What Anyone Can Do: Rich Karlgaard On Late Bloomers (1036)

Welcome to our new show, What Anyone Can Do Podcast with Leo Bottari and me, Randy Cantrell. Our new show picks up where the last show, Year of the Peer, left off, highlighting the simple truth that who you surround yourself with matters, and that if we enlist the support of others, give back to those who give to us, and pay it forward for the next generation, we can do anything. Author and keynote speaker Leo Bottari and I will interview a diverse group of thought leaders who will share stories and insights that will help you succeed in business, and in life. How? By doing the things anyone can do, but most of us never will. Welcome to another episode of What Anyone Can Do podcast. My name is Randy Cantrell. He is Leo Bottari, our guest today. I'll let Leo make the introduction, but he once introduced himself in a boring business meeting as Keith Richards.

Leo, that's right. Um, but this is in fact, uh, Rich Kaulgaard, uh, publisher and futurist, uh, at Forbes. And, uh, we're just delighted to have him here and, and Of course, today, Rich, we're so excited to get to talk to you about your latest book, Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement. And as we've talked about offline, I've read all your books and I've always really enjoyed them. And I thought this one in particular was so incredibly well done, well researched. And I think it will speak not only to the late bloomers, maybe a few of them among us here, but, um, but really to everyone. And I think it's really instructive for all involved and, um, would love for you to talk a little bit. I think to begin with, what was it that inspired you to take on this topic?

Well, Leo, it's an honor to be on your show and thank you for the kind words. What inspired me to get on this topic was that I certainly identify as a 25. I was still ragingly immature. Incapable of holding a job greater than temporary type of security guard, things like that. I did introduce myself once as Keith Richards at a, at a job that lasted about 2 days after I did that stunt because I was 23 or 24 and I simply didn't even know what adult behavior was. I was in a meeting with a client. I lasted about 2 weeks at a research firm and was shown the door after that. Once again, I had to go back to Being a security guard at age 25, it really struck me that I needed to move on. When one night I was the graveyard shift at a trucking yard and I was making my rounds in my uniform and my badge and I heard a barking across the fence and I swung my flashlight around and there on the other side of the fence peering at me, not happily, was a Rottweiler. And it occurred to me that at age 25, my professional colleague was a dog. And 3 months—

around yourself with matters there, right?

Yeah. Yeah. That, that, that was some realization. And then about 18 months later, I threw a temp typing job at the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto. I was running with some of the scientists and engineers at noon. It was in the Palo Alto Hills. They had shower facilities, beautiful location. And one of the, one of the engineers said, Rich, what are you doing in the temp typing pool? And I said, fast stop. I was almost tearful. I said, I don't know. I feel stuck. I have no clue what I'm supposed to be doing. You know, my roommates are off beginning great legal careers at what became a Silicon Valley law firm powerhouse. Another was working on a secret project at Lockheed. It turned out to be the space shuttle program. They were doing amazing adult things. And this engineer said, well, would you like to try some technical writing and technical editing? And I said, you bet. And I had this, it was like the seas parted. It was the first time, you know, I'm 26 pushing 27 that I felt ready for an adult job. And not only that, working with scientists and engineers opened up a whole new part of my brain that I didn't even know existed, logical thinking, scientific thinking, process thinking. I'd never been exposed to that. My dad was a high school athletic director. I like to say I grew up in a home where logic was about as commonly used as the Egyptian language. And so everything began to change at that point. So I thought, well, maybe, maybe that would be useful to share at some point for other people and parents. Who have teens and young adults that haven't blossomed yet. What more recently, what really got me off my hind end to start the research for doing this book was reading about the rising rates of anxiety, depression, and even suicide among teens and young adults. And there was an epidemic of suicides and suicidal thoughts and treatments for suicidal thoughts in Palo Alto's two public high schools, Gunn High School and Palo Alto High School. And these are because they're in the shadow of Stanford and in an affluent community, a lot of high achievement people. The kids feel a lot of pressure. And a writer from Atlantic Monthly, Hannah Rosen, looked into it and saw that the kids most vulnerable to committing suicide or having suicidal thoughts were not the screw-ups, not the kids that had drug addictions or anything like that. They were the kids who were mere B+ students. And they felt ashamed of themselves. As one of the students who did end up killing himself had posted recently on social media, "I just can't take another day of getting up at 3:30 in the morning to keep up with my Advanced Placement courses." So I said, what the heck is happening to our society? And that's what— that was the catalyst that really propelled me to do this book.

