How to be creative even when you’re old

Einstein may be a genius, but there was something he wasn’t good at. Image credit: Wikimedia.

Society fetishizes young people. Youth symbolizes beauty and sexuality. It also represents creativity. We worship young geniuses who bust out of college to start billion dollar companies. We admire young prodigies with through-the-roof IQs, awarding them titles like “the next Einstein.”

But even Einstein himself, a towering intellectual whose legacy is still being felt with the recent detection of gravitational waves, couldn’t oppose the ravages of age.

After coming up with the famous theory of relativity, he resisted quantum mechanics, which turned out to be the next big advancement in physics.

It’s true: people tend to get less creative as they age. But exceptions exist. In the book Originals: How non-conformists move the world, author Adam Grant shares why some people reach their primes well past 40, and what we can do to capture that magic.

First, some case studies. Adam cites research which showed that when firms get suggestions from employees, older ones contribute more – both in quantity and quality of ideas.

The book then talks about economist David Galenson’s work, which spotted plenty of masters who peaked only past their physical prime.

Scientist Roger Sperry discovered the functions of the right and left brain when he was 49. Filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock directed his seminal works Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho between the ages of 49 and 61. Robert Frost wrote his most renowned poems after forty.

And of course, who can forget Raymond Kroc, a businessman who joined McDonald’s when he was 52 and turned it into one of the most recognizable franchises in the world?

Two types of creativity

After studying various innovators, David posits that there are two kinds of creativity: conceptual and experimental.

Conceptual inventors paint big ideas in their minds and bring them into reality. Einstein stands out here: he formulated the theory of relativity through thought experiments, using nothing but pen and paper.

Experimental inventors, on the other hand, learn by trial and error. Rather than piecing together a step-by-step plan, they try everything to see what sticks. That was Robert Frost; he experimented with his poems, mixing and matching elements until he found the right combination. He peaked well into his 60s.

Martin Luther King Jr. was also an experimentalist. Yes, he was only 34 when he gave the “dream” speech, but he had been practicing public speaking for over 20 years, giving thousands of public addresses and testing various approaches.

David then found that conceptual and experimental thinkers peak at different times. In a study of Nobel Prize winners in economics, conceptual inventors on average published their best papers earlier than experimental inventors. He analyzed famous poets and found the same trend. A separate study of Nobel Prize winners in physics confirmed the findings.