How To Be Successful: 4 Secrets Backed By Research

These days the world strongly associates success with youth. The cultural narrative goes something like this: if you didn’t create a world-changing algorithm in your dorm room before you could legally drink, then why are you even trying?

Don’t get me wrong, the world loves a good late bloomer story — but only in retrospect.

If you’re a potential late bloomer, chances are you’ve already spent enough time listening to your own voice drone on in your head like a sad audiobook of unmet potential. And the road of the late bloomer is no fun. Being the person who’s spent the last three Thanksgivings explaining why your current project is not just a fancy way of saying “unemployed.” Your parents slowly lose hope of ever bragging about you at dinner parties. You debate coining new euphemisms like “chronologically challenged.”

The world is so busy celebrating the Mark Zuckerbergs that they forget the Vera Wangs – she didn’t even get into fashion until she was 40. David Sedaris didn’t publish his first book until he was 38. Laura Ingalls Wilder only started writing “Little House on the Prairie” at sixty-five.

So if you’re feeling like a human time capsule, buried underground while everyone else is doing laps above you, take heart. You can still be successful. But what makes the difference between whether you’ll be slow to break out – or whether you never do?

We’re going to get insight from Henry Oliver’s book, “Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life.”

Better late than never, right? Let’s get to it…

 

Don’t Give Up

Yeah, sounds obvious but gimme a second here. Many late bloomers don’t have a specific goal – but they do feel they have a calling. Something they were meant to do. Research shows having a calling significantly increases well-being — but it’s also stressful as hell.

It’s a lot of pressure to feel like you’re the one who needs to “fulfill the prophecy.” A calling is demanding. It doesn’t just sit there quietly. No, it’s a screeching toddler with a chainsaw, threatening to ruin everything if you don’t give it your full attention. Have you ever heard people talk about their passion projects? Sure, they’re technically “happy” and “fulfilled,” but they also look like they haven’t slept properly since 2003.

The research shows that late bloomers’ callings express themselves in three ways: emergent, deferred and accommodation.

“Emergent callings” start off weak and become stronger as you age. These people spend years trudging through the minefield of “acceptable” life choices—graduating college, getting a job, convincing themselves that they’re totally fine with their corporate overlords giving them meaningless titles like “Coordinator of Coordinating” just so they don’t notice their souls evaporating. Then one day – BANG. They find their purpose, and now they’re running at it full tilt, arms flailing, no helmet, no brakes, screaming, “THIS IS IT! I’M DOING THE THING!” And everyone around them is like, “What thing? Is there a thing? Why is there so much yelling?”

Then there are the “deferred callings.” These folks figured out what they wanted to do early on, but then life stepped in and said, “Hey, I see you have a dream, but you also want to eat food and sleep indoors, so how about becoming a project manager instead?” They shove that calling into a mental storage unit, lock it up, and toss the key, hoping that maybe, maybe, someday they’ll have time to dig it out again—if they haven’t already drowned it in red wine and resentment.

Two diametrically opposed paths. What’s the middle ground?

“Accommodation of a calling” means keeping it as a hobby alongside your work. This can be a good strategy because it keeps the dream alive, even if it’s on a respirator. Fully stopping is the biggest barrier to success. Most people are ditching their dreams left and right. They call it “rebalancing priorities” or “shifting focus,” but really, they’re just done. And that’s fine for them. But this is why accommodators are more likely to succeed. Not because they’re the most talented or the smartest, but because they’re the ones who refuse to leave the party.

So the key for most late bloomers is to keep that dream simmering. A sleeper cell still operating, waiting to be activated. Still honing their skills, an eye out for opportunities. While their peers are ditching their life goals, the accommodators are slowly chipping away at their dreams like they’re escaping Shawshank.

(For more on how to find your calling in life, click here.)

Okay, we understand the path that usually works. But what makes the difference between the accommodators that bloom and the ones that never do?