I think though the fact that you do so By sharing your own story, I think makes it particularly powerful, right? This is a very personal experience for you in addition to just something you've researched and you've seen in others. And I thought that that vulnerability and that ability to share that story so that people, you know, could kind of look and see who and what you're doing today and the people you're influencing and see that you know, hey, that, that's something maybe I could do too someday.

Well, thank you, thank you for that. As I got into the research of the book, I found a lot to support the idea that many young adults will simply bloom past the age of 25. They won't even start, and there are reasons for that. But what surprised me, Leo, was that this concept of middle-age blooming and later-age blooming that the research strongly supports our capability to do that. And that I hadn't really anticipated. And so whereas I thought I was going to write a book about the pressure we put on teens and young adults and why that's unwarranted in so many cases, that it backfires probably more often than it does good, it was really, it was really inspiring to see how the brain unfolds over the decades of our lives and how that supports middle-age blooming. That could be the parent returning to the workforce. You interviewed Carol Fishman Cohen, who runs a firm called iRelaunch dedicated to parents re-entering the workforce. They have a lot of fears and anxieties around that, even if they were previously pretty well accomplished. And then what we can do in our 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s is really amazing, validated by a couple of, you know, major pieces of research coming out of Harvard and MIT that I can talk about, and by this maverick, delightful neuroscientist Elkhonan Goldberg out of NYU, who's 72 years old, and I can talk about his findings too.

I'd love for you to do that. I think it was further validated by some of the people that you bring up whom we may not necessarily recognize as late bloomers. We just know them today as for what they do and for how successful they are and all that. So I guess before you get into the research, tell us about some of those people who you actually identify in the book, because I think that really kind of really puts names and faces on this. And then maybe tell us a little bit about research as well.

Well, sure. Let me start with the definition first, because when I got into this, I was kind of surprised to find out that no, there was no official definition of late blooming. And when you saw it in the academic literature, it was usually an afterthought to describe some kind of dysfunction, the failure to launch, etc., etc. So I came up with a couple of definitions. One is chronological and one is more contextual and even spiritual. The chronological one is this idea that a late bloomer is somebody, somebody who comes into their own, their, their They reach their full capacities later than expected and often in unconventional ways. The expected thing, of course, is contextual. So Tom Brady is a late bloomer, even though he won a Super Bowl, 5 more. The fact that he didn't have a 1 to 5 star rating coming out of high school, even though he went to a prominent high school in California that prominent in football circles, Serra High School in San Mateo. And he was the 199th player taken in the year 2000 NFL Draft. The smartest, brightest people in professional football thought there were 198 better picks than Tom Brady. So that's contextual. He was a late bloomer in a field that is designed to recognize and validate and promote really early bloomers. I mean, from high school on. And then you have somebody like Ken Fisher. I relate to Ken Fisher's story. If you watch, you know, cable news or cable sports, you can't miss the Fisher Investments ad. Ken has $100 billion under management. Just think about, you know, I think he charges a 1% or 1.5% fee, so you can do the math on the revenue that comes in from that. And, and, um, Ken flunked out of junior college. I mean, that surpasses even my own mediocrity in high school and junior college. He flunked out of junior college. He finished, he went back again, gave it the junior college try, finished, went off to Humboldt State with the idea of being a forester, quickly discovered that the jobs in forestry are more about paper pushing than actually hiking in the trees. Majored in economics with an idea that he was going to, uh, follow in his father's footsteps and run a financial advisory service. Ken didn't want to work with his father. Uh, so Ken went out on his own, hung his, uh, his own shingle out when he was maybe 23, 24, and hardly anybody came. Nobody showed up. And he managed to chase away the few clients that he had. He managed to chase away his office manager. He spent most of his time supporting himself as a construction worker. And playing guitar in a bar band, and not some foo-foo bar band. I mean a Harley-Davidson rough bar in, uh, in, uh, the Northern California woods. And so, but during that time, he read many, many, many books on investment. Benjamin Graham. I mean, classic books, books through the decades, contemporary books. And he started reading about 25 to 30 trade magazines a month. And along the way, as he likes to say, I developed unconventional theories about how to value a company. He was the first really, you know, when he broke through in his 30s, he became a Forbes columnist in his early 30s, about the time that he was starting to experience some success. And nobody had used the ratio of price to sales. I mean, there's price to earnings, but price to sales to earnings And because different industries, you know, will have higher P/Es because they're valuing the companies on growth rather than earnings growth, the top line growth. So he came up with some stuff like that simply because he was not in the mainstream. And then his business began to take off. And today Ken is in his late 60s and doing very well. Even in Silicon Valley where we celebrate the early achievers like Steve Jobs starting at Apple at 21 in 1976, or Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the Google founders, or Mark Zuckerberg. Kind of quietly, particularly in the enterprise space, you have, you have people who are doing amazing things later on in their lives. Tom Siebel started Siebel Systems at 41. C3, his current company, which is in the AI and IoT field, at 57. Today he's 66. Diane Greene, um, the insiders in Silicon Valley, when talking about the most accomplished women of recent vintage in Silicon Valley, the people who know, her name always pops up at the top of the list. She was the co-founder of VMware at age 43 in the '90s till January this year at age 64. She was the CEO of Google Cloud, going to battle against AWS and Microsoft Azure. David Duffield started PeopleSoft at 46 and Workday at 64. Now he's in his late 70s, you know, still just as creative and as engaged as ever. And I don't know why it is that our culture, you know, becomes infatuated with people like Elizabeth Holmes, who turned out to be a fraud. When you have Diane Greene, you know, who is a magnificent— VMware has a market cap today of $60 billion, her creation. And she started and ran it ethically. And she went home every night at 6 PM because she was raising young kids, and she encouraged other parents to do that. And today VMware is led by another kind of a late bloomer, Pat Gelsinger, who grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania and made his name as an architect of Intel microprocessors in the 1990s. And again, in the footsteps of Diane Greene, there were a couple of interim CEOs in between, runs VMware is a really ethically sound company, you know, and I guess they're just not, you know, they don't have the drama and, you know, the infighting that an Uber, you know, or Theranos has.

