[hinkley]

I did the math on the 10,000 hours theory once and concluded that this gives me permission to start something late in life. If you went as hard as you can you could reach expert level in a dozen things in a single lifetime, if that was your goal. It's perfectly reasonable for someone to expect to be able to achieve two or three. Even if they consider their youth 'wasted'.

Used to know a guy who was as old as I am now when he took up Go. Took him less than ten years to reach a 3 dan rating, which is on the edge of where common wisdom says you need to start as a child to achieve better than that. But any time he wasn't working, he was looking at Go games (and I suspect sometimes when he was working). If he started 5 years younger or lives long enough I expect he'll disprove that rule.

Of course it always helps if you're a polymath. There's a lot of social friction involved with picking up something that is expected of 14 year olds. If you can teach yourself you can skip over a lot of that.