Beginning a career at 65 vs 22 years of age has its Venn Diagram moments. Our energy level is higher at 22 than it is at 65. We have significantly more life experience at 65 than at 22. And in both cases, there is the unknown. All those events, experiences and roadblocks that are unpredictable and inescapable.

It’s been an incredible journey, this coming of age as a writer at 65. I am still living through the journey. It’s really just begun. And it’s only been as I have become a writer that I realize coming of age doesn’t only happen as a child growing into adulthood. It can be any transformative period in a person’s life. The same amazing and mystical evolution occurs. From cocoon to butterfly, and all the stages in between.

How many times a day do I wish I had started this journey earlier, in my youth, or even as a middle-aged working woman? I would have had more energy, I would have been fresher. People may not have looked at me as an old woman—maybe they would have at 45, even—but certainly at 25 I wouldn’t have been viewed as OLD. Now I know I am old, and that as much as I would like to think that coloring the gray away, or staying as fit as I can, the wrinkle lines, the middle-aged spread can’t be denied.

But, wishing doesn’t change things. I am where I am. Still impatient, still wanting results faster. Still frustrated that the world moves at its own snail’s pace.

Nothing replaces hard work, thinking strategically, staying the course.

So, how can I do better, how can I increase the chances of success?

There’s an old saying, “Plan your work, Work your plan.”

I have done this to varying degrees throughout my life. It’s time to resurrect the plan. Revise it, think more about what results I really want to have happen.

It can be done. I can do it!

Venn Diagram