Big Swings in Mid Life: 12 Examples and What They Share

The phrase big swings in mid life does a lot of work in self-improvement writing, and most of the work it does is sloppy. The category lumps together two structurally different actions: a late-bloomer story, which is mostly about long accumulation made visible, and a real pivot, which involves walking away from one trajectory toward another with no guarantee. The famous people who fill late bloomer examples listicles and mid-life reinvention examples roundups are almost always a blend of the two, and the blend is what makes them worth studying.

A big swing is not the same thing as a late-bloomer story

A late bloomer accumulates skill, often for decades, and then becomes publicly visible. Toni Morrison wrote The Bluest Eye while working as an editor at Random House in New York. The novel arrived in 1970, the editing work had been going on since 1967, and the writing in private had been going on longer than that. Anna Mary Robertson Moses, known as Grandma Moses, had been making embroidery pictures for years before arthritis forced her to switch to paint in her seventies. The painting was a transposition of existing skill, not a beginning from zero.

A big swing in mid life, by contrast, has a discontinuity at its center. The person walks away from one accumulated trajectory and toward another. The new trajectory does not yet contain them. Most famous mid-life pivots are some mix of both kinds of action, and the mix is what differentiates them.

Career pivots: three people who walked away from one trade for another

Julia Child spent the war years doing clerical work in Ceylon and China for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime intelligence agency that later became the CIA. She did not attend Le Cordon Bleu in Paris until after the war, and Mastering the Art of French Cooking did not appear until 1961, by which point she was in her late forties. The cooking career was a real second act, with no clear continuation from anything she had done before (Britannica).

Vera Wang competed in pairs figure skating through her teens, missed qualifying for the 1968 Olympic team, and entered fashion through Vogue, where she worked for sixteen years. She left Vogue in 1987 and spent a stretch at Ralph Lauren. She did not open her own bridal-couture business until 1990, at roughly forty. The skating did not lead to the editing. The editing did not obviously lead to bridal design. The third career has lasted longer than either of the first two (Britannica).

Ray Kroc sold paper cups and then, for years, a single product called the Multimixer, a milkshake blender that ran five drinks at once. He noticed that one of his customers, a small hamburger stand in San Bernardino, was ordering an unusual number of Multimixers. On April 15, 1955, at age 52, he opened the first franchised McDonald's in Des Plaines, Illinois. The franchise was a salesman's idea, executed by a salesman who had been preparing for it for thirty years without knowing it (Britannica).

Athletic late starts: bodies in places the sport's demographics did not expect

Diana Nyad swam from Cuba to Florida on September 2, 2013, at age 64. The swim took 52 hours, 54 minutes, and 18 seconds. It was her fifth attempt. The first had been in 1978 at age 28, behind a shark cage, and had been aborted by rough seas. The thirty-five years between the first and last attempts contain four full failures, with causes ranging from jellyfish stings to asthma to a lightning storm (Britannica).

Sister Madonna Buder, known as the Iron Nun, took up competitive running in her late forties and finished her first full Ironman triathlon in her mid-fifties. She continued completing Ironman events into her early eighties and is one of the most-cited famous late starters in endurance sports. The body of accomplishment is documented in the records of the events she finished, which she added to year over year long after the demographic median for the sport had passed her by.

Fauja Singh began marathon running in his late eighties, after the deaths of his wife and son in India, and ran the London Marathon for the first time in 2000. Guinness declined to certify him as the world's oldest marathon finisher only on documentation grounds. Birth certificates were not commonly issued in pre-independence rural India, so the recorded age has been challenged on paperwork rather than on whether the man finished the races. He ran his last competitive marathon in 2013.

Creative second acts: voices that arrived after long silence

Toni Morrison published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970, at age 39. She was a senior editor at Random House in New York at the time, having joined the company in 1967 as the first female African American editor in its history. She continued editing for more than a decade after the novel appeared. The swing was visible in 1970. The runway underneath it included the editing work, the prior teaching, and a lifetime of reading (Britannica).

Frank McCourt taught New York public-school English for twenty-seven years, the last sixteen at Stuyvesant. He retired from teaching in 1988. Angela's Ashes, his memoir of an Irish childhood, appeared in 1996, when he was 66, and won a Pulitzer Prize the following year. The book was not written in retirement out of nothing. The stories had been told in classrooms and at parties for decades before they reached the page (Britannica).

Anna Mary Robertson Moses, known as Grandma Moses, switched from embroidery to paint in her seventies after arthritis made needlework painful. Three of her paintings hung in a 1939 group show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her first solo exhibition opened at Galerie St. Etienne in October 1940, when she was 80. She painted into her late nineties (Britannica).

Harland Sanders sold pressure-cooked chicken from a Corbin, Kentucky service-station restaurant for years before franchising the recipe in his mid-sixties under the Kentucky Fried Chicken name. Charles Bukowski quit a long Los Angeles post-office job at 49 and published his first novel, Post Office, in 1971 at 51. Laura Ingalls Wilder published Little House in the Big Woods in 1932, at 65, after years of writing newspaper columns about farm life.

The pattern across all twelve, and what the listicle genre gets wrong

The second act career change is almost never a leap from zero. Eleven of the twelve people above had been working in or alongside the new field for at least a decade before the public breakthrough. Julia Child was cooking before she enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu. Toni Morrison was editing literature before she wrote any. Ray Kroc was selling to restaurants for thirty years before he opened one. The swing was visible. The runway underneath the swing was not.

The cases where the pivot was driven mostly by unhappiness with the prior trade do worse, in the historical record, than the cases where the prior trade had stopped fitting the person. Quitting because the work is hated tends to produce flat results. Quitting because the work no longer maps onto who the person has become tends to produce the documented late careers. The intent is part of the structure, separate from the surface action.

The reader who wants to take a big swing in mid life of their own can start by listing what they have been doing in the margins for ten years rather than what dramatic field they could enter from zero. The first list usually contains the swing. The second list is a daydream. Of the mid-life pivot stories and people who changed careers at 40 50 60 that have lasted, almost all began with the first kind of inventory.