Great contributions can be made late in one's career, regardless of what came before.
I often draw inspiration from the life of Abraham Lincoln, whose eventual success, both personal and societal, would have been hard to predict given his many business failures and electoral defeats. Like many of us today, he also had what now would be labeled depression, for him long periods of seriously questioning whether he could even go on.
Lincoln wrote his first extended statement on slavery 20 years before he became president. Yet, as Joshua Wolf Shenk writes, "at the time, Lincoln articulated no political point of view. His mind was elsewhere, trying to construct, from the throes of difficulty and uncertainty, a way of understanding ... who he was, where he was going in the world, and, indeed, whether he could survive."
"Yet this self-centered concern with his own suffering led him, slowly, to see and grapple with the suffering around him."
Lincoln had to find something great enough to live for.
Looking back from the very different world in which we live, can we imagine just how "out there," how utterly inconceivable, the end of slavery was? If that utopian, foolhardy, and naive aspiration was in fact possible, dare I ask what might be achievable today if not dismissed out of hand? Perhaps even the abolition of war? (Did I actually say that out loud?)
Today, individuals have more time to dedicate themselves to such honorable ambitions. You probably know that you're likely to live much longer than your great-grandparents did. Indeed, during the past century, life expectancy in the developed world has increased by 30 years. In effect, we've received the gift of an additional adult lifetime. I've known that for quite a while now and I'm still trying to fathom it.
All around us, people who focused the first half of their adulthood tending to business and family commitments are using the second half to invest themselves in society. A decade ago, I remember hearing that Bill Gates thought the jobs Microsoft created and the economic benefits of software development were sufficient contribution to the world. Agreed, that has been a contribution of historic proportion. Now, as this chapter was being written, the 50-year-old Gates announced he'd do even more and would be turning his main attention from Microsoft to his charitable foundation. Soon after, his friend Warren Buffet, some 25 years his senior, entrusted Gates' foundation with the largest philanthropic investment in history.
For you and me, as our lives become longer, a second calling becomes increasingly possible, indeed desirable--for both self and society.
Those who've taken on such roles (whether before retiring or after) have told us, in countless interviews, that their work in the social sector and civic arena has been even more important to them than the careers and businesses they spent decades building.
That may come as little surprise. After all, our investments in society may be the most significant expressions of who we are, what we stand for, and our hopes for the future. Through those commitments, we connect ourselves to humanity. We connect our generation with those yet to come.
Russell Simmons, the hip-hop producer we met earlier, says he'd rather be remembered as a philanthropist. "When I die, I hope they put that on my tombstone."