Most of us don’t know his personal story which sounds like it was scripted in Hollywood. At 42, he left his family and wife and went to Europe with a married client. His business was a shambles, but his European trip allowed him to reinvent his career. He had an epiphany disguised as a midlife crisis. He was willing to take bigger risks and break out of his typical architectural vernacular. But, by 60, he was bored and broke again. Soon after that, he created Fallingwater.
One feature of Wright’s work is that he carried all of his styles from prairie homes to organic buildings to his later work. As one of my friends says, “Wright was constantly in crescendo building upon everything he’d already learned. He was a late bloomer, but only because he’d been planting the seeds along the way. Malcolm Gladwell calls him a “double bloomer” because he had both early and late success along with heightened expectations and disappointments in midlife.
There’s some great social science research called the “equal-odds rule” (devised by psychologist Dean Keith Simonton) that suggests each piece of work a scientist or artist produces has the same statistical chance of being great as any other. Your successes and failures may come in clumps, but you will do your most significant work in the period in which you do your most work. The unfortunate reality is that, as we age, we produce less and, therefore, have fewer perceived successes.
If you’d met Wright around age 60, you’d have found a man who had survived quite a bit: a failed marriage, a dead lover, a house twice burned, a second failed marriage, a flatlining career and a personal financial crisis. And, then, he moved into his most productive era, living until age 91 at a time when that was quite rare.
We are all architects of our own lives. How might you see the next couple decades of your life as the culmination of all that you’ve learned along the way? You don’t have to be designing award-winning building…you might be mentoring young people in your neighborhood or running for political office for the first time at 65 or learning to become a master gardener in your 70s. You don’t have to become a couch potato.
-Chip