 

Hard Work

Research shows scientists tend to do their most significant work when they’re younger because that’s when they’re most productive. But it turns out the biggest difference between the productivity of the old and young isn’t biological – it’s that fewer people keep trying as they age. It’s not that they’re less able; they’re less willing.

As time goes by late bloomers can get discouraged and feel the hard work isn’t worth it because maybe they just don’t have the talent. But the myth of the overnight success is exactly that: a myth, like Bigfoot or a functional family group chat. Few people start out good at anything, except maybe being an insufferable teenager.

If you’re worried that you’ve started too late, that you’ve missed your shot, remember this: there is literally no expiration date on sucking at something and then getting better at it. You’re not a carton of milk. As long as you’re still breathing and semi-coherent, you can improve at anything. (Except maybe breakdancing. Please don’t start breakdancing in your forties. Nobody needs to see that.)

If you want to be a late bloomer who succeeds, stop obsessing over when you started and start obsessing over what you’re doing now. Because the research shows the more time you spend doing the thing, the more chances you have of doing something great…

Enter the “equal-odds rule,” the cruel little statistic that says every single thing you create has an equal chance of being brilliant or complete garbage. This means you can’t just sit around waiting for the muse to show up like a food delivery guy. You’ve got to crank out work like you’re running a sweatshop in your own brain. All those failed attempts, those terrible drafts, those embarrassing entrepreneurial efforts—they’re not just failures. They’re essential shots on goal.

The key ingredient to any late-blooming success story is shockingly mundane: you’ve got to sit down and do the work. This sounds obvious but it’s actually quite profound. Because doing the work is the one thing most people don’t do.

Continually grinding it out isn’t glamorous. It’s not the “Rocky” montage. It’s more like Sisyphus. But one consistent thing Henry Oliver found when looking at research on successful late bloomers was that they were persistent. Successful late bloomers have this magical ability to keep going long after the rest of us would’ve thrown in the towel, the laundry basket, and the whole washing machine. They don’t just have ambition; they have intensity with a capital “I” and about 17 exclamation points. They come at you like a telemarketer who just learned you’re the only one on Earth without car insurance.

And you know what happens when you keep bashing your head against the same wall? Sometimes the wall gives up. It’s like the universe looks at you and goes, “Fine, you win. I’ll throw you a bone just so you’ll stop bothering me.”

The point is, you keep moving forward and you do it now, not later. Not after your life magically gets sorted out, because it won’t. Later is the graveyard where dreams go to die. Because even if you don’t end up changing the world, at least you won’t have to live with the regret of having stopped when you were just getting started.

(For more on how to be productive, click here.)

Hard work is essential. But plenty of people work hard and still fail. What separates them from the ones who eventually succeed?

 

Willingness To Change

If you want to improve your life, you have to change your circumstances. This doesn’t necessarily mean quitting your job and selling all your possessions. It means recognizing that the people and places you surround yourself with are shaping your future, whether you like it or not.

If you’re spending all your time with people who think achieving life goals means finding the perfect throw pillows, don’t be surprised if your biggest achievement this year is buying a decorative cactus. Your social circle can be like secondhand smoke, but for your soul. You think you’re impervious, but then one day you wake up and realize you’ve been inhaling mediocrity so long, you’re practically coughing up bits of “I guess this is good enough.”

This is the harsh truth of being a late bloomer: you have to be your own disruption. You have to drag yourself, kicking and screaming, out of your own personal “Groundhog Day.” Stop expecting change to show up like a handsome stranger in a rom-com who teaches you how to love again.

And once you get over the disappointment of that, you’ll realize: it’s actually a good thing. It means the story of your life is yours to write, one page at a time, starting now. Be the interruption you’ve been waiting for. Because, really, the only thing worse than being stuck is realizing you’ve been holding the key to your own escape all along.

Oliver found that the late bloomers who flourished were not willing to sit around waiting for permission to do something meaningful. They understand that you don’t need a hall pass to live the life you want. And nobody is going to come rescue you. You’re more capable of rescuing yourself than you think.

