Great minds

180 people who found the thing

Grouped by the five patterns this assessment reports, rather than by field. Somebody who has just been told they are a Guide learns nothing from a list of physicists. The pattern is the constant; the field is the variable.

Hover or focus a name for the highlights. Open it for the rest.

Every one of these was past forty before the thing they are remembered for began. The most common objection to this whole exercise is that it is too late, and thirty counterexamples is a better answer than reassurance.

Colonel Harland Sanders

1890-1980 · Restaurateur
- Was a farmhand, soldier, fireman, insurance salesman and service station operator
- Started franchising at sixty-two, after a new motorway bypassed his restaurant
- Sold the company at seventy-four
- Kept working as its public face for the rest of his life
The bypass destroyed the business he had spent twenty years on. He was sixty-two and started again, on the road, selling the recipe.
Grandma Moses

1860-1961 · Painter
- Began painting at seventy-eight when arthritis ended her embroidery
- Was discovered by a collector who saw her work in a chemist's window
- Had a solo show in New York at eighty
- Painted around 1,500 works before she died at 101
She switched because her hands would no longer do the old thing. It is not a story about a late calling; it is a story about adapting.
Laura Ingalls Wilder

1867-1957 · Author
- Published Little House in the Big Woods at sixty-five
- Had written a farm column for years before that
- Her daughter, an established writer, pushed and edited her into it
- The books were still being written when she was in her seventies
The material had been sitting in her for sixty years. It took somebody else believing it was a book.
Ray Kroc

1902-1984 · Businessman
- Sold paper cups and then milkshake mixers for thirty years
- Was fifty-two when he saw the McDonald brothers' operation
- Had diabetes and arthritis at the time
- His treatment of the brothers is a documented grievance
Thirty years on the road selling other people's products gave him the exact knowledge to spot what he was looking at.
Frank McCourt

1930-2009 · Author
- Taught in New York public schools for thirty years
- Published Angela's Ashes at sixty-six
- Won the Pulitzer Prize the following year
- Said he had been trying to write it since his twenties
Forty years of trying and failing to write one book, then writing it. The teaching was not a delay, it was where he learned to tell it.
Vera Wang

1949- · Designer
- Was a competitive figure skater who failed to make the Olympic team
- Spent sixteen years as an editor at Vogue and was passed over for the top job
- Designed her first dress at forty, for her own wedding
- Opened her own house the same year
Two careers that ended in not quite making it. The third started at forty with a dress for herself.
Momofuku Ando

1910-2007 · Inventor
- His company went bankrupt when he was forty-eight
- Invented instant noodles at forty-eight, in a shed behind his house
- Invented the cup version at sixty-one
- Was still working on space noodles in his nineties
Bankrupt at forty-eight, with a shed. He spent a year in it and came out with something eaten a hundred billion times a year.
Bill Traylor

1853-1949 · Artist
- Was born enslaved and worked as a farm labourer for most of his life
- Began drawing at around eighty-five, homeless in Montgomery
- Made around 1,500 works in the following three years
- Is now held in major museum collections
He started at eighty-five on the pavement, drawing on discarded card. Three years of work, and it is in the Met.
Toni Morrison

1931-2019 · Novelist
- Published her first novel at thirty-nine
- Was editing full time and raising two sons alone
- Wrote before dawn because it was the only hour available
- Won the Nobel Prize at sixty-two
Her start was late and her method is the more useful lesson: four in the morning, because there was no other hour.

Also listed under Creators, because a pattern is a disposition rather than a job.
Charles Bukowski

1920-1994 · Writer
- Worked at the post office for over a decade
- Published his first novel at fifty-one
- Had stopped writing entirely for roughly ten years before that
- Wrote steadily for the next twenty-three
A ten-year silence in the middle. He is the argument that a long stop is not the same as an end.
Louise Bourgeois

1911-2010 · Sculptor
- First major retrospective at seventy-one
- Made the giant spiders in her eighties
- Worked for forty years with little recognition before that
- Was still making work in her late nineties
Forty years of obscurity, then thirty of fame, and she changed nothing about the work in between.

Also listed under Creators, because a pattern is a disposition rather than a job.
Julia Child

1912-2004 · Cook
- Worked for intelligence services during the war
- Did not learn to cook until thirty-seven
- Published her first book at forty-nine
- First television programme at fifty-one
Everything she is known for started after thirty-seven, in a country whose language she had to learn.

