Better Late Than Never

Turned off by the way literature was taught in college—through the philosophy of criticism—she became a studio art major and tried to pursue an art career for the next decade. When she finally realized that she was a word person and writing was what she was meant to do, "it was like suddenly looking at a friend you've had for your whole life and realizing this is the person you want to marry," Glass says.

At age 29, she decided to give writing a go. It was tough at first, taking seven years before any of her short stories got published in even a minor magazine. "Most of my peers were well-launched in solid careers when I was taking baby steps in what would ultimately be mine," she recalls.

Once she decided to tackle a novel, things were no easier. Working without a book contract or a steady income, she wrote Three Junes in isolation, sharing her writing with no one, not even her mate. "Keeping it close to my chest meant that it stayed in a sort of dream realm, which was important to staying inspired," she says.

She sent Three Junes to seven or eight publishers simultaneously, and all but one rejected it. Fortunately, it takes only one.

Glass attributes her eventual success to stubbornness. "A trio of misfortunes in my mid-30s—divorce, cancer, the death of my only sibling—did call on me, like it or not, to be resilient." It was a hole, she said, she had "to crawl out of with my bare hands. Lots of sorrow and hardly any money."

Her National Book Award is dedicated to "everybody who blooms late in life, whether you're a writer or anything else because you never, never know."

Joshua Waitzkin

Some are lucky enough to realize complete success once in a lifetime. At age 31, Joshua Waitzkin has done it twice and may yet do it again. And again. He's on an inner quest to discover the outer limits of ability.

At age 6 Waitzkin discovered chess while walking with his mother through New York's Washington Square Park. He was hooked and played continuously with the men who gathered there. "It was a school of hard knocks, and those guys kept me on my toes," he says.

Although his chess progress was rapid, he lost his first National Championship, at age 8. Many chess kids would have been devastated, but not Waitzkin, who went on to dominate the scholastic chess scene. "On some fundamental level, the notion of success in my being was defined by overcoming adversity—and still is," he reports.

Then, in 1993, Paramount Pictures released Searching for Bobby Fischer, which depicts Waitzkin's early chess success. To the degree that it now belonged to others, his love of the game weakened.

Meditation and reading philosophy and psychology encouraged him to start the learning process anew—and at 21 he took up the martial art Tai Chi Chuan. "At a world-class level, most of my rivals in Asia had trained full-time since early childhood," says Waitzkin.

As different as Tai Chi is from chess, Waitzkin discovered hidden harmonies between the two and attributes his rapid progress—he won the 2004 Push Hands World Championship—to transferring the lessons he learned in chess to this new art. "Chess taught me how to be relentlessly introspective, how to unearth tells in myself and in opponents," he says. "The connections were in my process, and that process could be applied across the board," he adds. "Learning and peak performance aren't about control or memorization or perfection—they are about something much deeper, something more essentially human."

Nor are they about giftedness. Waitzkin often knew his rivals were more naturally gifted than he. But he "believed in my training, my approach to learning, and my ability to rise to the challenge under pressure." He also sees the outer limits of ability as something malleable that can expand with training, and embraces the discomfort of such moments of growth. That allows him to "love the richness of the self-discovery. The discomfort becomes exquisite. Learning becomes life."