Wow. Interesting.

When it comes to the research, Rich, what was the most, and get into that as much as you'd like, what was the most surprising thing as a person that's not a neuroscientist What was the most surprising thing that you discovered?

Two. One was a major study that doesn't get the attention it deserves, and another is a conjecture from a maverick and brilliant neuroscientist. The first, the major study. In 2015, a big study came out. It was led by Laura Germine at Harvard, Josh Hartzorn at MIT, both postdocs working at Massachusetts General Hospital. And they asked the simple question, at what age do we cognitively peak? And the answer is really intriguing, complex, and very, very hopeful. The answer goes like this: What cognitive ability are you talking about? Because there are multiple cognitive abilities, and not just cognitive abilities, you know, then you have emotional intelligence and things like that. And sure enough, that if you're looking at rapid cognitive processing speed and working memory, Those peak pretty early. Those peak in our teens and our 20s. And so it's no surprise that software programming under time pressure favors young people with those kinds of abilities. Then when we get in our 30s, 40s, and 50s, a deeper pattern recognition, um, all the kinds of cognitive abilities that support better communication. Leadership skills, even compassion and empathy, all of those begin to really come around in our 30s, 40s, and 50s. And then in our 60s and 70s and beyond, assuming we stay healthy and mentally engaged, we have yet another one that builds on top of the first two that supports what we might call the ancient idea of wisdom. And that is, how do you deal with ambiguity? How do you deal with conflicting information? We keep getting better and better and better at that as we get older. And what we lose is very little along the way. You know, our cognitive processing speed and our working memory peak in our teens and 20s, and, you know, which the observation of which led Mark Zuckerberg once to say, people under 30 are just smarter. Well, he's in his early 30s, he doesn't say that anymore. Or, and you could forgive him because he was young and cocky and we're all young and cocky at some point, I suppose. But I don't forgive Vinod Khosla. Vinod should have known better. Vinod, brilliant co-founder of Sun Microsystems back in the '80s, a successful venture capitalist, said in a public forum, basically, people over 45 are brain dead. Sorry, you're wrong. You're simply wrong on that one, Vinod. And so, but that, that's sort of in the wind in these technology communities. So we lose very little. We lose, as we move along, we lose about anywhere from 0.2 to 0.4% per year from peak in these various abilities. Well, you have to string that out a long time to see a really material depreciation. In terms of any of those.

And along the way, you've got appreciation of these others.

