Latest / Encore Living / #129: T.G.I.TED - Challenging the Myths: Age and Success

Transcript

#129: T.G.I.TED - Challenging the Myths: Age and Success · Encore Living

• 0:21
  Thor Challgren: Welcome to Every Day and New Thought.
• 0:23
  Thor Challgren: I'm Thor Chalgren and every weekday I share one new thought.
• 0:27
  Thor Challgren: It's TGI TED Thank goodness.
• 0:31
  Thor Challgren: It's TED a feature on the show where I look at one TED Talk that inspires me, and I'll put the links for the other shows in this series in the show notes below, and I'll also have the link for this particular TED Talk that I'm going to share today also in the show notes.
• 0:48
  Thor Challgren: And also great news my own TEDxTalk is now available and it's called why you Should Embrace Chaos on Vacation.
• 0:58
  Thor Challgren: That is also in the show description below.
• 1:01
  Thor Challgren: But today I'm talking about a TEDxTalk given in 2019 and it's called the Real Relationship Between your Age and your Success.
• 1:14
  Thor Challgren: This is a talk given by Albert Laszlo Barabasi.
• 1:18
  Thor Challgren: He is a data scientist who, in his talk, looked at the data correlation between age and success.
• 1:28
  Thor Challgren: He starts by quoting Albert Einstein, who said A person who has not made his great contribution in science before the age of 30 will never do so.
• 1:41
  Thor Challgren: Obviously, the speaker, who is himself a scientist, took some exception to that, and it's easy to see why.
• 1:50
  Thor Challgren: You know, in society we see lots of supposed evidence that people only succeed when they are young.
• 2:00
  Thor Challgren: All you have to do is look at things that are popular in our culture, like sports movies, hollywood, silicon Valley, wall Street.
• 2:09
  Thor Challgren: Everywhere you look, it's easy to see what appears to be evidence that you have to be young to succeed.
• 2:18
  Thor Challgren: And in science, even the speaker says that the data at first seems to confirm what Einstein said, but then Barabasi looks at it further and he discovers that what he says is while performance is bounded, success is unbounded.
• 2:37
  Thor Challgren: He actually looks at the performance gains of someone like Usain Bolt, who literally runs only one second or less faster than the person he beats, so that on a certain level is bounded, but the success that's possible for all of us is unbounded.
• 2:57
  Thor Challgren: And the data point that he looks at throughout his talk is this age at which scientists publish papers, which is a marker for how successful you are at a scientist.
• 3:08
  Thor Challgren: And he says at first yes, the data does seem to confirm that there is a drop off at a certain age.
• 3:14
  Thor Challgren: Then he looks at it further and he finds that there are many instances of people who succeed later in life.
• 3:22
  Thor Challgren: In fact, one scientist publishes a Nobel Prize winning paper.
• 3:28
  Thor Challgren: That is the very last thing that he does in his professional life when he's seven years old.
• 3:34
  Thor Challgren: So maybe the point is people believe that at a certain age they can't succeed, so they stop performing, they stop putting in the effort, and I think this is the big takeaway from this talk, which is that creativity doesn't age, only productivity does, meaning.
• 3:56
  Thor Challgren: In other words, you can be creative at any age, but if you choose to stop being productive, you won't be successful.
• 4:04
  Thor Challgren: So my big takeaway for this is his closing message Success can come at any age, as long as you don't give up.
• 4:15
  Thor Challgren: This is a fun, engaging talk.
• 4:17
  Thor Challgren: He has some great visual images in the talk, including an animated mouse that appears throughout the entire talk.
• 4:24
  Thor Challgren: It's a lot of fun If you're at a place where you want some inspiration for believing that you can succeed at any point in life.
• 4:33
  Thor Challgren: I highly recommend this talk.
• 4:35
  Thor Challgren: That's the show for today.
• 4:37
  Thor Challgren: If you like this episode, please hit like.
• 4:39
  Thor Challgren: If you're watching on YouTube, if you're listening to the podcast, please subscribe or follow the show on your favorite podcast app.
• 4:46
  Thor Challgren: Until next time.
• 4:48
  Thor Challgren: Thanks for listening.