Age and outstanding achievement: What do we know after a century of research?

This article examines, in four sections, the substantial literature on the longitudinal connection between personal age and outstanding achievement in domains of creativity and leadership. First, the key empirical findings are surveyed, with special focus on the typical age curve and its variations across disciplines, the association between precocity, longevity, and production rate, and the linkage between quantity and quality of output over the course of a career. Second, the central methodological issues are outlined, such as the compositional fallacy and differential competition, in order to appraise the relative presence of fact and artifact in the reported results. Third, the more important theoretical interpretations of the longitudinal data are presented and then evaluated for explanatory and predictive power. Fourth and last, central empirical, methodological, and theoretical considerations lead to a set of critical questions on which future research should likely concentrate. For centuries, thinkers have speculated about the association between a person's age and exceptional accomplishment: Is there an optimal age for a person to make a lasting contribution to human culture or society? When during the life span can we expect an individual to be most prolific or influential? It comes as no surprise, then, that one of the oldest topics in life span developmental psychology is the relation between age and achievement. Perhaps the earliest investigation into this matter may be found in Beard's (1874)