Good things come to those who wait, and for experimentalists, it’s never too late to become original. After Frank Lloyd Wright received the contract for Fallingwater, his most celebrated architectural work, he procrastinated for nearly a year while making sporadic drawings before finally completing the design at age sixty-eight. Raymond Davis shared the Nobel Prize in physics for research that he started at fifty-one and finished at the tender age of eighty. The more experiments you run, the less constrained you become by your ideas from the past. You learn from what you discover in your audience, on the canvas, or in the data. Instead of getting mired in the tunnel vision of your imagination, by looking out into the world you improve the acuity of your peripheral vision.
– from “Originals” by Adam Grant
