A few years ago, Henry Oliver was working as a researcher in a British recruitment agency when he became aware of ageism in the workplace. Employers would go out of their way to attract young employees and mothers returning to the workforce, but turned their back on anyone over 55.
There were gaping job vacancies in the UK – one million jobs were unable to be filled. Yet no one wanted to hear about one particular talent pool, says Oliver. “I got sick of giving presentations saying, ‘Well, you know, the 55-plus category is really where everything’s happening and that’s where all the people are’, and they’d be, like, ‘What else you got?’’'
But it gave the now 37-year-old the idea that a whole lot of people were being overlooked because of rigid ideas about how we view potential talent and career paths. He set out to find out more about late bloomers and how we might encourage more of them, quitting his job in the process. Oliver’s book, Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life, is the result of in-depth research and is peppered with biographical examples.
Speaking by Zoom from London, Oliver is a serious fellow, and has the manner of someone older. As well as his interest in “second acts”, he’s a well-regarded literary critic with a popular Substack blog, The Common Reader.
Second Act is a celebration of late bloomers and draws on many of them, from Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham to Julia Child, who began her foray into fine cuisine at age 37, painters, writers, sportspeople, entrepreneurs and people you’ve probably never heard of who either found a calling later in life or became more notable for it.
His quest was to find out what makes a late bloomer earned Oliver a research grant from a US university. Books and research he’d looked at didn’t properly answer the question. Through his interest in biography, he was intrigued about late bloomers and wanted to know why they find their spark later; people like Margaret Thatcher, who had supported her husband’s business career and was underrated as a politician until she became British prime minister aged 54; Penelope Fitzgerald, who was 62 when she published her first novel and kept writing and publishing until her death.
Oliver’s book covers the mechanics of late blooming. “What are the hundred little things that have to go off, like bits of an engine, for you to then turn into a prime minister or a novelist or something?’’ he says as our Zoom call crackles.
A “late bloomer’' is not pinned to an age – a sportsperson might be a late bloomer in their 20s, a writer or artist in their 60s. “It is someone who succeeds after the point when no one expects them to,’’ he says.
Age is irrelevant
Oliver pushes his spectacles further up his nose, explaining that his motivation for writing the book is to overthrow the idea that if we’re going to achieve anything, we’d better do it while we’re young. Instead, we can reinvent ourselves at any age. Late bloomers have lessons for people who feel frustrated, like they’ve left a dream too late to give something a go, he says.
His well-researched theory is that late bloomers share some common characteristics. They usually follow an unplanned career path. Their progress is “often punctuated and disrupted, not smooth and steady”.
Often, they have what he labels an “explore phase”, which, to outsiders, might seem like they’re being slack or dormant, but they’re just waiting for their moment. As he writes in Second Act: “Then, they get the opportunity for success through some combination of the right people, the right place and the right time. Their network, the culture they move to, a personal transformation – or some combination of these – take the disparate experiences of the first stage and turn them into the focused output of the second stage. They make the switch from explore to exploit and enter a hot streak. They just happen to do it later than their peers.”
An intense period of achievement can last for decades. But borrowing his ideas from computer science and studies of successful people, he notes that the crucial moment is the switch from exploring to exploiting. “Too much exploration can be risky: you end up as a dabbler, a dilettante. Too much exploitation can be boring: you don’t discover enough new information to do interesting, original work.”
Late bloomers are often persistent and dogged about their pursuit. There can be a single crisis or pivotal moment which is transformative, setting them off in a new direction.
He shares the story of Audrey Sutherland, who was working as a school counsellor when she looked down from an airplane window, saw the Hawai’ian island of Moloka’i, and resolved to swim around it. A sole parent, her divorce was a transitional moment when she shifted her family to Hawai’i – her next life chapter was pursuing solo journeys as a kayaker and author. In 2001, aged 80, she took a kayaking trip along the Vézère River in France; the next year she paddled 104km in Alaska.
Often late bloomers have a latent calling, when their circumstances change to realise their dream. Oliver cites the example of celebrated American folk artist Anna Mary “Grandma” Moses, who had a difficult, demanding life and was working on her farm in her 70s when a dealer discovered her painting.
Frank Lloyd Wright was a lauded architect but, in midlife, battled financial and personal problems. He turned this crisis around, refused to quit and made some of his best work afterwards.
But once you find your passion at whatever age, you need to work at it. Late bloomers often have a narrow and deep focus. They tend to be specialists rather than generalists.
