The Element (26 page)

Susan eventually decided to write a book based on the course she had taught. She faced many roadblocks. And after four agents and fifteen rejections from various publishers, she reluctantly put the proposal in a drawer. One of the worst rejection letters she received said, “Lady Di could be bicycling nude down the street giving this book away, and no one would read it!”

During this period, she decided to leave the Floating Hospital and focus on becoming a serious writer. “I remember riding in a cab one evening. The driver asked me what I did. I heard myself say, ‘I’m a writer.’ I suppose until that moment I had thought of myself as a psychologist or an administrator, but there it was. I was a writer.”

After three years of writing articles for magazines, she was going through the drawer that held her much-rejected book proposal. “I picked it up and had a profound sense that I held something in my hands that many people needed to read. So I set out with much determination to find a publisher who believed in my book the same way I did. This time, I succeeded. What’s more, I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.”

Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
^®
has sold millions of copies. It is available in a hundred countries, and it has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. Susan has written seventeen more books that are also making their way around the world. Susan was indeed a writer; the
Times
of London even dubbed her the “Queen of Self-Help.” She is a sought-after public speaker and has been a guest on many radio and television shows internationally. About
Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
^®
, she says, “My Web site receives e-mails from all over the world from people telling me how my book has helped their lives. Some have actually credited it with
saving
their lives. I’m so happy I never gave up. My father would really have been proud.”

We all know people who feel locked into their lives. They sincerely wish they could do something more meaningful and fulfilling, but at age thirty-nine or fifty-two or sixty-four, they feel that the opportunity has passed. Perhaps you feel that it’s too late—that it’s unrealistic to pivot your life suddenly in a new direction. Perhaps you feel that you’ve missed the one opportunity you had to pursue your heart’s desire (maybe due to one of the constraints we discussed earlier). Perhaps you didn’t have the confidence to follow the passion earlier, and now believe that the moment is gone.

There is abundant evidence that opportunities to discover our Element exist more frequently in our lives than many might believe. In the course of writing this book, we have come upon literally hundreds of examples of people following their passions later in their lives. For example, Harriet Doerr, the best-selling author, only dabbled in writing while she raised her family. When she was sixty-five, she returned to college to get a degree in history. But the writing courses she took along the way raised her prose skills to a new level, and she wound up enrolled in Stanford’s creative writing program. She eventually published her first novel, the National Book Award-winning
Stones for Ibarra
, in 1983, at the age of seventy-three.

While less than half that age at thirty-six, Paul Potts still seemed stuck in an obscure and unfulfilling life. He’d always known he had a good voice and he’d pursued operatic training. However, a motorcycle accident cut short his dreams of the stage. Instead, he became a mobile telephone salesman in South Wales and continued to struggle with a lifelong self-confidence problem. Then he heard about auditions for the talent competition television show
Britain’s Got Talent
, created by Simon Cowell of
American Idol
fame. Potts got the opportunity to sing Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” on national television, and his beautiful voice brought down the house, leaving one of the judges in tears. Over the next few weeks, Potts became an international sensation—the YouTube video of his first performance has been downloaded more than eighteen million times. He ultimately won the competition and got the opportunity to sing in front of the Queen. Carphone Warehouse’s loss has been a gain for opera fans around the world, as Potts released his first album,
One Chance
, in late 2007. Singing had always been his Element.

“My voice,” he said, “has always been my best friend. If I was having problems with bullies at school, I always had my voice to fall back on. I don’t really know why people bullied me. I was always a little bit different. So I think that’s the reason sometimes that I struggled with self-confidence. When I’m singing I don’t have that problem. I’m in the place where I should be. All my life I felt insignificant. After that first audition, I realized that I am somebody. I’m Paul Potts.”

Julia Child, the chef credited with revolutionizing American home cooking and originating the television cooking show, worked first as an advertising copywriter and then in various roles for the U.S. government. In her mid-thirties, she discovered French cuisine and began professional training. It was not until she was nearly fifty that she published
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
, and her storied career took off.

At sixty-five, Maggie Kuhn was a church organizer who had no intention of leaving her job. Unfortunately, her employers made retirement mandatory at her age. Angry at the way her employer showed her the door, she decided to start a support group with friends in similar situations. Their attempts to address the common problems of retirees pushed them toward higher and higher levels of activism, culminating in the creation of the Gray Panthers, a national advocacy group.

We’ve all heard that fifty is the new thirty and that seventy is the new forty (if this algorithm extends in both directions, it would explain the adolescent behavior of some thirty-somethings I know). But there are some important changes that we should take seriously. Life expectancy has increased in our lifetimes. It has more than doubled in the past hundred years, and is growing at an accelerated rate. Quality of health for older people has improved. According to a MacArthur Foundation study, nearly nine in ten Americans ages sixty-five to seventy-four say they are living disability-free. Many older people in the developed world have much greater financial stability. In the 1950s, 35 percent of older Americans lived in poverty; today that figure is 10 percent.

There’s a great deal of talk these days about the “second middle age.” What we once considered middle age (roughly thirty-five to fifty) presaged a rapid descent toward retirement and imminent death. Now, the end of this first middle age marks a series of benchmarks (a certain level of accomplishment in your work, kids going off to college, reduction in necessary capital purchases). What comes after this is a second stretch where healthy, accomplished people can set off to reach their next set of goals. It’s certainly either chastening or inspirational—I’m not sure which—to hear boomer rock stars prove their predictions wrong about what they’d be doing “when I’m sixty-four” or still trying to get some “satisfaction.”

