10年：10个人的成功传奇

壮盛之年：弗吉尼亚•哈密尔顿•阿代尔

出生日期：1913年2月28日

    想象一下，如果你一生都在写诗，但很少出版诗作，因患青光眼而失明，然后出版了一本非常畅销的诗集，突然就获得了关键而公开的成功。这就是弗吉尼亚•汉密尔顿•阿代尔的故事。这位英语教师的诗作在她20多岁时就得到了《大西洋月刊》（The Atlantic）和《新共和》（The New Republic）杂志的接受，但随后对发表流程越来越不抱幻想，进而不再投稿。

    她在1996年接受美国公共广播公司（PBS）《新闻时间》（Newshour）节目采访时说：“我相当有竞争力。我要做就做好，不然就不做。我还做许多其他事情，我非常享受教学。我想，我先后在五个学院或大学教了差不多25年的书。这是一份全职工作，我还有一名全职丈夫和三个全职孩子，没有时间去思考。”

    事实上，阿代尔在失明之后写了比之前更多的诗，因为她有更多的空闲时间。1995年，她的好友、诗人罗伯特•梅泽伊鼓励她把自己最好的诗作整理成一本书，她然后把这本书秘密寄给《纽约客》（The New Yorker）杂志。 《纽约客》杂志发表了其中几首诗以及一篇赞誉阿代尔的文章之后，兰登书屋出版了这本题为《甜瓜上的蚂蚁》（Ants on the Melon）的诗集。这本书先后出版了四次，而且作为一本诗集，它的销量可谓异常高。

    芝加哥大学（University of Chicago）经济学家戴维•盖伦森的研究发现，实验型创新者的创造力高峰出现在生命晚期，那时他们所积累的经验及磨练自己技艺所花费的时间手艺凝聚成辉煌成就。只需看看弗吉尼亚•伍尔夫、保罗•塞尚、费奥多•陀思妥耶夫斯基或约翰•达尔文的职业生涯便可知晓，他们都是在经过很长的一段职业生涯之后才做出了巨大的贡献。他说：“他们都是通过反复尝试，无把握地工作之后，在人生晚期、而不是早期获得卓越成就的人。”

80-something: Virginia Hamilton Adair

Born: Feb. 28, 1913

    Imagine writing poetry your entire life but publishing little, going blind from glaucoma, and then releasing a blockbuster volume of poetry that garners critical and public success. That's the story of Virginia Hamilton Adair, an English professor who had poems accepted by The Atlantic and The New Republic in her 20s, but then grew disenchanted with the publishing process and stopped submitting.

    "I was quite competitive. And I either wanted to be very good at it, or just to let it alone," she told PBS Newshour in 1996. "And I was doing a lot of other things. I was enjoying teaching tremendously. I taught for about 25 years in, I think, five different colleges or universities. And that was a full-time job, and I had a full-time husband and three full-time children, and there just wasn't -- wasn't time to think."

    Adair actually wrote more poetry after she went blind than before, because she had more free time. In 1995, her friend and fellow poet Robert Mezey encouraged her to collect her best work in a book, which he secretly sent to The New Yorker. After The New Yorker published a few poems and an admiring essay about Adair, Random House published the collection as Ants on the Melon, which has had four publishing runs and has sold an unusual number of copies for a poetry volume.

    University of Chicago economist David Galenson's research has found that experimental innovators peak in creativity late in life, when the accumulated experience and time spent honing their craft coalesces into brilliance. Just look at the careers of Virginia Woolf, Paul Cézanne, Fyodor Dostoevsky, or John Darwin, all of whom made tremendous contributions after a long career. "These are people who work by trial and error, work uncertainly, and they become great later rather than early," he says.