This is why being a late bloomer Francophone is a good thing

THIS IS WHY BEING A LATE BLOOMER FRANCOPHONE IS A GOOD THING

So, do you consider yourself a late bloomer?

Feeling that you’re learning French ‘too late’ in life?

If you see it as a disadvantage, did you know that Van Gogh’s talent was recognized after his death?

In fact, he became quite famous and his work was shown all over the world, however he wasn’t there to witness it.

He is just one example of late bloomers that litter the history books, and perhaps one of the greatest of painters.

There are countless famous late bloomers in other domains too. Julia Child didn’t learn to cook until she was 40. It took her another 10 years until she collaborated on her first French cooking book titled “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”.

Read the article below to find out more about this whole late-blooming business, and check out the video for some French paint!

(This week: the verb PEINDRE – to paint)

This is a blog post shared from Daniel Coyle’s TheTalentCode.com.

Late bloomers are underrated.

It’s not just the condescending phrase — the whispered implication that they should have bloomed earlier. And it’s not the fact that our culture tends to sprinkle the young with the fairy dust of infinite possibility, while treating late bloomers with the grim surprise we give when spotting an escaped farm animal roaming city streets – what are YOU doing here?

No, the real reason they are underrated is that these kinds of second-act successes are more common and possible than we might think. So in the interest of germinating blooms in our own lives, here are a few random ideas.

1. Be Willing to Be Stupid Early On

We know about Julia Child taking her first cooking class in her mid-thirties, Shinichi Suzuki opening his legendary music school at 46, late-arriving authors like Frank McCourt and Norman Maclean, and of course the official godmother of late bloomers, Grandma Moses, who learned to paint in her seventies.

What’s not mentioned in those stories is how the rest of the world — often including their closest friends — regarded their venture as borderline insane. To persist in the face of this sentiment is not an easy thing to do, and requires a particular combination of muleheadedness and dreaminess.

Muleheadedness also comes in handy during practice, because it takes an older brain more repeats to learn something. On the other hand, older brains tend to be good at remembering what they’ve learned.

I like the way Abraham Lincoln put it: “I am slow to learn and slow to forget what I’ve learned. My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch anything on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out.”

2. Play to Your Strong Suits

Young people are good at learning certain kinds of skills — okay, lots of skills. But older brains actually work better as they get older in many softer integrative tasks, especially those requiring discernment and reasoning.

Cheerful fact: People aged 40-65 score more highly than younger people on four of six major mental capacities, including the most vital: inductive reasoning. So while teens make good figure skaters and violinists, there’s a good reason we don’t choose many 19-year-olds as CEOs, teachers, or leaders. So pick something that plays to your increasing neural strengths — soft skills rather than hard ones. For more on this, check out Barbara Stauch’s wonderful and useful new book, The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain.

3. Use Your Freedom to Screw Up

Let’s take a moment to feel sorry for super-talented young people, because their lives too often resemble a fast-narrowing corridor of endless practice routines, early pressure, and the kind of devilish bargaining that led a violinist Yeou-Cheng Ma (sister of Yo-Yo Ma) to produce the saddest quote I’ve ever heard: “I traded my childhood for my good left hand.” Their skill comes to defines their identity and thus their possibilities — and creates a mindset where they are often afraid to take risks.

Late bloomers, on the other hand, get to develop their own identities and, equally important, screw up. If something doesn’t work out, they have other skills to fall back on — particularly emotional skills. And when it comes to building their talent, they’ve got the most important asset: the freedom to experiment, to make mistakes and fix them.

For a good lesson on doing this, check out this Julia Child clip (interspersed with Meryl Streep’s re-enactment from a recent movie). Child takes a risk, screws up royally, and it comes off as a triumph of late-bloomer resilience.

NOW IT IS YOUR TURN!
Tell us in the comments below if you are a late bloomer and what are you going to do to commit to learning to speak French right now?

Let me guess.

Do you constantly have the feeling that you can’t hear what the French say and you don’t know how to read all the French words because they are written so much differently than they sound?

Learn 3 secrets that will help you be self sufficient in the way you pronounce French words – even if you don’t know what they mean – so that you can read that sophisticated menu in your favorite French restaurant.