You've got appreciation. So that's one. This major study, Laura Germine, Josh Hartzarn, Harvard and MIT along with Massachusetts General Hospital. The conjecture, my favorite maverick. Every book has got to have the maverick, the lone maverick, who's got a following, but then there are skeptics too. And his name is Elkanan Goldberg. He's 72 years old. He's written several books, one on wisdom, one on creativity. And he started noticing in his late sixties that his intuitions, when he back-tested his intuitions, he intuitively came to an answer about something and he would back-test it to see if it'd gone through the slower, more methodical, logical process of trying to seek the same answer, that they lined up. But suddenly his intuition was able to shortchange a more methodical, logical process. And so he dove into that, and he's got this theory that the two hemispheres of the brain, the right side, which perceives novelty, and many would say that's where intuition is, and then the left side, the more logical side, the side where we store memories, we chunk things, you know, along the way. and the library in our head keeps getting better and better and better. One reason, parenthetically, why as we get older sometimes a name might elude us— well, we've got to go through a bigger library. People forget we've got to walk through a bigger library to fetch that name. And so he thinks that there's a series of networks that only begin to flower after our prefrontal cortex is fully mature, which could be in our 20s. Elkhon and Goldberg thinks it's later than that, early 30s. And, um, and then this network, what he calls the salience network, the network of networks, it's basically that there's more communication going on between the two hemispheres of our brain as we get older. Again, assuming we stay healthy, we haven't had a stroke or an accident or something like that. And they keep growing and growing and growing. And wisdom is really this conversation that's happening between the two sides of the brain. I see this, what do you think? And he has this other intriguing idea that our creative yield, as opposed to our raw creativity, the creativity that actually we know how to put to good use in business or elsewhere, keeps getting better and better because we're able to take that creativity, you know, stack it up, you know, travels the salience network to the other side and we can see how it stacks up against other creative perceptions that we've had, some of which came to fruition and some of which didn't. So I find that really— I want him to be right. And I realize he's kind of a maverick, but he is a tenured professor at NYU. He's not nobody. He's written several books, chiefly the people who, um, have a— I debated the psychologist from Columbia and I learned right then I should never get into a debate with an academic superstar. Because he just, he didn't think much of Elkhana Goldberg. But then I stood back and realized that I've been caught in a war between the neuroscientists and psychologists who are always fighting at the border to claim turf. And then I didn't feel so bad.

Well, and as you maybe, as you pointed out earlier, you know, your ability to deal with kind of conflicting ideas and think about how to square that for the reader, I think, is evident there. But one of the things that I'm hopeful of, I guess, is when I look at all kinds of studies out there, whether it's small to midsize business owners or even in larger corporations now, who with what they see as a tight job market are suggesting that they are finding it more difficult than ever to fill open positions with qualified talent, and yet You have people who are 50 and above oftentimes who are out there. They may not be inclined to be entrepreneurs, but they want to work. They want to add value. You know, a lot of great talent out there, and yet they are not given the time of day oftentimes. And I wonder how much talent we're leaving, you know, on the table here when we could really be putting these incredibly great people to good work, to add value in companies of all sizes.

