I recently listened to an audiobook titled “Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement” by Rich Karlgaard, and I found it reassuring. I don’t know about you, but I have often wondered why I seem to not be able to drive straight forward like a lot of people seem to find so easy.

It felt like I was wasting time and losing ground

Instead, I often have found myself taking detours from what felt like the main direction. Whether it was taking two years off from work to try for my Ph.D. (which I didn’t finish), or switching from working as an engineer for fifteen years to recently working as a software developer for the past four, I’ve had to often ask myself did I really have a plan I was following or was I just jumping from thing to thing. I wanted to tell myself I did, but the truth was often it felt like I was wasting time and losing ground.

I learn and experience life by sampling

One of the things I have come to accept about myself is that I tend to learn and experience life by sampling. Instead of reading one book on one topic all the way through, I might read fifty pages of four different books that were seemingly unrelated. It was not until recently that I have begun to see how a lot of my different interests have many things in common and even overlap in a lot of ways.

Now that I find myself thinking more and more about what my second act might be, I am encouraged to find that a lot of the topics and hobbies I have invested time in the past that seemed wasted, now look like seeds I was planting that I can turn back to later in life and make use of and explore further. Whether it’s my interest in teaching and how I am considering starting tutoring in my free time which I think I would enjoy continuing to do later in life, or the ten years of guitar lessons I was unsure were worth it, now looks to be another topic I could help young people learn in my free time later as another way of earning an income later on. I have already experienced this.

I find myself questioning my decisions

For years I felt like I had wasted two years of my life and a lot of money in my failed attempt at my Ph.D. But in recent years I had the chance to teach an evening class at a local college and that would never have happened if not for the course work I had completed during my Ph.D. attempt. Currently, I find myself questioning my decision to complete an MBA, as I now find myself leaning towards continuing with technical work for the foreseeable future. But who knows, maybe when I am 70 years old, I will enjoy doing some business strategy consulting work for some young person trying to start their own business. I’ll make a little money and make use of that MBA after all.

What seeds have you planted?

What topics have you been neglecting because you would not benefit right now from the time invested but now appear to be something you might enjoy being involved with later on in life? Maybe the time for us to make use of some of those things we have spent time on in the past that didn’t lead to anything at the time will prove of use in our later years. What seeds have you planted? Maybe we are not losers after all, maybe we are just late bloomers.

I decided to use the tagline “make the second half the best half” because it felt like an appropriate goal for what this site is about.  I am 48 and I have been working about 20 years now (not including years in grad school).  So if I hope to live into my 90s or if I plan to work another 20 years, which I do for both, then I am currently at the half way point.  And since I plan to write about my attempts and thoughts on making that second half the best half, it felt like an appropriate tag line.  I hope it inspires you when you see it to think of ways to do exactly that for your life.