I've always been a little bit worried about trying to get my "best work" in life done as soon as possible. I frequently read that most people (physicists, artists, entrepreneurs, etc.) did their greatest work when they were young, and I had always assumed that it is because your brain loses plasticity or something as you age. Being 26 years old, that often makes me feel like I only have a few good years left.
This article considers a different explanation for the trend — one that I hadn't considered. Namely, young people produce greater works because they have more time available. This study finds that the probability of producing something "great" is evenly distributed across all works that a person ever produces, so it seems that if you want to produce something great later in life, then the secret is to rearrange your priorities so that you have enough free time available to pursue whatever interests you.
That said, I will say that the Q factor makes me a little nervous — if you have an inherently low Q value, how do you improve that? (Maybe you can't — which would be unfortunate.)
I have a hypothesis about how most people seemingly did their greatest work when they were young: most of the very famous people we know of on average is several generations before - when you think of theoretical physicists you think of Einstein, Feynman, Higgs etc. . They started their careers a lot earlier than us now, their institutions were less crufty, the edge of the field, any field, is a lot closer. I'm willing to bet that on average the current generation would do their best work later in life. It's as big as the difference between how Baby boomers and Millennials starts their careers.
That said, experimental physicists and biologists have always done their best works later in life (mid 40s last time I read). Elon Musk's best work should still be ahead of him if he doesn't flop. And Jobs's best work (turning Apple into the monster it is today) wasn't done in his youth either.
Caesar went to serve his quaestorship in Spain ... in the spring or early summer of 69 BC . While there, he is said to have encountered a statue of Alexander the Great, and realised with dissatisfaction that he was now at an age (31) when Alexander had the world at his feet, while he had achieved comparatively little.
...trying to get my "best work" in life done as soon as possible...
I dunno, maybe that's not such a bad strategy. Nothing you do today will detract from doing your best work later, unless you burn yourself out. So, perhaps a better lesson is: Don't push yourself to burnout under the assumption that you have to get your best work done early.
I'm not any kind of great worker, but looking back at age 52, my best moments have been pretty evenly spread out. When I felt that I could, or should, make a conscious effort to slow down for a while (e.g., when my kids were born), stuff came to me anyway.
>> The Q factor is obtained from a researcher’s citation record: it is proportional to the logarithm of the number of citations that a scientist has received over a certain time frame.
I'm not terribly convinced by this Q-value. What happens if a scientist's field is a sub-field of a sub-field that's only of interest to very few people? What if their field only has a couple of journals? Then they'll get a low Q value but it won't be representative of the quality of their work.
For instance, see [1] :
The average biochemist ... will always score more highly than the average mathematician, because biochemistry attracts more citations.
There's some reserach from Lise Getoor I think, that shows how scientists tend to cluster in "cliques" [2] and that they will tend to cite each other's works. It means you can't really draw many conclusions from even a normalised h or Q, or whatever similar metric, except that the work is interesting to researchers in the same field, so, er, to people who are interested in it.
"The selection process is open to candidates with a PhD who meet the following criteria: Be in possession a PhD, awarded no later than three years"
"You can't apply if you are over 30 years old"
Enough said.
If airplane pilots where scientists, they would lose their pilot licenses after three years, without possibility to renew it of course (unless they start again and wait for four or five years). Isn't science superfunny?
This article considers a different explanation for the trend — one that I hadn't considered. Namely, young people produce greater works because they have more time available. This study finds that the probability of producing something "great" is evenly distributed across all works that a person ever produces, so it seems that if you want to produce something great later in life, then the secret is to rearrange your priorities so that you have enough free time available to pursue whatever interests you.
That said, I will say that the Q factor makes me a little nervous — if you have an inherently low Q value, how do you improve that? (Maybe you can't — which would be unfortunate.)