I think you're really on to something, Leo. Now, I will confess here to your viewers and listeners that, that despite my fancy title at Forbes, for the past 5 years or so, I've been on what you might call the emeritus track. They've allowed me to keep my fancy title because I can open doors that bring good publicity to Forbes with the outside activities that I do. But it's an acknowledgement that I'm not in there on a day-to-day basis, really wrestling with the editorial product or advertising sales. What I do is help the ad people open doors. I'm the emcee at our global CEO conference and other things like that. But I had to have a negotiation with the CEO so that we could come up to a fair level of compensation. So, what I like to think of is that I'm on the other side of the arc. I've peaked in salary. I've peaked in responsibility, but Forbes perceives that I'm still of value to the company. Now, we just have to negotiate what the right level of compensation is. I feel lucky because Forbes is a, you know, it's no longer a family-owned company, but it still runs itself like a family-owned company. The Forbes family owns a small percentage. We're owned by a Hong Kong consortium and have been since 2014, but we still operate the same way with the same set of values that we did when it was a family-owned company. So that's a conversation that I could have at that kind of a company. That's the kind of conversation you could have perhaps at a, where you used to hang your hat at Vistage kinds of small business. But at large corporations, they're missing a huge opportunity. To think of the career path as not an up and out, but an arc. And there are models, not just little family-owned companies. You know, I think law firms are getting smarter about creating the title of counsel for people who are past their peak, not willing to work 60 or 70 hours a week anymore, but they can't be a part of the partnership. Pool anymore. They simply can't because look, the partnership pool is a pyramid scheme. Everybody knows that. You graduate, you make partner. These poor associates are knocking themselves silly, um, and generating the compensation and you're harvesting more than your share, but then someday they will too, if they make partner and that's their incentive. So what do you do with the person that doesn't want to work 70 hours a week anymore, but has all— knows how to open doors and knows how to get things done. And that's where this concept of the career arc, we should be having conversations about the career arc. What I'm told, Leo, when I talk to HR people and I talk to in-house lawyers about that, they both kind of point fingers at each other, by the way, that it's, you can't, it sounds good, Rich. You're not the only one arguing for this. AARP is. There's a guy at the Milken Global Institute, Paul Irvine. You know, who's doing some good work here, and he is too. And, uh, but it's difficult in practice because, you know, you have a good faith negotiation with a senior employee, but the problem is they're all custom negotiations. There's no template that you can apply. Therefore, it becomes, in terms of internal costs, it becomes expensive to do because everyone is a one-off. Somebody over here might want to work 40 hours a week. Somebody might, you know, it's 70 at 68 or 72 might still be happy to get on airplanes and make sales calls at a moment's notice. Um, others not so much. Um, and so they're one-off, uh, discussions. And the second thing that gets in the way is the, uh, particular legal is afraid that some of these, uh, well-intended, good faith negotiations, the senior employees to figure out what the other side of the arc looks like, uh, um, will backfire because the senior employee will later claim they were buffaloed into accepting a lower salary with a lower title, and that's age discrimination. I think we're going to have to pick this lock. We've got to start a revolution here, Leo. I know you believe as I do that we've got to— this career arc is such a powerful idea that whether it's 20 hours a week, 30 hours a week, you know, up to 40 hours or perhaps whether it's the former EVP now calling themselves coach or mentor, Because you've got a problem too, these millennials, a lot of these millennials are technically brilliant, but they need coaching. Everybody tells me that. They need basic coaching. They're brilliant, but they walk into traps. They're brilliant, but they might not have the emotional IQ to move up into the executive ranks yet. They need mentors. And so a wonderful opportunity exists we just can't let picky, uh, legal matters or HR concerns get in the way because we're throwing away too much talent.

We're throwing away too much talent. As a practical matter too, if you were in your 50s and you're not working, and today you could very well live into your 90s, that's not a very, you know, great position to be in, right? I mean, let's face it. And I think everybody loses in that scenario.

Oh yeah, well, not least because we'll bankrupt Social Security, people will run through their savings, and then we've got a societal problem that is bigger. It's almost like the student debt problem. This is a— I just have to say this. I've been one of those, you know, being kind of the libertarian conservative that I am, well, these, you know, they made the loan, you know, they got the loans, they need to pay the loans. I was having a conversation with Mike Milken of all people. Mike Milken is no softie. Believe me. And Mike Milken said, well, think about it. He said, the millennials aren't going out and starting businesses to the degree the previous generations were. Many of them feel hamstrung by their loan payments. We should have the discussion, he said, about whether we think there is a greater than $1.5 trillion worth of economic damage we're going to do to the economy over the productive years of the millennials because we strapped them with debt than the $1.5 trillion of outstanding debt? I mean, yeah, when you look at it that way, at least have the discussion. So, when you look at the career arc and people who take care of themselves are going to live long lives and pretty fruitful lives and could be real contributors and we're telling them they've just got to run through their savings and draw on Social Security. That's just, it's dumb, it's inhumane, and we need more brave companies stepping up and telling CEOs, telling their HR and legal people to figure this out.

So to further the case, in your book, you talk about the 6 strengths of late bloomers. So maybe you can share some of that with us. And I think that'll give people also a sense of, I think there's a real kind of holistic argument you're making around this whole Yeah, I can't prove this, but observationally, it strikes me as true.

