Are you too old to find success? | Oliver Burkeman

The web is cluttered with listicles offering the supposedly reassuring information that, say, JK Rowling wasn't a publishing sensation until, well, her early 30s

At what age are you too old to achieve breakthrough success in your field? That question fascinates so many people, I suspect, because almost nobody considers themselves already entirely successful. The unpublished novelist longs to be published, the published one yearns for bestsellerdom, the bestselling superstar craves the Booker prize. (Also, everyone always thinks they're just a few years from being "over the hill". The web is cluttered with listicles offering the supposedly reassuring information that, say, JK Rowling wasn't a publishing sensation until, well, her early 30s.)

But a huge new study, examining the careers of nearly 3,000 physicists from 1893 on, reaches an unexpected result. It's not that youth wins out, nor that years of experience lead to late triumphs. Rather, age just isn't much of a factor. A physicist's highest-impact work "could be the first publication, mid-career, or last publication". What counted more was productivity. If you want to publish a celebrated physics paper, the crucial thing isn't to be young and energetic, nor old and wise. It's to publish a lot of papers.