Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello everyone. Welcome to the 219th episode of the Atlas Society asks. My name is Jennifer ondyugrosman. My friends call me Jag. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society. We are the leading nonprofit organization leveraging art to introduce people to the ideas of Ayn Rand in creative ways, including AI, animated book trailers, graphic novels, even music videos. Today we are joined by Henry Oliver over from the UK. Before I even begin to introduce our guest, I want to remind all of you, whether you are watching us on Instagram, Twitter, x, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube. Use the comment section to type in your questions. We will get to as many of them as we can. So our guest, Henry Oliver, is the author of second act what late bloomers can tell you about reinventing your life, which encourages people to think about themselves as potential late bloomers and realize that it's never too late to discover their hidden talents and accomplish their goals. In addition to his substack, the Common reader, Oliver writes regularly for outlets like the New Statesman, the critic, and unheard. Henry, thanks for joining us.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: Hello. I'm so glad to be here.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: So I was drawn to your book in part because of the example set by my grandmother, who never finished high school. After having children and getting divorced in the 1950s, she decided to study interior design and hang out a shingle and went on to achieve great professional success. And then after that, she went on to pursue painting and sculpture well into her nineties. And her late blooming attitude showed up. I remember when my father remarked, after I had had this career in politics, he was surprised that in my forties, I ended up at Dole Food company. And my grandmother's reaction, oh, it's still early days for JAG, but my experience after I left Dole, going back out onto the job market was not the same. It was pretty rough trying to find a job in one's forties.
And I understand that you worked on the opposite side of that kind of job market exchange. Tell us a little bit about your experience as a research and marketing guy for companies looking to hire talent and how that might have planted the seeds of that helped you eventually bloom into this book.
[00:02:47] Speaker B: Well, let me just first say that's a wonderful story about your grandmother. And I love stories like that. And I think they used to be so important in our culture, and we've become very obsessed with is there data for that? Is there a study for that? But a story like that's really important, right? Really powerful.
I worked as a researcher in a yemenite advertising agency, essentially, but we didn't sell chocolate or shoes. We sold jobs for large corporations. So anyone here who's applied for a job at a big company will have gone onto a career site, been sent information about why it's a good place to work if you've done graduate schemes, anything like that. And I was the one where clients would say, where are all the people we can hire? We need some good people. And I was saying, well, look at this labor market data. It's the over fifties. You know, this is a really big group now. And they just weren't interested. And I was looking at other things, like the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald. I had a longstanding interest in Margaret Thatcher, and I started to realize that there's this group of people who we don't pay enough attention to.
And so it began as a sort of a way of dealing with my frustration that my corporate clients weren't interested in this talent pool, but it became a much bigger idea.
[00:04:07] Speaker A: Well, that is absolutely fantastic. You mentioned Margaret Thatcher, and we are a big fan base for her here at the Atlas Society. One of the delights of reading late Bloomer second act is the way in which you delve into the biographies of people like Margaret Thatcher, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ray Kroc, and to find commonalities of experience and personality. And one commonality I found fascinating was this idea of inefficient preparation. Would you explain what that is and perhaps provide some examples from the lives of late bloomers?
[00:04:51] Speaker B: So we have this idea that there's a career path, and you need to pick a career path, and you will make progress on the path, and just all of these ways of thinking that mean that there's a kind of efficient way of doing it. And if you, if you do really well, you'll go to a firm or a corporation or something, and you go up, you know, one rung every year or something. And if you kind of have, have this sort of career I did, where you do several different things and they're not really connected. And people say, well, what are you trying to do? You know, what's going on? They can't see what the path is.
And so it looks very inefficient.
It looks like, you know, you're meandering or bumbling about. Yeah, right. Which, I mean, I certainly was, and a lot of other people do. And what I was trying to show is that's a good thing. That's, that's one particular way of managing a career. It's not just, I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm bouncing around. It's a means of learning deeply, coordinating lots of different interests and trying to pull together different sorts of things.