Also listed under Guides, because a pattern is a disposition rather than a job.
Richard Adams

1920-2016 · Author
- Was a civil servant for over twenty years
- Invented Watership Down as a story told to his daughters in the car
- Was rejected by thirteen publishers
- Published at fifty-two and left the civil service
Thirteen rejections for a book about rabbits, written by a fifty-two-year-old civil servant. It has sold tens of millions.
Peter Roget

1779-1869 · Physician
- Made word lists all his life as a private method of managing anxiety
- Published the Thesaurus at seventy-three
- Had a full career as a doctor and lecturer before it
- Revised it personally through twenty-eight editions
A private coping mechanism, kept for fifty years, published at seventy-three and never out of print since.
Mary Wesley

1912-2002 · Novelist
- Published her first adult novel at seventy-one
- Had been widowed and was living in poverty before that
- Wrote ten novels in the following twenty years
- Sold around three million copies
Seventy-one and broke. Ten novels and three million copies followed.
Ronald Reagan

1911-2004 · Actor and politician
- Was a radio announcer, then an actor, then a union president
- Entered electoral politics at fifty-five
- Became president at sixty-nine, the oldest at that point
- His policies remain sharply contested
Here for the shape of the path, not the politics. Three unrelated careers before the one he is known for.
Diana Vreeland

1903-1989 · Editor
- Did not take a job until she was thirty-three
- Was made editor-in-chief of Vogue at sixty-two
- Was sacked at sixty-eight
- Then reinvented museum costume exhibitions at the Met
Sacked at sixty-eight and invented a new form afterwards. The Met years may be her most influential.
Harry Bernstein

1910-2011 · Author
- Wrote unsuccessfully for most of his adult life
- Published his first successful book at ninety-six
- Wrote it after his wife of sixty-seven years died
- Published three more before he died at 101
Ninety-six. He said loneliness after his wife died opened up memories he had not been able to reach.
Kathryn Joosten

1939-2012 · Actor
- Was a psychiatric nurse and a mother of two
- Began acting at forty-two in community theatre
- Moved to Los Angeles at fifty-six and worked as a street performer
- Won two Emmy Awards in her sixties
She moved to Los Angeles at fifty-six with no contacts and took a job sweeping a street at a theme park.
Duncan Hines

1880-1959 · Restaurant critic
- Was a travelling salesman who kept notes on where to eat
- Self-published the list at fifty-five as a Christmas card to friends
- It became the standard American restaurant guide
- Licensed his name to a cake mix company at seventy
A private list, sent to friends. The demand created the business, not the other way round.
Anna Arnold Hedgeman

1899-1990 · Activist
- Was a teacher, then a civil servant
- Was the only woman on the organising committee for the 1963 March on Washington, at sixty-four
- Pushed publicly for women to be allowed to speak at it
- Wrote her first book at sixty-five
At sixty-four she was in the room and fought to get other women onto the platform. She largely lost that fight and made it publicly.
Giuseppe Verdi

1813-1901 · Composer
- Lost his wife and both children within two years, early in his career
- Announced his retirement at fifty-seven
- Wrote Otello at seventy-three and Falstaff at seventy-nine
- Funded a retirement home for musicians, which still operates
He retired, and then wrote two of his best works in his seventies. He called the rest home his finest work.
Mary Delany

1700-1788 · Artist
- Invented paper collage botanical art at seventy-two
- Made 985 of them over ten years
- Each flower is built from hundreds of cut pieces of coloured paper
- They are botanically accurate enough to identify the species
She began at seventy-two and stopped at eighty-eight when her eyesight failed. The British Museum holds all of them.
Takichiro Mori

1904-1993 · Property developer
- Was an economics professor until he was fifty-five
- Started developing property in Tokyo after that
- Built one of the largest property portfolios in Japan
- Was among the wealthiest people in the world by the late 1980s
Professor until fifty-five. The second career was not a continuation of the first in any respect.
Susan Boyle

1961- · Singer
- Sang locally for decades while caring for her mother
- First auditioned for television at forty-seven
- Her debut album was the best-selling of that year worldwide
- Was diagnosed with Asperger's at fifty-one, having been told as a child she had brain damage
The talent was not new and the audience was. She had been singing in the same village hall for thirty years.
Paul Cézanne

1839-1906 · Painter
- Was rejected by the Salon nearly every year for two decades
- Had his first solo exhibition at fifty-six
- Worked in near isolation in Provence for years
- Matisse and Picasso both called him the father of modern art
Twenty years of rejection and near-total obscurity, then a late shift that changed what painting was for everybody after.
Estelle Getty

1923-2008 · Actor
- Worked as a secretary and did small theatre for decades
- Was cast in her breakthrough television role at sixty-two
- Played a character older than herself for seven years
- Won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for it
Decades of auditions and secretarial work. The break came at sixty-two and she played somebody twenty years older.
Wally Funk

1939- · Aviator
- Passed the Mercury astronaut tests in 1961 and was not allowed to fly
- Became the first female air safety investigator in the US
- Kept applying to NASA for decades and was rejected each time
- Went to space at eighty-two
Sixty years between qualifying and going. She never stopped applying and never stopped flying.
Samuel Johnson

1709-1784 · Writer and lexicographer
- Failed as a schoolmaster and lived in poverty for years
- Began the Dictionary at thirty-seven and finished at forty-six
- Did it with six assistants where the French Academy used forty scholars
- It was the standard for over 150 years
Nine years, six assistants, and most of the work done in one room. He defined around 42,000 words.
Vivian Maier

1926-2009 · Photographer
- Worked as a nanny for about forty years
- Took over 150,000 photographs and showed almost nobody
- Much of the film was never developed in her lifetime
- The work was found at auction in 2007 and she died before it was published
She never saw a single print exhibited. Whether that is tragic or simply a different relationship with an audience is worth deciding.

Which of these is you?

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