It’s no surprise: Many of the artistic greats, from Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan to Zadie Smith and Taylor Swift, found immense success when they were young. The fastest-growing startups—Meta, Snapchat, Airbnb, and so on—were founded by twentysomethings, some of whom never graduated from college. A quote frequently attributed to Albert Einstein holds that scientists who have not made a great contribution to their fields before the age of 30 will never do so in their lifetimes. As one of my chemist colleagues, at 55, told me, “Science is a young man’s game.”