You might think of it as saying a generalist is just another sort of specialist, right? It's a specialist in a particularly sort of odd bundle of things. And so in the book, what I try and do is talk about people who, you know, there are musicians, comedians, all sorts of people like that who they're not climbing the ladder, they're not making this smooth progress. I mean, you know, think of Calvin Coolidge. Right. To my mind, one of the more impressive american presidents, certainly one of the more interesting. He doesn't have one of these careers where he kind of shoots up into political fame. It's a bit more uneven and a bit more sort of up a bit, down a bit, sideways a bit. It's not very efficient. And he was given this wonderful advice by a tutor when he was at college who said, look, don't worry about, oh, I'm graduating into recession, there's no jobs or whatever. What you need to worry about is, are you in the swim of things, right? Are you keeping yourself prepared? Are you doing the best that you can do in this job now, rather than constantly looking to the next job? And if you are, this thing about being in the swim, the tide will turn, events will happen and you'll be able to take advantage of that. And I think that's the basic idea. And it seems to work really well for a lot of people and we should, I think, talk more positively about how it can work in those terms.
[00:07:30] Speaker A: Well, that really resonated with me up to about eight years ago, I'll admit feeling a bit disappointed in what seemed to me a very disjointed career. Speech writing, editing, video production, marketing, public policy.
Then, when a friend of mine from years ago put forward my name to run the Atlas Society, the seeming randomness of my previous experience made sense. Having played, if you will, many different instruments in the orchestra, I was better prepared to conduct it. But none of that would have happened without that connection. So what is the role of networks in the evolution of a late bloomer? And what can younger people in our audience do today to help build those valuable networks for the future?
[00:08:32] Speaker B: Right. I think this is such an important question.
Networks are one of the main ways that late bloomers get their break. And that makes sense, right? Because if you've made it to a certain point in your life and things haven't come together yet, you're going to have to find some less obvious, less sort of advertised route. And so the network is key.
We think of networks as being a game of connections.
If anyone. If anyone. Obviously everyone's read the tipping point by Malcolm Gladwell, where he came up with this concept of connectors. People who know loads and loads of people, they know far more people than the rest of us. It sounds exhausting. And these are the people who can always recommend somewhere for dinner, always recommend, oh, I know someone who can help you with that. Right. And we think that's what networking is.
And this kind of comes from older research about how everyone's got six degrees of separation, right? And so you can make your way to anyone else in the world through six degrees of separation. The problem is when they redid the research and they did it by having people send emails rather than send letters, which they've done in the past, most of the emails just didn't get sent on. The six degrees of separation is still true, but you can't get yourself down the line very far. And the problem is that you don't have any influence. You might be able to find some sort of connection, but you can't actually persuade them to do anything for you. And so what you need to think about is not, have I got thousands of connections and know all these people, but who do I know that has a useful influence or a relevant influence that can actually help me? And what that might mean is not trying to find a very important person, someone at the center of a network. It might mean trying to find someone on the edge, someone who doesn't look super important, but who actually can get the ear of someone you want to know or can give you that particularly good advice, or happens to know you in some way. So the way I think about networking now, I got this wonderful advice from a friend of mine. She's been an actress for many years and she says, she said, stop worrying about networking. You just tell everyone you meet what you're doing, and in a way that makes it much more conversational, much more sort of normal thing. I'm not going out networking, but it also means it gives you that sense of you don't know who the important person in your network is, you don't know who's got the influence. So make sure you tell everyone and it'll come about somehow.
[00:11:13] Speaker A: Well, we are seeing a lot of glowing comments here in the various places, platforms where we're online people. Alan Turner fully agree. The career path you work on at one company all your life is gone. People have to jump from job to job in this job market.
So anyway, guys, this is a wonderful opportunity to ask questions. So if you've got questions for our guests, then please go ahead and type those in as well.
You know, in talking about the networks, right. Rather than, what I'm hearing is rather than thinking of it just in a kind of LinkedIn orientation, but also building social capital. And before we went live, we were talking about some of the negative experiences that you had with closed objectivists in the UK and how that was such a turn off. And I think that what we do in the open objectivism here at the Atlas Society is that we emphasize the importance of benevolence and of finding alliances and finding commonalities. People don't have to agree with you on everything. And so I'd say to the young people, you know, building that social capital, building a reputation, earning a reputation for not just integrity, but also, you know, kindness and generosity is a very self interested thing to do in the long run. And plus, it'll make you a lot happier.
So another commonality that stood out in the book among late bloomers was earnestness. And in our current day, with so much cynicism masquerading as sophistication, I imagine that sincere conviction might be unsettling to some and refreshing to others. What are some examples of earnestness in the late bloomers that you profile?
[00:13:24] Speaker B: Yeah, this is a wonderful question, and I wish more people asked it, because I think it's really important.
