The battle for creativity boils down in the end to a race with one’s own brain. It is no secret anymore—or at the bare minimum it shouldn’t be a secret at least—that one’s brain becomes more and more sclerotic with age and less and less plastic. Roughly translated, this simply means that we lose the impetus and means for sublime creativity as we grow older. No one escapes this cruel phenomenon either. Not Albert Einstein, who did his most stellar work in his twenties, and then in the latter years of his life was little more than a doddering, eccentric shell of a scientist who spent the bulk of his time involuntarily resting on well-deserved laurels while doing nothing of importance professionally apart from regurgitating his ground-breaking theories from decades earlier. Not Earnest Hemingway, who is said to have developed such a massive writer’s’ block in his sixties when his inspirational well dried up completely that he became so frustrated he tragically saw fit to take his own life. Not James Watson, the illustrious American biologist who was the undisputed catalyst in unmasking the structure to the long-secret DNA molecule in 1953 at the ripe “old” age of twenty six years. Following this ground-breaking discovery, Watson–who is still very much alive at ninety years of age and has spent the remainder of his career determinedly pursuing other biological Holy Grails–has never come remotely close to replicating that astounding Eureka moment from his mid-twenties. The (sad) lesson to be learned from all this? Your best creative work comes before the age of forty, oftentimes even thirty. So if you haven’t unlocked the clandestine virtuoso hiding inside you before those temporal benchmarks come around, it almost certainly ain’t gonna happen at all!
Fred's Soapbox 