I'm 52. My life was a total mess, and I'm talking messed up relationships with my family, smoking like a chimney, debts, drinking and more . I cannot agree more that it is not the destination that gets you out of it, it's the courage to start the journey. Once you face the realities, deeply own them, and then genuinely change your day-to-day behaviour, things miraculously start happening even before you've cleared out all the problems. IE: your point about someone showing genuine honesty and courage in trying to get a grip on their lives. People really respond to that.
Personally, I'm lucky that throughout the above, I did keep up on technology. But another discipline I had to learn was not to give into my natural curiosity to try to learn everything that was interesting to me (Ocaml, Vulkan, Elixir, Yggdrasil Network, Rust, IOT, Matrix Protocol, Blender etc etc etc) all at the same time, but to stick to one or two and really persevere on them (I chose Rust). IE stop dreaming and giving in to curiosity, and learn one or two hard skills really well. T-shaped skills basically. No reason not to stay curious - helps you decide on the next vertical bar in the T. But don't waste too much time on breadth - also focus on depth so that at your later age, you'll still feel high confidence in yourself in this area even against the younger guns.
> IE stop dreaming and giving in to curiosity, and learn one or two hard skills really well. T-shaped skills basically. No reason not to stay curious - helps you decide on the next vertical bar in the T. But don't waste too much time on breadth - also focus on depth so that at your later age, you'll still feel high confidence in yourself in this area even against the younger guns.
This is exactly it. Finding something on which you can speak with authority is extremely valuable. Every third graduate coming out of university has been taught to sound confident from day 1. You can provide substance.
Personally, I'm lucky that throughout the above, I did keep up on technology. But another discipline I had to learn was not to give into my natural curiosity to try to learn everything that was interesting to me (Ocaml, Vulkan, Elixir, Yggdrasil Network, Rust, IOT, Matrix Protocol, Blender etc etc etc) all at the same time, but to stick to one or two and really persevere on them (I chose Rust). IE stop dreaming and giving in to curiosity, and learn one or two hard skills really well. T-shaped skills basically. No reason not to stay curious - helps you decide on the next vertical bar in the T. But don't waste too much time on breadth - also focus on depth so that at your later age, you'll still feel high confidence in yourself in this area even against the younger guns.