E
veryone who works at
NASA or Google or SpaceX
got excited about science
before he or she was ten
years old,” TV host Bill ‘The
Science Guy’ Nye said recently. “This
is well documented. If it isn’t ten, it’s
11 or 12. But it isn’t 17, I’ll tell you that
much.”
You can plainly see the ten year old
inside Nye, who is now 63, just as you
can see the ten year old in anyone
else who works at the junction where
their deep happiness meets the
world’s deep needs.
Walter Murch, the Oscar-winning
film editor who likewise discovered
his passion in childhood, followed a
twistier – and perhaps more typical- career path than the lifelong sci-
ence geeks. You can’t do kid stuff for
a living, he was told – ‘kid stuff ’ in this
case meaning fooling around with a
friend’s dad’s tape recorder, sampling
snippets of sound. He was steered
towards more practical pursuits, such
as engineering and oceanography.
Forty-odd years later, Murch landed
in the movie business. And one day it
dawned on him why this new job, film
editing, felt so right: it scratched the
same itch that splicing audio had all
those years ago at his pal’s house. “I
was doing almost exactly what excited
me most when I was ten,” he said.
Murch wondered whether he’d
stumbled on a general rule: what if
what we really loved doing between
ages nine and 11 is what most of us
ought to be doing, somehow, for our
actual job as adults? If that’s true,
he thought, then our life satisfaction
depends rather heavily on recalling
precisely what that thing was – on
remembering who we were during
that unique developmental stage,
where everything that’s in us shows
itself for the first time.
While I was researching my book
U-Turn: What If You Woke Up One
Morning and Realized You Were Liv-
ing the Wrong Life?, a pattern emerged
that seemed to confirm Murch’s
insight. Among the hundreds of sto-
ries of mid-life career changes I sifted
through, the ‘Rule of Age Ten’ came
up over and again. These were lives
of ‘aha’ moments decades delayed.
And of better-late-than-never course
corrections, back in the direction of
those early enthusiasms, following
coordinates established before what
we ought to do (according to parents
and teachers and other well-meaning
adults) began to smother what we
loved and who we were.
The trend was so striking that after
I finished writing that book, I started
telling everyone who was floundering
in mid-life, “Try to remember what
you were all about when you were
ten. If you kept a diary, dig it out. If
you’re still in contact with friends
from that era, call them up. Ask them
who you were.”
What’s so special about age ten?
A ten year old is a tiny superhero, at
PHOTO: SHUT TERSTOCK the apex of his or her powers in many
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The Genius Section