Summaries

Late Bloomers

The article Late Bloomers written in What the Dog Saw written by Malcolm Gladwell, discusses the difference between the two kinds of creative people in the world. Those who achieve fame and renown at an earlier stage of life, while the other toil their whole lives for recognition and manage it to achieve it very late. Gladwell Fountain divides creativity itself in two segments, experimental and conceptual. (Gladwell, pp. 295)

Conceptual creative people are the prodigies or geniuses of their relative subjects. They are not open-ended explorers as Gladwell says. Simply because, they already know what they want in their mind, they can see it, how it should be and what it should be. They simply execute it. They don't waste time experimenting any combinations or various addition or subtraction to their original ideas. Picasso is an example stated here, who got fame and fortune at an early age. He never experimented with his ideas. (Gladwell, pp. 295-300)

On the other end of the table Gladwell talks about the Late bloomers. According to him these people are much more experimental in their approach. Since their ideas are not perfect and vague, their work process is also undertaken in little tentative baby steps. Cezanne another artist is such an example. He achieved his fame at a very later stage in life after lots of toiling, hard work, research and experimentation. Another example Gladwell gives is of a writer who worked at his writings, and didn't achieve proficiency until the age of forty-eight. He was mostly nervous about his writing career, and could be quoted regarding his feelings that he felt as if he had stepped off a cliff and didn't know what the parachute was going to open. (Gladwell, pp. 300-314)

The reason why the Late Bloomers achieve later in life is not always because they didn't get the chance or they were oppressed by the circumstances, rather it's because they didn't become sufficiently proficient in it till late. It took them all that time to learn and perfect their art and creativity.

What the Dog Saw

The article What the Dog Saw compares the human marriage counseling with dog training. It doesn't compare the intellectual capabilities of the dogs to the humans, rather it highlights the common principle of both, which is that in order to get what you want from the other individual you have to understand a certain bit of their ...