And so I'm really glad you picked up on that, because one thing that really sort of distinguishes these people is that they don't take what they do lightly and they don't make light of it. It's not that they're not fun or anything, but they take it very seriously. And let me use the example of Margaret Thatcher, because we've mentioned her. Everyone said at the time, oh, she's so irritating. You know, they thought she was so sort of heavy going, and she would tell them off. And there was a lot of sexism tied up with that and a lot of snobbery.
But really, the problem that she faced was that she was very earnest. She really was a huge politics nerd, if you like. And she was reading all these books and interested in all these big questions, and she would want to have serious debates and proper discussions, whereas she was obviously in politics dealing with a lot of people who aren't always like that, to say the least. So this earnestness sometimes gets misinterpreted by the people around the late bloomer. Ray Kroc had the same thing. His friends would joke, oh, Ray's got another business idea. You know, he's always got these ideas and they didn't realize just how seriously he took his own ambitions and his own sort of quest to keep finding, keep finding a way of building up a great business. So this thing about earnestness, I think, is important because everyone is earnest about something, right? Everyone watching or listening to this, they are things in your life that you are very, very earnest about.
And I think that is a great indicator of what people can do and where potential lies. And it links to motivation. And if you are motivated, you'll never be bored, it'll never be a drag.
Motivation solves so many problems. So that's why I think earnestness is really important.
[00:15:34] Speaker A: All right, we've got a couple of questions here on Instagram. Ilyan 16 asks, what are the best networking methods online in person? Any advice for how to build these potentially valuable connections for the future?
[00:15:52] Speaker B: So you obviously need both. And the question is, depending on your personality and what you're doing, what's the appropriate mix and balance?
Some people, I think, benefit a lot from doing stuff in private and for keeping these private passions to themselves. And in that case, you may not want to do so much of your networking online to begin with. You may want to find offline people to, to talk to.
But at some point, the Internet is really, really wonderful for everyone because you can just talk online about what it is you're earnest about and you can find other people who are, who share that interest. Right? And you hear so many stories from people about, they got a job because they had a Twitter account and they just took it seriously and they just posted about, you know, some stuff they were particularly interested in with tech or whatever. So you need that balance.
I think it's very useful. If you've made connections with people online and they seem like you have mutual interests and stuff, it's great to meet those people. Get on Zoom. If you're in the same city, go and actually see them. I think that can be really important.
[00:17:05] Speaker A: I'd say also at the Atlas Society, we try to facilitate that in person networking as well.
We have our Gulch Gulch, which is our student conference next year. We'll be bringing 150 young people from around the country and all over the world. We have generous scholarships to Austin, Texas, in June. Of course, we have our annual gala next year. It'll be in Chicago in the fall, and we even have regional chapters. So if you're in the US and you are in Southern California, for example, or the Atlanta area. Go on our website, reach out to us, and we can put a you in touch with other people, because I think in this increasingly online world, with young people spending up to 9 hours on their screens, do not underestimate the power of making these in person connections and don't lose those skills.
[00:18:05] Speaker B: Oh, sorry. I was going to say that that sounds fantastic because it's one of those, like, it's very low cost. You just have to turn up and chat to people. Right.
And you'll get a lot more out of that. Like, I was at a conference recently and I met a philosopher, and I was. I took the opportunity to talk to him about an idea that I do not want to write about in public because I'm not ready. And he sent me some papers and we had a great chat. And it's just a pure coincidence. And all you're doing is just sitting and having a drink with someone. So I totally agree. I think that's really important.
[00:18:36] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, part of the preparedness is being prepared for serendipity. And when you. There's always something interesting about people. And as a bit of an introvert myself, I need to constantly remind myself of that and, you know, put myself out there, go the extra mile to talk to people and find out what. What they are earnest about. Okay, we have another, I thought, a very compelling question here on LinkedIn from Casey Callum. How does one overcome the fear and stress that can come from realizing one is going to need to reinvent themselves? That's fair, right?
[00:19:22] Speaker B: Oh, that's a huge question. It's more than fair. And I can see other questions in the chat, actually, about balancing the need to reinvent yourself with, like, everyday life. And I think that these questions go together.
And I'm going to answer that. I'm going to answer this point with a story, basically, about a kayaker called Audrey Sutherland, who I think should be much more famous. She wrote two very, very good books, paddling north and paddling my own canoe. They're short, vivid, wonderful, fun to read. I really strongly recommend them. And they're not just sort of kayaking manuals. They're real books about life.
