What’s the Best Time to Re-Invent Oneself?

I was doomscrolling on TikTok the other night and came across something quite interesting. It was a video of a 50-something-year-old lamenting about how he has reinvented his life after years of being actively involved in corporate. He says that he wasted 30 of his years slaving away behind a computer and now was contemplating on diving into farming or something that resonates with his passion.

His dream was to own a farm full of chicken flying around, dogs barking in his backyard, cows dropping dung everywhere and goats probably knocking their heads on the wooden fence of his ranch – a ranch he never had time to set up since corporate took his entire time of the calendar.

I found this shift to be super profound and intriguing, especially for the fact that the light bulb moment just fell on him at that ripe age. For young people, we mostly envision climbing that corporate ladder and earn accolades that open up doors to our dreams. But most times, we end up being clouded in a rat race that makes us forget our real purpose.

Borrowing from a book titled ‘Ikigai’ by Francesc Miralles and Hector Garcia, the secret to happiness and success lies in what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Once you discover that, you are set for a roadmap to your purpose.

Reality check has it that sometimes we have to go through some paths that don’t align with our dreams before we actually discover our actual reason for being alive. Quite like the analogy that asserts that we have to kiss so many frogs before finding the prince. 

Many of us find ourselves in jobs that we didn’t really study for, or in careers that we never thought we would ever pursue. I know of so many journalists that really didn’t study journalism, and of many other business people who decided employment wasn’t their call and leaned towards creating spaces that give them fulfillment.

Best case scenario, most of these paths lead us to our purpose. And worst? We only come out of them with lessons that shape our vision. In the words of a modern-day philosopher, J-Cole, he raps, “Good news is you came a long way, bad news is you went the wrong way.”

Pause and think about that for a sec!

When we connect the dots backwards, most often, we end up seeing the reasons behind the happenings in our lives. There is always a reason behind it all, and it only makes sense when we look at it backwards. To mean, no matter the path we end up finding ourselves in, there is always a lesson or reward to pick from it.

Looking back at the 50-something-year-old who is reinventing himself after years of being in corporate, it makes me realise that there is absolutely no timeframe to doing things. You can take a whole paradigm shift at 23, or even at 57 years-old. It’s all in making it make sense to you.

In our 20s, there are lots of lessons to pick up and decisions to make which eventually impact our future. Most of the reinveting we make stem from some of the decisions we made back then. Could be the careers we chose or the partners we settled with, possibly the hobbies we occupied ourselves with. But like afforementioned, at the end it ends up making sense as to why we had to go through certain phases, both positive and negative.

This could be a cue to call yourself for a meeting and probably rethink, or maybe audit your vision and how the past has fed into it. How is it looking?