Tick Tock — Time’s running out… or is it?
“He’s only 21 and look how successful he is!”
“She is only 10 and has already won her first national award” (this has actually happened)
“It’s too late to start now, you’ll never catch up”
“At your age, I was already — a senior exec/a mother of 2/a home-owner” — Take your pick!
These statements surely sound familiar to you. Our lives are inundated with titles like 30 under 30, young achievers, or some such. Why are we so obsessed with age? This begs the question, is one’s achievement only valuable if it is commensurate with certain preconceived notions about what age said achievements should have been met by? If it surpasses these expectations either because someone is much younger (prodigious) or much older (and achieved something in spite of a late start), it gets treated like some kind of extraordinary feat.
As someone who began her adult life dreaming of becoming a performing artist, one of the most common statements that came my way from all quarters was — you’ve only begun at 21, the competition is tough, with most of your peers having begun this journey at 16…you have a lot of catching up to do.
Cut to 2019, when I began my journey in the world of PR and communications, I found myself saying things like you are 29 and have only just begun your career… you are at the bottom of the pyramid, and your peers are a good decade ahead of you. How will you ever catch up?
And this is perhaps why I spent much of my 20s battling the regret that I didn’t have my ‘eureka... I want to be a professional musician’ moment at the age of 17, and instead kept second guessing and telling myself it was too late to be doing this. I spent the latter half of my 20s thinking I should’ve started working sooner! I wonder how life would have turned out, or where I’d have been had I spent even half that energy focussing on what really mattered, doing the work, enjoying the process, and bettering myself in whatever arena I chose to enter at the time. Hindsight is 20–20 right.
The thing about our mind voice, or in some cases, people’s actual voices, is that it may seem somewhat harmless on the surface, but has irreversible consequences on one’s motivation and belief in what they’re doing. While I have spent my time going through the motions, and doing what had to be done at the time, I find that I have been unable to make certain concrete shifts because there simply isn’t any belief!
These attitudes are (at least in some measure) firmly rooted in societal expectations that dictate that our lives follow a templatised ‘script’, thereby weighing heavily on the age-milestone/achievement link. Once we escape the chains of this template, we might well imagine a world which moves away from absolute age as a yardstick while judging achievement and merit. After all, it’s the amount of time one puts into their craft that’s salient, and not the age at which their craft was honed. Additionally, there needs to be a shift from the mindset that links one’s ability to put in time and effort into any pursuit to their age.
Paul Gauguin, a French painter began painting full-time at the age of 34 and went on to become an important figure in the Symbolist art movement of the early 1900s.
Vera Wang, a name that is inextricably linked to high street global fashion, made her first design at the age of 40.
Stan Lee created his first hit comic, “The Fantastic Four,” just shy of his 39th birthday in 1961, post which he went on to create the legendary Marvel Universe.
The Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago spent most of his adulthood as a civil servant and then a journalist. Apart from a handful of works through this time, he only found success as a novelist after he turned 60, and went on to win a Nobel prize in literature at the age of 76.
What all these people have in common is the fact that they came upon their ‘path’ late(r) in life, and were in difficult fields which demanded high levels of skill and years of practice. But what it suggests to me is that their move into these fields was probably driven entirely by passion and sheer belief, and quite possibly without the pressure of targets, and the burden of regrets.
I am sure we have heard several such stories, not just in these ‘famous’ cases, but in our daily lives too. We have probably also been told in some form or the other, that ‘it’s never too late to start something’, but these voices seem to get drowned out somehow. The reason for my 600 odd word ramble about this is that I have finally decided that it’s time to dial up the volume on these voices. Today, I can honestly say that love what I do, and bettering myself at it is all I ought to, and will focus on. Everything else is just noise. I wish to spend the next phase of my life being present in the moment and enjoying the journey that began when it did (doesn’t matter), and I am incredibly happy that I get to do it at The Mavericks, a place that has given me the opportunity to discover and pursue what I am good at and what I love without any judgement!