And she did two remarkable things. When she was 40, she looked down from an airplane and saw a piece of hawaiian coastline. She lived in Hawaii. And she just suddenly said, I have to go there now. She had four children. She was a single mother. She had a job. She did not earn a huge amount of money. They lived up near the beach. I think at this time they did have tv, but for a long time, their house couldn't even get tv reception. So she did not have an easy life or a straightforward life where one could just get up and go on an exploration like that. But her kids were a little older, and she had one of the teenagers look after the others. And she went off and did it, and she nearly killed herself.
So she had to think, how am I going to get myself to a position where I can do that kind of coastal exploration? And it obviously took her years, and she had to do training and practice and learn things. And she realized that she was taking on something a bit bigger than she'd anticipated, and then.
So she kept doing it and building it up, and she went back and she did that exploration without killing herself.
And then when she was 60, she had the same experience again. She looked out of a plane window and she said, oh, I really want to go there. But this time it was in the Arctic. It was British Columbia, alaskan coast, and she was 60. So for the first time, she wasn't going to be in the warm waters of Hawaii, but in the very, very cold waters of the Arctic. And she was doing this on her own in an inflatable kayak. And so this question arises of how on earth did she become.
How had she reinvented herself to become a 60 year old woman who was doing solo bear encounters and dealing with cabins where the roof had fallen in and all this sort of stuff?
And she had this answer. She gave this answer. She would give talks and say to people about how to do kayaking and the explorations she'd done. And at the end, she said, okay, I want you all to close your eyes and think about, what is it? If someone gave you $5 million, what is it that you would do? You know, what's your dream, if you like? And this was in the eighties, so you can update the amount of money if you need to.
And she let them sit with it for a minute, and then she said, okay, open your eyes and just tell me, why can't you just do it? Why are you waiting for the money? Why can't you just do it?
And one time this guy stood up and he was very grumpy, and he said, oh, I'll tell you why.
I've got children who want to go to college. I've got a wife. My parents are getting old. I've got bills. I've got a mortgage. He's going on like this.
Now, Audrey Sutherland's the wrong person to say this to, because she's the single mother with four children, right? And she's built this up over years out of nowhere. And she said, look, this is not a question of doing the whole thing tomorrow and reinventing your life, like all in one go, you have to say, what is it that I can do today to get me a little bit closer to my goal? So she would make sure her maps are in good repair and study the terrain and make sure she knows where she's going, or make sure she has enough food in tins or check her rope. If she was driving on the road and she saw someone had thrown out some old rope or some old material or anything, she would stop and go and see, is this good stuff? Can I use this?
She acquired a lot of stuff like that. Repair her equipment, go out to the beach near her house and practice capsizing in the kayak, any little thing. And you build it up with these tiny little things day by day by day. And of course, what that means is, you know approximately what direction you're going in. But you don't have to say, this is the fine detail of the goal, and I'm going to do it all now. You just have to get started and keep doing little things every day that get you there. And the goal emerges from that. Right. What you're trying to do changes and adjusts as you go. And when it's a daily thing that you're trying to do, it's much less intimidating.
You're just trying to do little things every day. You're not trying to do the whole thing all at once. And I think that's a really good answer. Other people have given that answer as well. If any of you know, the pursuit of happiness, the Will Smith film, there's a very, very good book by Chris Gardner, the stockbroker. It's about his life. He said the same thing, basically, and several other people have said it. So that I would say is, is how you, how you deal with this sort of, this question of the bigness and the intimidatingness of reinventing yourself.
[00:24:57] Speaker A: Yes. Well, I remember very early on in my career, I was working for Ariana Huffington. This is when her husband at the time had just gotten elected to Congress, and I was 22 or so and just starting out in my career path. And she said something to me which has stuck with me all these years, which is, you can do anything you want. You just can't do everything all at once. And it also reminds me, I think it was Aristotle who was talking about writing, and he would say a little upon a little adds up to a lot. So I think also keeping a journal is something that people can do.
We have another question here from Alan Morris on Instagram. What are some strategies or habits that are helpful for late bloomers looking for a new path? So we've talked about earnestness. We've talked about inefficient preparation. We've talked about networks. Maybe you can touch on some of the other habits or qualities or even talk about the importance of things like hobbies.
[00:26:16] Speaker B: So I take this question to mean, what should I be a late bloomer in?
And this is a really good question because the book kind of assumes that it's obvious to you, and a lot of people assume it's obvious to you.
