Second Act

We go through many transitions: getting married, having or not having children, changing jobs, menopause, mental health problems, moving to a new area, redundancy, retirement. These can all be opportunities for change. They won’t be exclusively good or bad experiences for everyone. But they can change the way your motivation is expressed. The same

Doing something you are comparatively less good at in the short run might not seem like the best idea, but it can be. Not knowing what sort of practice will pay off is one of the biggest challenges we face when making these decisions.

Some people’s lives change in a big way at a big moment: inspiration strikes, the wheel of fortune turns. Some people evolve slowly, perhaps erratically, but consciously, deliberately. For most, change involves both sudden inspiration and slow transformation.

However old you are, whatever your status relative to your peers, life is waiting for you. It is not too late to pursue change, to seek a different life, a better world.

But politics is still an area where circumstances change unexpectedly, unpredictably. When they do, careers are made and lost. Many late-blooming political careers were formed fortuitously.

They found that when people have positive inner emotional states, they are more productive. Being in cultures where your work is inhibited creates negative feedback loops, whereas positive cultures create positive feedback loops.

‘There is in human nature a general inclination to make people stare; and every wise man has himself to cure of it, and does cure himself.

Had he died at forty, he would have left behind a few poems and some journalism, read only by specialists. And it would have been difficult to see how he could have become anything greater. Before he was famous, he was a failure.

We should keep working and keep trying, keep expanding our perspectives and horizons, our stock of knowledge and our range of experiences, not just for aspiration, but so we will know at the end of our lives that we did.