(For more on how to be successful, click here.)

Keep that dream simmering. Work hard. Be willing to make changes. And if you want to make sure you succeed you have to find a way to get your hard work noticed…

 

Networking

You’ve heard of “six degrees of separation”, right? Here’s the twist: social scientists Nicholas Christakis and James H. Fowler discovered that while networks do have six degrees of separation, they only have three degrees of influence. And influence is the important part.

It’s not enough to be connected, you need to be close enough to have influence over the people you need help from. And that means just making more and more connections.

Mentors and peer groups are great but you need to expand your circle of “weak ties.” Sounds like the name of a really boring indie band but these are the acquaintances, the loose connections that can help you bridge the gap to other peer groups that offer new information and opportunities. Weak ties can be the deus ex machina of the late bloomer’s life.

Goethe said, “Tell me who you spend time with, and I will tell you who you are.” Find the pockets of people who value the things you do, who aren’t constantly trying to convince you that your big dreams are just impractical nonsense. Get out of that small town mentality, even if you’re in a big city. Stop playing it safe, stop surrounding yourself with people who’ve accepted that life is just one big compromise.

(For more on how to network, click here.)

Okay, we’ve covered a lot. Let’s round it up and we’ll cover the late bloomers nemesis: the mid-life crisis. And then we’ll learn why the worst thing can sometimes be the best thing…

 

Sum Up

Here’s how to succeed as a late bloomer…

• Don’t Give Up: A “calling” is deeply unsettling, like a metaphysical telemarketing scheme that won’t stop harassing you until you either answer or change your number. If you can’t go full-bore just yet, don’t give up. Keep your dreams as a hobby until it’s time to strike.
• Hard Work: Being a late bloomer isn’t about having a late start; it’s about finally getting off your butt and doing the work, even if you’ve already missed the boat, the train, and probably a couple of Uber rides. You can no longer afford to be someone who thinks “maybe someday” is a plan.
• Willingness To Change: Let’s get one thing straight: no one is coming to rescue you. There’s no magical career fairy who’s going to swoop in with a glittery wand and a LinkedIn upgrade. Nope. If you’re holding out for a sign, let me help you out—this is it. This is the sign. Be ready to change. Be ready to sacrifice.
• Networking: You’re not playing “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” You’re playing “Three Degrees of Actually Getting Someone to Return Your Email.”

Middle age is that magical time when every conversation you have is about real estate or cholesterol. It’s also when the midlife crisis strikes. We’ve all been conditioned to treat them like some kind of mental hemorrhoid—a painful, embarrassing little affliction that you’re supposed to endure quietly and pretend isn’t happening.

But let me make a counterargument: we need more midlife crises. Yes, you heard me right. Maybe, just maybe, that miserable sense of “What’s it all for?” is the universe nudging you with its elbow, like, “Hey, pal, it’s time to stop Googling your exes and do something new.”

Successful late bloomers have turned the art of the midlife crisis into a strategy for reinvention. They don’t spend their afternoons brooding over what they haven’t done; they spend their afternoons figuring out what they’re going to do next. Because here’s the secret: a crisis is just a catalyst in a crappy disguise. It’s the inciting incident in the epic story of Your Second Act. Reboots aren’t just for Hollywood IP. Because at the end of the day, the only thing worse than a midlife crisis is avoiding one so hard that you end up living in a state of dull, quiet misery.

If you want to be a successful late bloomer, you have to reject the idea that you’ve missed some magical deadline to do something cool with your life. And the biggest obstacle is your own paranoia that you’re “too old.”

So, to all the potential late bloomers out there, whether you’re 30 or 80: go on, be ambitious. Start that project everyone thinks you’re too old or too inexperienced for. Shake up the room. Be the person who makes people say, “I didn’t know that was possible.” Because those are the people who actually change things—no matter what their birth certificate says.

Make the rest of us feel like we peaked way too soon.