I really wanted to prove it. Do late bloomers have a higher level of curiosity than early bloomers throughout their lives? Now, maybe that early bloomers have a higher level of curiosity when they were young and they find that which they're good at and they lean into it. And then they figure, well, you know, my curiosity has served its purpose. I'm now going to trade it for determined focus. And let it rip. When you— but the late bloomer, because the late bloomer hasn't benefited by this conveyor belt to early achievement, as I call it, that exists in schools and among the way employers screen for first hires, the late bloomer is tasked with the idea of getting off that path and forging their own path of discovery in which curiosity is the most important thing thing that you can have. And if you don't believe me, there was a 2017 cover story of Fortune magazine in which they asked some pretty high-profile CEOs, the CEO of Intuit, the CEO of Genentech, CEOs like that, what do you value most in your employees? Curiosity was the number one thing that was said. Resilience, perseverance, compassion, communication skills. I mean, let's go back to compassion. How could— why compassion? Because when you're more empathetic and compassionate, and compassion is really not only are you empathetic, but you're going to do something about your empathy. Uh, it makes you a better salesperson over the long run. When you really identify and want to help with your sales clients, uh, maybe they want help in the very next quarter, but over the long run, you become the superstar salesperson simply because you're there to help your clients succeed. And, um, and so, you know, it just kind of made me angry reading that article because I thought, well, you say curiosity is the most important, yet you've set up a screen that your first hires, that's where you went to school, the grades you got. And, um, uh, even knowing observationally that many of those early achievers, having, having now seen that they've got to trade their curiosity for focus, don't know how to get it back. And they plateau in their 20s. Equanimity is another one of my favorite later bloomer skills. You can see it in demonstration when Captain Sullenberger, age 58, landed the US Air plane in the Hudson and everybody got out. And a movie was made about it with Tom Hanks and the whole thing. And you listen to the ATC recording and he's calm as a cucumber. Equanimity is calmness under pressure. Tammy Jo Schultz, age 56. She was the pilot who landed the Southwest jet about a year ago when an engine blew at 31,000 feet. Shrapnel went through the window, killed a woman. There was blood, screaming, people vomiting. She took it down to 10,000 feet right away because people weren't— not everybody's putting on their oxygen mask. And you listen to it, you listen to the recording, and there she was, calm as a cucumber, just like Sully version 2. And research validates that there's a reason why we gain an equanimity with the ability to stay calm under pressure as we get older. Perseverance, grit, Angela Duckworth, who really popularized the grit idea, shows in a graph that our grit gets better and better, better through our 70s. And now why is that? Well, it turns out we're much better selectors of where we're going to apply our grit. We don't willy-nilly, we don't buy into the pop culture idea that we I should apply it everywhere. We become, I'm going to apply it here. I'm going to make my stand here. This is my purpose. And therefore, they're able to summon a greater amount of their grit because they haven't gone off and squandered it. So all of these things keep getting better and better throughout as we get older.

Well, on the curiosity front, I can tell you personally that the older I get, the more information I become aware of, the less I know and the, uh, the more I want to learn about it. So it's kind of becomes, uh, you know, I've told Randy this, I feel like I'm getting dumber by the day because you, you end up, you know, becoming so much aware, more aware of all of the information that may be available on a particular topic. I can only imagine that as you looked and you take that deep dive into the research, it is pretty amazing, right? Um, And I think that inspires curiosity when we become understanding of that.

Yeah. Well, in one of the most viewed commencement speeches ever on YouTube, the great one that Steve Jobs gave to the Stanford graduating class in 2005, about 18 months, by the way, after he was diagnosed with the pancreatic cancer that would kill him, he, at the end of his speech, talk. He wrote about— he talked about the 3 biggest setbacks that turned out to be the 3 that he had. And people can Google it and go find it. It's very inspirational. But at the end of it, rechanneling Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog, he said, stay hungry and stay foolish. And that— you unpack that, there was more there than than it might first appear. Because if you just graduated from Stanford, a school that only admits 3% of its applicants, a school that unlike when I went to it in the '70s is really truly world-class today, staying hungry and staying foolish is actually the major challenge for these people's lives. Carol Dweck, who teaches freshman psychology at Stanford and wrote the best-selling book Mindset in 2006, I interviewed her for Late Bloomers, and Carol Dweck said, she says, I love the way— well, I love the way mindset has been adopted by business. Satya Nadella at Microsoft, as everyone reads there, because it's why you need to cultivate a growth mindset rather than rely on your fixed mindset. In other words, getting more foolish and curious is a good thing to have. And she said, I love the way that corporations have adopted mindset. I'm really disturbed that the message hasn't gotten through with high school counselors and admissions directors and so on. Well, I said, what do you mean by that? She leaned forward and with a very serious look, she said, the students I see as freshmen at Stanford today, she said, too many are exhausted and they're brittle and they don't want to mar their perfect records. They're the very definition of a fixed mindset. They, you know, they think it's done. You know, they've hit the big milestone. They got into the elite university. They're done. They don't want to go out and be curious and foolish anymore. They're done with that. In fact, they have a greater fear of looking foolish than the fool does because it would mar their perfect record. Their sense of embarrassment now becomes so acute that it bars them from learning. And I thought about that. Exhausted, brittle, and don't want to mar their perfect record. So that doesn't sound like somebody I want to employ if I either have the chance to employ the curious one or the one that is past their curiosity.

