"Life isn't about finding yourself.
Life is about creating yourself."
--George Bernard Shaw(Written in April 2013)
It's tough to get to 60 years old and realize that you have never finished that process of creating yourself. That is, you realize that, as lucky as you have been, as many chances as you have had, you have never taken that one chance and run with it. Or shot for the moon. Or gone for broke. Or followed your heart.
And there are all kinds of reasons not to.
There are the easy ones, like needing to pay the rent, or the mortgage. Like needing to provide for a family. Like needing to just pay off that car loan, or complete that last project, or get one more promotion...all of which may be good things to do, responsible things to do, important goals to achieve.
There are the tougher ones, like choosing to leave a dead-end job without something better, like persisting in a consulting role when you're not finding the kinds of engagements that you're really looking for.
All of these things may make a lot of sense if your goal is to "find yourself." But you can only "find" yourself when you are lost.
When you know who you are, what you want, what you dream about, you're not lost. You may be afraid...to go through the uncertainty of an acting career, or the grind of a professional baseball career, or the setbacks of teaching. To take the risks involved in saying, "This is who I am," in case those you care about don't get it. You may be uncertain, which leads to that same fear. You may even have failed at these things in the past. But if you know who you are, you understand that failure needs to be temporary.
Failure has only one value: as a learning experience. If you know who you are, what you want, and what you dream about, you must welcome failure at it, because failure is high-value coaching: it forces you to think about why - about what worked, and what didn't. It allows you to consider adjustments, refocuses, improvements. It can make you better at being your best.
Can you fail gracefully at 60? Can you ever fail gracefully? Does it matter?
Go for it.