If we have an entire extra “middle age” these days, certainly we get additional opportunities to do more with our lives as part of the package. Thinking that we need to fulfill our grandest dreams (or at least be in the process of fulfilling them) by the time we’re thirty is outmoded.

I don’t mean to say, of course, that we all can do anything at any time in our lives. If you’re about to turn one hundred, it’s unlikely that you’re going to nail the leading role in
Swan Lake
, especially if you have no previous dance background. At fifty-eight, with a wobbly sense of balance, I’m getting used to the idea that I’ll probably never take the speed-skating gold at the Winter Olympics (particularly since I’ve never actually seen a pair of ice skates in real life). Some dreams truly are “impossible dreams.” However, many aren’t. Knowing the difference is often one of the first steps to finding your Element, because if you can see the chances of making a dream come true, you can also likely see the necessary next steps you need to take toward achieving it.

One of the most basic reasons for thinking that it’s too late to be who you are truly capable of being is the belief that life is linear. As if we’re on a busy one-way street, we think we have no alternative but to keep going forward. If we missed something the first time, we can’t double back and take another look because it takes all of our effort just to keep up with traffic. What we’ve seen in many of the stories in this book, though, are clear indications that human lives are not linear. Gordon Parks’s explorations and mastery of multiple disciplines were not linear. Chuck Close certainly has not lived a linear life; disease caused him to reinvent himself.

Sir Ridley Scott had a decidedly nonlinear approach toward entering the film world. He told me that when he first left art school, “I had absolutely no thoughts about making films. Films were something I would go to on a Saturday. It was impossible to think of how you would make that a leap into film from the life I was leading.

“I then decided that fine art wasn’t for me. I needed something more specific. I need a target, a brief. So I moved around and tried other forms of art practice and finally I found my feet with Mr. Ron Store in printing. I loved the printing process. I loved having to grind stones for each color of the lithograph. I used to work late every day, go to the pub for two pints of beer, and get the last bus home. I did that for four years, five nights a week. I adored it.”

A short while after this, he started moonlighting at the BBC. “I was always trying to break the boundaries of what I was doing, maximizing the budgets. They sent me on a year’s travel scholarship, and when I went back, I went straight in as a designer. After two years at the BBC, I was put into the director’s course.”

From there, though, he made another leap, this time into advertising, because it was “fantastically fun. Advertising has always been a dirty word in relation to fine art and painting and you know, that side of things. I unashamedly grabbed it with both hands.”

Directing commercials led to directing television. Only after that did Ridley Scott become immersed in the film world that would define his life’s work. If he’d believed at any point along this journey that he had to follow a straight path in his career, he never would have found his true calling.

Human lives are organic and cyclical. Different capacities express themselves in stronger ways at different times in our lives. Because of this, we get multiple opportunities for new growth and development, and multiple opportunities to revitalize latent capacities. Harriet Doerr started to explore her writing skill before life took her in another direction. That skill was waiting for her decades later when she turned back to it. Maggie Kuhn discovered her inner advocate when the opportunity arose, though she was probably entirely unaware that she had this talent until that moment.

While physical age is absolute as a way of measuring the number of years that have passed since you were born, it is purely relative when it comes to health and quality of life. Certainly, we are all getting older by the clock. But I know plenty of people who are the same age chronologically and generations apart emotionally and creatively.

My mother died at the age of eighty-six, very suddenly and very quickly from a stroke. Right up to the end of her life, she looked ten or fifteen years younger than her birth date suggested. She had an insatiable curiosity about other people and the world around her. She danced, read, partied, and traveled. She entertained everyone she met with her wit, and she inspired them with her sense of style, her energy, and her sheer pleasure in being alive—in spite of multiple hardships, struggles, and crises in her life.

I’m one of her seven children, and she was one of seven as well—so when we gathered in one place with our extended family, we were a substantial crowd. My mother took care of us during times when there were few modern conveniences and little help apart from what she could drag reluctantly from us when we were not actually creating work for her. When I was nine, we all faced a catastrophe. My father, who was the pillar of the family, and had been so distraught at my getting polio, had an industrial accident. He broke his neck, and for the rest of his life was a quadriplegic.

He was himself an extraordinary man who remained firmly at the center of our family life. He was sharply funny, deeply intelligent, and an inspiration to everyone who came within range of him. So, too, was my mother. Her energy and zest for life never diminished. She was always taking on new projects and learning new skills. At family gatherings, she was always the first on the dance floor. And in the last years of her life, she was studying ballroom dancing and making dollhouses and miniatures. For both my mother and my father there was always a clear, substantial difference between their chronological ages and their real ages.

There’s no shortage of people who achieved significant things in their later years. Benjamin Franklin invented the bifocal lens when he was seventy-eight. That’s how old Grandma Moses was when she decided to get serious about painting. Agatha Christie wrote
The Mousetrap
, the world’s longest-running play, when she was sixty-two. Jessica Tandy won the Oscar for Best Actress at age eighty. Vladimir Horowitz gave his last series of sold-out piano recitals when he was eighty-four.

Compare these accomplishments with the premature resignation of people you know in their thirties or forties, who behave as if their lives have settled into a dull routine and who see little opportunity to change and evolve.

If you’re fifty, exercise your mind and body regularly, eat well, and have a general zest for life, you’re likely younger—in very real, physical terms—than your neighbor who is forty-four, works in a dead-end job, eats chicken wings twice a day, considers thinking too strenuous, and looks at lifting a beer glass as a reasonable daily workout.