Over theHill at 25?Superstars—in every field—seem to be
getting younger and younger. Is the cult
of early success making the rest of their
contemporaries feel like losers?
By Charlotte AlterW
hen Taylor SwifT made The cover of
TIME magazine in 2014 as the new queen of
the music industry, she had been in the busi-
ness for more than 11 years. But at 24, she’d
still have had trouble renting a car.
It should be inspiring for young people to see someone so
young achieve such phenomenal success. “Other women who
are killing it should motivate you, thrill you, challenge you and
inspire you rather than threaten you and make you feel like
you’re immediately being compared to them,” Swift told my
colleague Jack Dickey at the time. “The only thing I compare
myself to is me, two years ago, or me one year ago.”
But despite her best efforts to set a positive example, Swift
also represents a generation of super-youth to whom normal
young people are inevitably compared. “You see someone so
young, your age or even younger, being so wildly successful, and
you can think, ‘They just have it; they have something I don’t
have,’ ” says Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford
University and the author of Mindset: The New Psychology of
Success. “You think, ‘I’m so young and already I’m doomed.’ ”
Forget Forbes’s 30-under-30 list: when it comes to “fresh-
ness,” 30 is the new 40. At her age, Taylor Swift wasn’t consid-
ered precociously successful—just regular successful. In fact,
we’re in a kind of Age of Wunderkind, and not just in entertain-
ment (always fixated on youth and beauty): in 2014—when this