Edited By Fiza Mishra
We’ve all heard of at least a couple stories about these born geniuses, brilliant children who’ve grown up to be equally brilliant adults. I’ve heard enough stories that it seems like all certified geniuses have to start being geniuses before they’re old enough to see R-rated movies.
Take, for example, Mozart.
In 1761, 5 year old Wolfgang Ademeus Motzart sat crouched over a clavier, composing his first piece, a Minuet and Trio in G major. And it wasn’t some crude, clumsy jumble of disparate notes either. It’s annoyingly sophisticated. Even after many, many disastrous piano lessons, enduring years of exasperated instructors’ impatient reproaches, I don’t have the skills to do it justice.
It doesn’t end there. History is teeming with stories of brilliant children who invariably grew up to be brilliant adults, marked in our history books as the greatest thinkers, artists and leaders the world’s ever known.
Those of us who were condemned to take physics in highschool know of Gauss. He could do complex sums in head at the age of 3. Picasso painted his masterpiece ‘Le Picador’ when he was 9.
And these stories aren’t just confined to a distant past. Mark Zuckerburg and Bill Gates famously created their billion-dollar enterprises in college. And it seems like the Ellen show provides us with a new wunderkind to fawn over each week. We watch on, in awe, choking back our envy as 5-year-old Nate Seltzer rattles off countries, capitals and flags in perfect, unfaltering rhythm. I have no doubt he’ll go on to be the world’s best… cartographer. Truthfully, I don’t know what geography experts do, but whatever it is, I’m sure Nate will be among the greatest.
The legend of the wunderkind, while providing ample inspiration for the next new critically acclaimed and commercially successful biopic, can be incredibly damaging too.
Being bombarded with story after story of these whiz kids does truly terrible things to my self-esteem.
For one, it’s very difficult to not feel entirely inadequate, when at nineteen, I still struggle to spell rythym right and once, with far more confidence than I had any right to, I asserted the capital of Australia was obviously Sydney.
But seriously, not only had these people figured out what their niche was before completing puberty, they were seminal members in the field. Meanwhile, I can barely commit to a major and I’m just hoping to scrape by midterms with at least a B or two to my name.
It also undermines the importance of failure and the learning process. Failure and making mistakes is how we learn, after all. But it’s very easy to forget that when 5-year-olds, who aren’t old enough to have properly failed at anything, are composing and charming the Empress of Austria, Maria Theresa, with their performance on the harpsichord. (Yup, that happened)
And while I know, it’s a little too early to call time of death on my chance as a life of success and notoriety at 19, it becomes increasingly difficult to remember that with so many sensationalized stories of these brilliant children who grow up to be brilliant adults. I forget that the Mozarts and Nate Seltzers of the world are the anomaly, not the norm. Most notable people don’t earn notoriety until much later in their lives.
We all know and love Samuel L. Jackson. I will never get over that scene in Quentin Tarantino’s 90’s blockbuster, Pulp Fiction, reciting Ezekiel 25:17, emanating ‘cool’ with every line. He’s become so ubiquitous in Hollywood movies it seems almost impossible to conceive that Jackson spent a major chunk of his career playing minor roles. It wasn’t until Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever that he was plucked from obscurity, at the age of 43.
Henri Rousseau worked as a clerk, pushing papers, for most of his adult life. He failed to become a customs officer. He didn’t even start painting in earnest until he was 40. Now, we herald him as a seminal Post-Impressionist, exhibiting his work alongside the likes of van Gogh and Matisse.
Stan Lee is the mastermind behind some of our most beloved superheroes, but did you know he didn’t create his first hit comic until he was almost 39?
There are many more instances of these slow-burn geniuses, as I like to call them. But for whatever reason, these legendary tales of wunderkinds prove annoyingly enduring. I guess they’re just more fun than stories about unassuming people, not demonstrating any early signs of brilliance, who make a name for themselves at 40.
All this goes to show, whether you’ve carved out your niche by 11 or you’re still working things out, you’re probably going to turn out just fine, and it’s never too late to figure out what you want to do and how to get good at doing it.