end, in their mid-fifties, are the Experimental Innovators. People who had ideas but wanted to test them. Job and family got in the way, but it gave them time to really explore, test things, experiment with different ways, go back and try again. These older people have had time to learn more than one field, and their innovations often traverse between specialties, creating new connections. Charles Darwin and Virginia Woolf rocked the world, but only after their hairs turned gray.
You are never too old to change the world. The young aren’t the only ones to come up with Creative Thoughts.
You are never to young to change the world. The old don’t know everything.
Bibliography
Livni, Ephrat. “The two types of creativity that peak at different ages.” Quartz. 2019 April 28. (https://qz.com/1606423/the-two-types-of-creativity-peak-at-very-different-ages – last viewed 11/17/2023)