Darwin took 21 years to publish his findings on evolution. In fact he couldn't finish the actual book that he had set out to write and published a summarized abstract instead, which is what we know as On the Origin of Species.
A couple software examples off the top of my head are Richard Hipp with SQLite and Matthew Ahrens with ZFS. Both almost incomprehensibly sophisticated projects executed well over decades.
Neither are anything like a solo effort in the way these examples are, and it's hard to say what they'd be like without the long individual involvement.
The painting is by Hokusai. Kanagawa is a place.
Richard Stallman: GCC and Emacs - both massive pro?ects and still going strong.
Linus Torvalds: Linux OS kernel
Science
Geoffrey Hinton: scaling neural networks
Books
Donald E. Knuth: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (vol 4c of 12)
Buildings
misc. architects and builders: (most) cathedrals (Cologne, Barcelona, ...)
J R R Tolkien
Janny Wurts
M A R Barker
Ed Greenwood
Neither are anything like a solo effort in the way these examples are, and it's hard to say what they'd be like without the long individual involvement.
Growing up in a retirement community you would be foolish to ignore the fact that some things don't start getting good for the first few decades.
Most everybody else doesn't have such overwhelming examples, and fail to realize it until much later in life, if ever.