One thing we can never really predict is the rate or pace that something or someone will mature. Whether it’s an idea, or a technology or a person, gauging both the acceleration and speed on an individual level is really hard to do.

Take people for instance. Occasionally we see examples of people leading the way in adult circles like politics or sport when they’ve barely taken a step into their teens. They look and behave like adults already. Then there are others who developing much later. And then you see the mass of people, in the main part of the bell curve, who mature at around the same time, the average time, though I dislike the use of the word average here.

When I think back to my own youth, although I earned the same legal rights as others when I became 18 years old, I was probably thirty before I really felt like I had life sussed and ‘got it’. Whether those of use who are later to things enjoy a longer, later period of being at the races before the inevitable decline towards completing the circle of life I don’t know, but probably not.

I think that the pace at which we mature is a function of both nature and nurture, but that doesn’t seem to make it any easier to predict who will mature faster. And then, when we come to the pace of maturity for things, ideas, technologies and so on, history and data can provide a guide, but a pretty unreliable one at that.