What Highly-Successful People Did When They Were Younger

Lately, it seems like my LinkedIn has been filled with my peers being promoted. New titles involving superior terms like ‘Senior’ and ‘Manager’ keep popping up.

I’m happy for them, but I feel like I’m behind. And sometimes, when I’m feeling really hopeless, I search ‘what successful people were doing in their 20s’.

I’ve come to know a lot of these stories, like Oprah getting fired at 25 or J.K. Rowling battling poverty and divorce before she published Harry Potter at 32.

But I need constant reassurance that there’s still time, like the cliché ‘it’s a marathon and not a sprint.’

But I realized this week, I have to update my search term. 25 is the most popular age in which these lists are compiled around and my 28th birthday just three months away means I’m no longer in my mid-20s. Fack.

So, I’ve raised the bar to 30. New stories about Liam Neeson, Bob Ross and Morgan Freeman have given me a wider berth.

However, since I’ve moved the goal post, I’m starting to worry about what that means for right now, the ‘before’ period.

Was Martha Stewart happy as a stockbroker in the four decades before she wrote her first cookbook? Was Alan Rickman content with his graphic design career?

It’s almost like we’re erasing the time before ‘they made it.’ Decades of their life categorized as ‘before,’ knocked down in relevancy. But that can’t be what life was…it was their whole world, their reality with no idea what was to come.

I don’t want to spend decades of my life waiting, miserable as I try to work towards a vague goal. I’m frustrated and while that can motivate me, I also have to find a way to enjoy the present. I don’t know how to do that yet so maybe I’ll start with Julia Child’s advice (a later-in-life success story).

‘With enough butter, anything is good.’