I'm not the biggest fan of Malcolm Gladwell but I don't mind him either. I read The Tipping Point and then Blink back-to-back a couple years ago and then immediately forgot everything. I'm holding Gladwell partly responsible. He wrote a piece on plagiarism a few years ago that I thought was great. I think he might be my generation's Marshall McLuhan; he's huge and seemingly omni-present now but in twenty-five years he'll only be taken seriously by a handful of marginalized academics and 19 year old undergrads. Still, I can think of a worse fate.
He recently wrote a piece for the New Yorker about late bloomer artists, people who develop their aesthetic slowly and over a much longer period of time and who thus come to success much later in life (think 50 and over), as opposed to the early bloomer "young genius" whose first work out of the gate captures the world's attention and immediately comes to define their career.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell
I've always thought about myself as a late bloomer. Even when I was in high school I could just tell that - whatever I ended up doing - I was going to take the slow road getting there. But I've always been at ease with this fact (well, except when I'm pulling my hair out in a maelstrom of self-hating anxiety). But, quite frankly, I don't think it's a choice. I came to puberty late, learned how to drive a car late, I lost my virginity late. I just assumed I was on the path to hitting most significant adulthood benchmarks later than the average.
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