Some innovators are luminous shooting stars--think Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein, Sylvia Plath, Bob Dylan, Steve Jobs--who make bold leaps early and suddenly, then lose their creativity. Others are late bloomers--Paul Cezanne, Charles Darwin, Virginia Woolf, Alfred Hitchcock, Warren Buffett--who show little early promise, but spend long periods doggedly pursing distant goals, and attain greatness in old age. By analyzing the careers of scores of great innovators, this book reveals systematic differences in the motivations and methods of these two types, and their very different patterns of creativity over the life cycle. The result is a new and deeper unified understanding of the sources of human creativity.