Leonard Cohen struggled mightily to write his classic Hallelujah. 

He drafted more than eighty verses. “I filled two notebooks,” he said in an interview, “and I remember being in the Royalton Hotel [in New York], on the carpet in my underwear, banging my head on the floor saying, ‘I can’t finish this song.’”

There’s a true story, though it sounds apocryphal, of a meeting between Cohen and Bob Dylan in Paris in the mid-80s. Both men were on tour. Cohen recalled:

“Dylan and I were having coffee the day after his concert, and he asked me how long it took me to write Hallelujah. I told him a couple of years—I lied, actually. It was more than a couple of years [it took him five]”

Then I praised a song of his, I & I, and asked him how long it had taken. He said, ‘15 minutes.’”

Cohen admitted that his songs came in “dribbles and drops.” Dylan’s, by contrast, seemed to pour out fully formed. By his early twenties, Dylan was world-famous and hailed as one of the great songwriters of his generation. Cohen, meanwhile, was well into his forties before the accolades arrived.

This essay is about the process of bringing creative work into the world. And by creative work, I don’t just mean songs or paintings, but any work that is bold, personal, and intended to change the recipient for the better. Dylan and Cohen are both rightly regarded as masters. But they also represent two archetypes of the creative process.

“I seek in painting” Paul Cézanne
“I do not seek, I find” Pablo Picasso

Economist David Galenson was fascinated by the history of modern art. He undertook a systematic study of how artists’ ages related to the value of their works at auction. This led to his book Old Masters and Young Geniuses, in which he outlined two distinct types of creative life cycles.

According to Galenson, there are two kinds of innovators: the conceptual and the experimental. Both can achieve greatness, but their methods differ.

A conceptual innovator is characterised by certainty. As Picasso once said, pointing to his forehead: “The key to everything that happens is here. Before it comes out of the pen or brush, the key is to have it at one’s fingertips, entirely without losing any of it.”

Conceptuals are the ones history most often calls “geniuses”. They are irreverent toward tradition, and their best work often comes early. Their ideas arrive in flashes of inspiration, acted on quickly and communicated with confidence. Picasso was 26 when he painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, launching Cubism. Dylan was 24 when he wrote Like a Rolling Stone, later ranked number one by Rolling Stone magazine in their poll of the 500 greatest songs of all time.

Experimental innovators need time. Their goals are often elusive, sometimes impossible. They rarely feel they have “arrived”, yet their persistence deepens their craft. Their contributions reflect effort and accumulated wisdom, often recognised only later in life.

A critic once described Cézanne’s work as “an asymptote toward which he was forever approaching without ever quite reaching it; it was a reality incapable of complete realisation”

Cohen was 50 when he finished and recorded Hallelujah. It took another 20 years, through covers by John Cale, Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright (and even Shrek), before the song entered the cultural mainstream. His first number one album came in 2012, at age 77. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008 and the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2010.

This pattern is not confined to art. In entrepreneurship, too, we often romanticise youth and overlook the value of experience. Recent research shows that among the most successful startups, the top 0.1 per cent by growth rate, the average age of founders was 45. A 50-year-old founder is nearly twice as likely to achieve high-growth success compared to a 30-year-old, while those in their early twenties have the lowest likelihood of reaching the top tier. This evidence strengthens the case that experience and persistence often outweigh youth in meaningful, long-lasting innovation.

The way we think about the creative process has been dominated by the Dylan-like archetype: the young disruptor, brimming with confidence and certainty. They make headlines early, guns blazing.

But true innovation is not only about short-term breakthroughs. It is about work that changes practices, earns respect and endures. That is as true for Conceptuals as it is for Experimentals, for Finders and Seekers.

In business and entrepreneurship, the same framework exists. For every Zuckerberg there is a Ray Kroc, who opened his first McDonald's franchise in his fifties. For every Steve Jobs there is a Katharine Graham, who took the helm of The Washington Post at 46. Culture exalts the former first, and is slower to recognise the latter.

If you lean Experimental, know this: appreciation, if it comes, will come later. But appreciation should not be the goal. What matters is purpose, meaning in the process, and mastery that grows with time. As Steve Jobs once said, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

So if your path feels slow, take heart. Mastery has its own pace. Keep going.

References

1. This post was inspired by the podcast Revisionist History by Malcolm Gladwell. In particular this episode here

2. The stories about Dylan and Leonard Cohen are mainly from the book: The Holy or the Broken by Alan Light

3. The thinking behind Conceptuals and Experimentals is from the book: Old masters and Young Geniuses by David Galenson

We’re busy working on a couple of new episodes, but in the meantime, why not explore the past ones? The Finding Meaning in Work podcast dives into conversations with people who’ve built lives and careers rooted in purpose. Guests include Simon Griffiths, Founder and CEO of Who Gives a Crap, who turned a simple idea into a global social enterprise; Fatuma and Laurinda Ndenzako of Collective Closets, reshaping Australian fashion through a celebration of African heritage and slow fashion; and Dr. Jason Fox, a self-described wizard-philosopher challenging the default metrics of modern work to spark curiosity and authentic progress.