LATE BLOOMERS
Growth takes time. Often it is slow. Some plants and trees take longer to grow and bloom. The saguaro cactus is the slowest growing plant in the world. It only grows one inch each year. The slowest growing tree is the cedar tree, which takes 150 years to grow four inches.
Every living thing has it’s own time and pace. Even you.You may be a late bloomer in some area of your life. You may be 55, 65 or 75 and IT’S NEVER TOO LATE!
A late blooming adult is a person who does not discover histalents and abilities until later than normally expected. In certain cases retirement may lead to this discovery. Discovery or re-discovery is the key.
Examples
Harlan David Sanders’work experience included farmer, steam boat pilot, and insurance salesman. At age 40, he opened a service station and started selling chicken dinners to his customers. It took him years to perfect the pressure frying method of cooking chicken. From there, he opened his own popular restaurant. He eventually closed the restaurant because an interstate highway affected the business.
Sanders started a new business at the age of 65. “Colonel” Sanders went on to become a multimillionaire.
Anna Mary Robertson Moses lived on a farm. She raised her family and, was a happy, long-time embroiderer until arthritis made that painful and difficult. She started painting at age 75.
In the late 1940‘s her first paintings sold for $2 or $3 depending on the size. The painting “Sugaring Off” (1943) in 2006 sold for $1.2 million.
“Grandma” Moses lived to be 101.
Nell Painter at 64 retired as professor emeritus of American history at Princeton University. She decided to go to art school. She started with a bachelor’s degree and finished with a Masters in fine arts.
At 77, she is now a real-life, income-producing professional artist. Her book “Old in Art School” is a memoir about going to art school with students a third her age, and how art school changed her view of what she thought she already knew.
It Starts With Awareness & Access
Way back in 1987, a Christian friend from Taiwan told me. “You are big vessel, late success.” That was his translation of a Chinese saying. I liked being a big vessel. I hated the late success part.
Some gifts take time to develop. Success in the conventional sense of wealth, rewards, and fame may not be the result. What matters is the discovery of your gifts and toshare them.
When I first took the Clifton Strengths Finder it gave me awareness and access to my top talents or success patterns. My way of thinking, feeling, & behaving that was natural & easy for me. The feeling “I love doing this!” “I want to do this again & again!”
Once I discovered these patterns and a way to develop them, I never looked back. Through deliberate practice, training, & coaching I have clarity, certainty, & confidence. The main expression & contribution of my gifts is through coaching & writing.
Your Staring Point – Discovery
People may say “You do that so well. How do you do that?” It is easy & obvious to you & amazing to them.
ACTION TODAY: Consider what comes easy and natural for you? Write down experiences where you have been in the zone, the flow.
ACTION TOMORROW: Continue to review past or current experiences when you were at your brilliant best.
ACTION THIS WEEK: Pay attention to what you are doing and ask, “is this fulfilling or frustrating. If frustrating, how can you eliminate it or delegate it? If fulfilling how can you do more of it?”
For everything there is a season
and a time for every purpose under heaven.
Ecclesiates3:1
Harlan David Sanders was a failure who got fired from a dozen jobs before starting his restaurant, and then failed at that when he went out of business and found himself broke at the age of 65. In his early years, he drove around in a Cadillac with his face painted on the side before anybody knew who he was, pleading with the owners of run-down diners to use his recipe and give him a nickel commission on each chicken. He slept in the back of the car and made handshake deals. His first marriage was a difficult one, so he divorced his wife after 39 years.
He was 65 years old when he started Kentucky Fried Chicken. In his youth, Sanders worked many different jobs from farming to steamboat pilot, to insurance salesman. When he turned 40 years old, he started a service station and sold chicken dinners to his patrons. Over a number of years developing the way he pressure-fried the chicken. As the demand for his special chicken grew, he opened a restaurant. As fate would have it, a major interstate was built, which diverted traffic away from the road his restaurant was on. So, at age 65, the restaurant was bankrupt. Now retired from his jobs, he cashed his first ever Social Security check and Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) was born. He was so confident in his ability to fry chicken that he used the last money he had in the world and invested it in his restaurant. Less than 10 years later, Sanders had more than 600 Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises in the U.S. and Canada.
Today, more than 12 million people eat at KFC each day in 109 countries. There are more than more than 20,000 restaurants locations worldwide. His face continues adorning buckets of chicken.
Anna Mary Robertson Moses, one of the most celebrated name in American fine arts and folk arts, and she didn’t even pick up a brush until she was well into her late seventh decade.
Grandma Moses was originally a big fan of embroidery, but once her arthritis grew too painful for her to hold a needle, she decided to give painting a try in the mid-1930s.
She was 76 when she cranked out her first canvas, and she lived another 25 years as a painter. Her works have been shown and sold in the United States and abroad and have been marketed on greeting cards and other merchandise. Moses’ paintings are among the collections of many museums. The Sugaring Off was sold for US$1.2 million in 2006.
Julia Child was 49 years old when her 1st cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking, was published. At 51 years old she gained television fame cooking show, which premiered in 1963. At the age of 69, she became co-founder of the American Institute of Wine and Food to help advance the knowledge of food and wine through restaurants. In 1984, at the age of 72, she completed the series of 6 videotapes about “The Way to Cook”. By the end of 1965, The French Chef was carried by 96 PBS stations. Sales of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”were picking up speed — 200,000 copies sold. In 1966, she won an Emmy. Time put her on the cover in a feature article on American food — “Everyone’s in the Kitchen.”