“Late bloomers don’t always have a specific goal, but they do have a vocation or sense of calling.’’
Finding his calling
Oliver has all the characteristics of the late bloomers he writes about. Over a decade, his career meandered as he tried to find his calling. He got an English degree, studied law for a year, graduated with a master’s in biography, worked in a shop, was a teaching assistant for 8-year-olds, blogged for a law firm, worked for an MP, and then got into the research role at the recruitment agency.
At 35, he quit that job. “I was so bored, I thought my head would roll off. I thought, ‘If I die at 70, then that’s my halfway point.’”
He also has a strong sense of his own mortality. For someone still in their 30s, this seems surprising until he talks about his penchant for poetry. He devoured Keats in his teens, spouting poems as a way of dealing with teenage angst. He then had a Wordsworth phase. Our interview is peppered with quotes from poems.
Talking on his blog about his motivation for quitting to write his book, he quotes 16th-century philosopher Montaigne: “Everybody goes out as though he had just come in.” The best way not to get caught out by your death is to act like it’s closer than you think it is.
There was also another motivator for throwing in the dull job. In his early 30s, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. His case was easily cured, but it was still cancer. When his oncologist told him it might change his life or his perspective, he shrugged that he already knew life was short. “There’s a wonderful quote from Montaigne: Sometimes it is the body that dies first, sometimes it is the soul. And we all know people like that, right?’’
In this context, his book is a call for action. He writes: “Our time is not guaranteed to be well spent. How many people are lost to weariness, laziness, mental decline, exhaustion, redundancy? Every year, we delay some part of living. As we get older, each year is a bigger part of what we have left. But we don’t value our years differently enough. People plod through jobs and lives they do not want. Do they not know what fraction of themselves they are letting go? Is it as simple as not being able to think of an alternative?’’
Oliver’s book comes at a time when, as he says, “we are living in the age of the late bloomer”.
He points to the Oscars, when Jamie Lee Curtis was named best supporting actress last year aged 64. Jerry Seinfeld, 70, is making a movie. At 81, Joe Biden is the oldest sitting president in US history and Donald Trump is a political force at 78. Keir Starmer was elected British prime minister at 61. Here, Winston Peters is deputy prime minister at 79. And Elizabeth McCombs was a late bloomer when she became our first woman MP in 1933 aged 59, when she won the Lyttelton seat in a byelection.
Some of our most notable writers and artists have achieved more in their second halves: Patricia Grace was 49 when she was able to quit her teaching job and write full-time; Renée, the late writer and playwright, was in her 50s when she began writing, and penned her last book the year before her death aged 94; Bill Hammond, one of the country’s most influential contemporary artists, only began to gain recognition in his late 40s.
Juggling priorities
One theme touched on only lightly in Oliver’s book – which seems especially relevant to his theory – is that women are often consumed with running a household and caring for children (alongside a day job), so their second act comes only when caring responsibilities diminish and they have time to consider what they really want to do.
And although people are achieving success and recognition in midlife and their senior years in ways not seen before, Oliver’s gripe is that this is really happening only in the cultural and political spheres: workplaces are not catching up and employers and recruiters are still writing off talented people from their mid-50s onwards. “They’re still looking at people who are applying for jobs and saying, ‘No thanks, we’ll take the younger one.’”
Finding a vocation often involves learning from failure. He thinks many of us get stuck in what is known as the competency trap. He points to me – I’ve been a journalist for 30 years, I’ve mastered my craft, so I might fear trying something new. “I think one important thing is a moment of realising that you love something. And we can get that through sampling. Trying something out to see if you like it.’’
You’ve got to be motivated and prepared to put in the work, too.
For those who tell him they’ve left something too late, he shakes his head in frustration. “I don’t want to hear, ‘I’m in my 50s; I’ve left it too late’. What I want to hear is, ‘Life is short, let’s try.’
“So, every reader will either be a late bloomer or a potential late bloomer. They will know someone who could be a late bloomer, or they’ll have some kind of management recruitment responsibility. If I could just pick that person up and drop them over there, what might happen to them?’’
Late blooming can also be more low key. “Late blooming does not have to mean a whole new career or achieving some greatness. Maybe it does, or it might be that you’ll take French lessons, or you’ll start playing a musical instrument you haven’t played since school, or you’ll finally read War and Peace.”
Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life, by Henry Oliver (Hachette, $65 HB) is available now.