I'd like to think that people who read this book, if you're in— whether it's your 30s, 40s, 50s, or older than that— that your best days are ahead and that there are things that if you haven't done yet, that doesn't mean they will have had to pass you by. I mentioned to you a story that I wrote about in my book, What Anyone Can Do, about my dad. And he was in his 40s after a number of different jobs, including being on the Boston Police Force for about 10 years, but realized his passion was really about wanting to be a golf pro. But to be a Class A PGA professional, those were all the schools that you had to go to that everyone was in their early 20s, you know, kind of doing it. In fact, I ran into some kids, if you will, who, you know, were at school with my dad when he was in his 40s because he decided to pursue it. It took him 3 years plus. He did all the studying and all that he had to learn about the golf business, passed the player ability test, and went and taught golf for 30 years, which was certainly incredibly inspirational to me. But I think for those guys who were in class with him, they were kind of the typical thing where they were just really admiring someone who kind of took that on at that stage in their life. I think it's been certainly a great example. And, you know, something that I think is in all of us if we think about it that way.

Yeah, that's really inspiring. When I was in grade school, my dad was a physical education teacher. He was one of those good high school athletes that didn't quite— wasn't as good in college, came back to the hometown, played softball, drank beer with the boys. Every small, medium-sized city out there has stories of people like that. Bruce Springsteen even sang a song, "Glory Days," about that. And he didn't have particular ambition. I would remember I was— we were kind of poor and my dad was, um, he'd come around and he'd teach jumping jacks to us. And I just used to go, oh my God, you know, my dad, the jumping jack teacher. His dad is a dentist. His dad, you know, is doing that. My dad teaches jumping jacks. Then at age— in his late 30s, he suddenly awoke to an ambition. The opportunity came to be the first public school athletic director in Bismarck, North Dakota. And he leaned into it and he got it. And he began to change. And it coincided with Bismarck had the first indoor arena that sat 10,000 people. So we won all the state tournaments, basketball and wrestling. He arranged those. He did the public address. And I watched this man do the very thing that he was born to do on earth. You know, and he came into his own and he was no longer, you know, he left the old softball beer drinking guys. He actually went through a 12-step recovery program. He left it behind because he knew it was of the past and his future, you know, was doing this. He did some great things. He's still cited for, he died in 2012. When Title IX was passed, there was a lot of grumbling, as you can imagine, in a conservative state like North Dakota. He went all in. And the momentum that he gave the public schools in Bismarck, there are now 3 public schools, their girls' sports just kick butt. They kick Minot's butt, they kick Fargo's butt, they kick Grand Forks' butt, and the boys' sports too. You know, all of his his legacy. And I go back and people will tell, I still can remember, you know, a warm September night when he was doing public address at a football game and it would carry, you know, halfway through the town, a beloved figure. And I thought growing up, that was kind of a model that you had a right to do what you wanted. And what your father did and what my dad did is that they leaned into who they were becoming, not who they were. And they leaned into not only their passion, but their purpose. I bet your dad had fans that a younger golf pro couldn't have ever had. I mean, middle-aged golfers are now, they don't have the range of motion they used to. There could be any kind of physical— Who would you wanna teach? You know?

You mentioned that. One of his strengths as a teacher was his ability to relate to the experiences of his students and be able to connect those experiences to the game in a way that I think would have been more difficult for someone younger. And again, it's about those connections. But, you know, these stories, Randy, I feel like there's hope for us yet. You know, there's kind of— Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely. Can I say one more thing?

Please.

