How to get a career in your 40s
I’ve had an idea rolling around in my head for a while now. With all the posts on social media about changes in the workplace & millennials, maybe there are ways that the 40 and up can leverage the changes millennials are already demanding.
I’ve been processing it for a couple of months now, maybe there’s something here for a blog post?
I appreciate your forthrightness and transparency in your writing.
Career opportunies are not really about age, they are about motivation.
For example, there are always lots of new things happening in the world that you can leverage to create business opportunities. But doing that requires spending lots of time learning news ways of doing things and thinking about things and exploring stuff that is outside your comfort zone. Most of the time this is exciting when you’re young and exhausting when you’re in your 40s.
The reason for this is because in your 40s you are learning all sorts of new things not about business but about relationships and commitment and aging which are why being in your 40s is so difficult.
And that’s another reason why so many work opportunities feel like they are for 20somethings and not 40somethings: because when you’re young you are not balancing kids, and a mortgage, and other family obligations. It’s harder to take advantage of new opportunities when you are not in a position to take risks.
That said, there are so many new arenas where a 40something can compete just fine with a 20something. Like cryptocurrency and blockchain. There are few experts (I mean, they say they are experts, but they have like, one year of learning under their belt). So you can become at expert at a cutting edge topic and have a big career in that. If you want to take the time. And move to Malta or Seychelles, or wherever the good jobs are.
Or you can become instagram famous and make money from that. It just takes time. Or be a YouTuber. You can do that. There’s a huge opening for people in their mid-life to get YouTube channels. It only takes time. A huge amount. For more on how much time it takes to be an expert, read this:
http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2018/02/15/commitment-is-essential-for-doing-something-that-matters/
The truth is, doing anything that takes advantage of a new opportunity in a big way — at any stage of life, at any time in history — just takes time. But by middle age we are acutely aware of how little we have.
Penelope
Middle age may be the perfect time to pivot and dive into a new work adventure. If you’re in a position where the kids have left the next or are currently in college, it’s refreshing to finally have the commodity of time on your side.
A financial risk may be a different consideration, however…