As he drove a school bus carrying his junior high school basketball team back to school after a loss, Dale Brown turned on the windshield wipers. The rain was heavy. With each swipe of the wipers against glass, the dejected Brown heard failure…failure…failure…
It's literally been decades since I read a Sports Illustrated (SI) feature on then-LSU basketball coach Dale Brown. By then he was a Final Four, SEC Champion, college basketball coaching legend, but in the SI story Brown recalled the old days when he wasn't much of anything. Failure...failure...failure…
Brown's story came to mind while reading Rich Karlgaard's inspiring new book, Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement. Not only is Karlgaard a big fan of the world's greatest magazine (after Forbes, of course), not only did Sports Illustrated's layout inform his creation of the first magazine meant to chronicle the rise of a nascent Silicon Valley, but Brown's ascent from the depths of school-bus failure would very much fit what he's talking about in Late Bloomers.
By now many readers are already familiar with Karlgaard's well-publicized thesis, that for many of us our brain truly begins to develop later than others. Because it does, because most of us discover ourselves after our frequently aimless twenties, Karlgaard decries an “early twenty-first-century society” that “has conspired to make us feel shame” for not racing out of life's proverbial gates. Karlgaard is making a case for late bloomers like himself, like the late Hall of Fame football coach Bill Walsh, the brilliant investor Ken Fisher, the endlessly entertaining and imaginative author J.K. Rowling, and countless others who took a while to soar.
As a late bloomer myself, as someone still hopeful about seriously blooming, Karlgaard's book resonated with me. For so long I looked longingly at the early achievements of friends, colleagues, and famous people only to wonder what was wrong with me. Karlgaard experienced much the same, and in a Dale Brown-like moment he discovered the nowhere of his career late one evening while working the night security shift at a northern California business. It wasn't windshield wipers that awakened the Stanford grad from his career slumber, but instead it was the realization that his fellow watchman that night was a dog….
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