Why 38 is the best age to launch yourself

How strange would it have been 20 years ago to learn that on my 38th birthday the thing in my life I would be most excited about (and would share with all my family and friends when they called to wish me a Happy Birthday) would be launching a blog with help from an online “build a blog” bootcamp? Had fortune teller shared his prediction with me, I first would have probably asked, “What in the world is a blog?” Then I likely would have remarked about how that sounds kind of sad that this would be the most exciting thing in my life at this age! Well, the good news is that on my 38th birthday in 2019, I’m not sad that this is in fact my truth. Actually, I feel more excitement and energy about this new blogging endeavor than I have felt about a hobby, side hustle or creative undertaking in quite some time! The more exposure I have to other bloggers and with the abundance of tools and resources I’m acquiring through the 5 day “Build a Blog Bootcamp” by Elite Blogging Academy , the more inspired I am to keep following this path. It’s been like a chain reaction, where excitement leads to action and brainstorming, and the more ideas I have, my confidence soars and I can conceptualize what I know to be the potential I’m capable of reaching in this realm of creativity and business. It’s super exciting, to say the least!

Using loss to spark change

About a month ago, I lost a close family member, the second death in a year and a half. My 25 year old cousin died unexpectedly in an extreme skiing accident in October, 2017. Then just 15 months later, my uncle (his father and my mother’s closest brother) died at 64 after nearly a year long battle with cancer. The first loss devastated my family and the second one just felt like the icing on a cake made of garbage and tears. We are not a religious bunch, and I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason (in fact I detest that saying). Each time someone passes, especially the older I get, the more I find myself contemplating the meaning of life and how each person’s contributions can have such a ripple effect, for better or for worse. I mourn each person we lose, thinking about they stood for, the footprint and legacy they leave behind, and how I can live my life in a better way as a tribute to them with their spirits and memories alive as part of me. In an effort to get this post published and not to journal about my life for as many paragraphs as the age I just turned, I’ll try to cut to the chase of how this relates to blogging. In a nutshell, losing my cousin Caleb, who was full of life, and who lived and loved and skied and hiked and climbed and did everything with an extreme passion, helped me to renew an energy within myself. It prompted me to to get off my ass and work towards trying to live life the way he did. Or to find my version of that anyway and fo after it. In his 25 years, he embodied the kind of excitement many people lose in childhood and never get back. I started downhill skiing and I traveled out west to explore and ski in a new part of the country. I left a job I didn’t really like to take a risk and to go after finding where my passions lie, hoping I would connect with my interests and innate skills in a different line of work. I quit drinking, and in the process of all of this found myself in some pretty emotionally uncomfortable places. It has been my experience in the past, and is proving to be true again, that these kinds of stuggles are necessary to find clarity and to come out on the other side with a vision of what I want from my life. Losing my uncle a month ago reinforced that life doesn’t last forever and we never know when our time is up. We simply do not have enough time to be wasting years being miserable, which I am certainly guilty of! I’ve known for years now that I’m someone who needs a pretty specific set of work values to be satisfied with my career (here’s a great article about how clarifying your work values leads to job satisfaction by the way! And if that isn’t enough of a Princess and the Pea scenario, I believe I am one who needs to feel proud and excited by their career and daily work to feel comfort and ease in pretty much all other areas of life! Time and time again I have tried to prove this formula wrong, but the results are always the same. It’s a hamster wheel like no other, that after years of riding like a ferris wheel, I’m ready to get off.

If nothing else, an idea is a start

It is here that we arrive to one of my great big ideas of the last couple years for a bold career pivot move. One from which I can imagine and even taste a sense of fulfillment. This great plan is create an app that would help me organize and then implement all my life goals, dreams, ideas and everything else I find meaningful and interesting enough to save in an electronic space. Places I want to visit, subjects I want to study, wellness retreats, career ideas to pursue, and it goes on and on. And once I am able to do this for my own use, how could the masses not want such a perfect tool to organize their lives too? Devolving from the dreams of such a comprehensive tool into the reality that this app would have to be big enough to make money brings me to further develop the idea. It seems to potentially turn such an endavor into a career, this app would not only have to appeal to the mainstream population, but would be developed and marketed to commercial clients. Companies and employers would see it as crucial tool needed for their workforce to maintain exceptional physical, emotional and spiritual health, as well as a work-life balance that employers couldn’t afford to lose. All packaged up in a nice commercial package and sold as a component of employee benefits packages.

A little guidance can go a long way

The day after my uncle passed away, I was sitting with my surviving cousin, a millenial who has found great success working in tech and who is by my standards, an instagram celebrity. Normally I probably wouldn’t bother sharing such an undeveloped and lofty idea as this organization app with someone who like my cousin, has a high level expertise in this area and keeps the company of ivy leaguers and children of Fortune 500 CEOs. Given the circumstances the sadness and unpredictability filling the air, however this seemed like just the perfecct time, one in which I felt like I had nothing to lose in exposing myself and my undeveloped get-rich-quick scheme. So in an effort to fill the silence, I brought it up. From Arlin and from this discussion, I surprisingly (but not really surprisingly) aquired some amazing advice. He advised me to think about what I want to accomplish by creating this app, to illustrate with what method it will function and to develop these ideas in a public forum, i.e. blogging. He explained all the logistics, such as how blogs work and which websites are used in this industry, fueling the fire within me to get going. A few days later, I set up a WordPress.com site and created my first post the last week of January. While nothing much followed this initial post, it got the ball rolling and opened my eyes and ears to the idea of blogging. Incidentally, an email from Faith Mariah and her blog Radical Transformation Project., came to my attention and and presented the Build Your Blog Bootcamp in such a light which wouldn’t allow me to look away. Which brings me to the punchline, which is, you’re never too old to start something new or to reinvent yourself in your career, personal life or in whichever direction your mind. body, soul and/or spirit feel called. Thirty-eight is a good an age as any to begin a blog and to work towards revolutionizing my role in this life to honor the light within myself and within others.