And this is what, again, relating to my dad, your dad, and what we all strive for. And that is this idea that blooming really happens when we When we lean into who we're becoming, we lean in, we've now had some time to discover what our native gifts are. We lean into our native gifts, our deepest passions, not our transitory passions. You can feel passionate about a particularly good burrito you had for lunch, but the passion that is so deep that you're willing to sacrifice for a little bit for it. And then a sense of purpose. That, that feeling that what you're doing is what you were born to do. And when you get that kind of alignment, because you've been on this path of discovery, maybe you've made some embarrassing mistakes. Maybe you've been beaten up. Maybe you've been looked like a fool and been humiliated. You know, when you arrive at that intersection, you've— what I felt, and I think what your dad felt and what my dad felt, they felt like they were being pulled. No longer were they being pushed. I'm sure my mom, I mean, I never saw this, but I'm sure my mom was probably nagging my dad, you know, back in his softball beer drinking playing days. And we were driving crappy cars and stuff like that. But, um, but he wasn't a guy that responded to being pushed. And I think late bloomers are not the people who respond to being pushed, but they will respond to being pulled. And when you feel like you're being pulled because everything in this alignment, then the things you don't have miraculously you will get. I've seen introverts who bloomed and suddenly became great salespeople, whereas in the past, you know, the idea of cold calling somebody would have just driven them, you know, into a panic attack. I've seen passive people become lions of courage because they were pulled toward their destiny. And so I would encourage anybody, you know, who's felt like they haven't had that perfect alignment to go out and try to find that perfect alignment and allow yourself to be pulled, allow yourself to be pulled. And the things you don't have, whether it's the partner who will make up for your weaknesses, you know, your ability to sell when you never felt you could sell before, they will come. Trust the process.

It seems obvious to me, Rich, that that's happened to you with this project. Am I right?

Oh yeah. Uh, Leo said some nice things about the book. I spent more time on this. And it comes from a heartfelt place, a deeper place than my previous books. I mean, I, you know, I spent 30 years writing about kind of the, that, that box where the sides of the box were technology, the economy, business models, and, you know, and teams and performance models and really talked about that. And I still love that. And I still give talks. I still love figuring out what makes a really successful company tick. But this comes from a deeper emotional place because of my own background, and I'm glad you noticed that.

What are you most optimistic, or what are some signs that you have seen now that the book's been out? You've had a lot of good favorable press and publicity about it and spoken about it and been on other podcasts about it.

What are you—

well, that you're most optimistic about?

The people who've embraced this book first and most passionately and continue to do so today are parents. They're parents of teens that seem to be stuck or early adults that are still living at home or seem to be stuck. I was hoping there would be a greater response in the HR community. That hasn't happened yet. It might someday still, but I think—

Are you seeing any heroic CEOs on the horizon? Embracing this kind of a thing?

Oh, I hope that happens. Um, Ken Fisher's probably come the closest to, but of course I profiled him in the book. Um, but he's, but yeah, you know, uh, when Satya Nadella embraced Mindset, that was about 2 years after the publication of Mindset. Mindset had a modest success as a hardcover book, sold about 60,000 books. And then when it went to paper, And then when Satya Nadella at Microsoft embraced it, it just exploded. And now it's done about 1.5 million books. We all hope for that moment. We will see. When you look at Tom Peters' In Search of Excellence, it got off to a modest start and exploded some months into it. When you looked at Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma in 1997, modest start. Then Forbes put 6'8" Clayton Christensen and 5'8" Andy Grove on the COVID of Forbes. Andy Grove's Secret Weapon. And then boom, it exploded. So I don't know. I think there are some late-blooming CEOs out there. I hope they embrace it. I hope they have their employees read it. Hard to identify who they are. I'm happy that right now that the parent market is going gaga over it. And then another one is— Pastors, pastors of churches in high-performance cities and the suburbs of those cities, like Menlo Church, Menlo Park, California, right in the heart of Silicon Valley. And churches like that where the pastors are seeing so many families that are just distraught because they don't know where to turn when it comes to should they raise their kids with more discipline and focus Or should they light up, ease off on the pressure a bit? And it's tearing up families. It's tearing up families with anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts among many kids. And so that's sort of related to how parents are responding to it. I hope it becomes a corporate success too. It's in the hands of my higher power now.

Well, thanks for the great work. Again, Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement, Rich Karlgaard. Get yourself a copy. And, uh, we just appreciate, uh, everything you're doing. And, um, you know, keep, um, keep delivering the message.

Thanks so much, guys.

You bet.

Okay.

To learn more about our show and what we do, to submit questions to us, and to subscribe to What Anyone Can Do Podcast, please visit our website, whatanyonecandopodcast.com. What Anyone Can Do Podcast is hosted by Leo Bettencourt. Katharine and me, Randy Cantrell. Music provided by Kevin MacLeod is Vibe Ace, licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 3.0 license. Thanks for watching or listening. We hope you'll share the podcast.