I think what happens is we start to confuse worldly success with the thing that you want to do. So to begin with, we have to separate off the question of money, success, anything like that, and just look at the question of, you know, it's a Saturday, you have a couple of free hours. What is it that you really want to do? I don't mean like, you know, leisure stuff so much, but like, what is it that's really motivating you? And this, I'm going to come back to this word motivation because it is so important.
And one of the things I discuss in the book is about people with a musical vocation but who did not have a musical career.
And essentially, the psychologists who looked at this found three things. Some people, the, you know, they play an instrument when they're young and then sometime in college or like early twenties, they run out of spare time and it goes away.
And they don't rediscover that until they kids leave home or they retire.
Some people, they don't even really discover that they have the vocation until later on. And then there's this third really interesting group where they said, okay, I have to get a regular job and mortgage, kids, whatever, whatever. But I can't live without my clarinet or violin or whatever. Somehow in my life I have got to go to my orchestra practice twice a month. You know what I mean? It became just a non compromised situation for them.
So whichever kind of vocation you have, the question is, what is it? What is the equivalent of that view? What is the huge motivator? What is the thing that gnaws at you?
And if you really don't know, then the answer is sampling.
I think we don't talk enough about sampling. It's not a high status thing. I don't know why go to a cookery course, one Saturday afternoon, it's 3 hours. It's not that big a deal. If you have an interest in cooking, this is one way to find out how much more interest you might have. Right.
Something. Something like that. And the more sampling you do, the better, honestly.
And that is kind of the only way to know. And we're very encouraging of young people doing sampling. You should get out, see the world, do work experience, try different things. We're always saying this.
When you're in your forties, no one is saying to you, oh, get out, see the world, try 100 different things. But it's still good advice. It's still the only way to find out whether you'd be better off as a physicist or a ballerina or a pastry chef or whatever. So sampling and motivation are the two words you need to remember for that one, I think.
[00:29:42] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, the other thing that I would say is that to find out what is your default, like, what is it that you would do even if you weren't paid? And sometimes it can not necessarily be like a positive trait. I think of actually a very close friend of mine who has a major prime time spot on a television cable news network. And yeah, I love her dearly, but one of the things that could be little trying about her just to be around her on a day to day level is that she's a complainer, she's a critic, she has snide word for, you know, everyone. And I don't know, it just didn't could rub some people the wrong way, but this is who she was. And rather than trying to fit herself into some other, you know, mold that she was not and be a goodie two shoes, she leaned into it. She leaned into her default mode of being critical. And it's actually helping to, you know, boost her career because now that this is what she does for a living, earning millions and millions of dollars complaining about, you know, this one or that one or politics. So.
So it can be something that you should just think about. What, what is your, what is your passion? What is your default mode? Okay, very. Another relevant question from Guardian Gamer.
Are passion and skill often considered one and the same or mutually exclusive?
[00:31:29] Speaker B: I don't know what other people think about this very much. I don't think they're the same. And I think that's really important.
You could discover that the thing you want to do as a late bloomer is consumption rather than production. Right? You might say, look, I love movies.
I've never taken it like super, super seriously, but I am going to watch all the classic movies. I'm going to become a movie buff. I'm going to subscribe to the magazines. I'm going to go and see things on the big screen in 70 millimeter, whatever. I'm going to take it seriously, and I'm going to see the movies I haven't seen, and I'm going to get that knowledge base. That's a great way to be a late bloomer. One thing I often say is, like, you might sit down and read War and peace, you know, when you retire. What a fantastic thing to do with your life. What an amazing addition to your experiences.
That might be a small wave of late blooming if it's not something you've done before. So now there are ways of, like, being a better reader, being a more informed movie watcher or whatever. But we often think of late blooming as like, I'm going to make something, do something, be something, write something, but it can actually be. I am passionate about.
Use the example of my father Hill walking, and there are some big hills I haven't walked yet. So that's what I'm going to do. I think that's a really good thing.
And a lot of people don't want to become a late bloomer in the way that the people in my book are. They want to see more of the world in ways that excites them and.
[00:33:10] Speaker A: Enjoy and have experiences. You know, another paradox to me is it seems that sometimes when somebody is really smart, you know, going back to this question about passion versus skill and skilled at a lot of things, right. You probably could excel in many different fields. Excel is a speech writer. Excel is a policy analyst, and Excel is a tax accountant. So you're doing well at something, maybe it's your first or your second job, and you keep on getting promoted and you keep on going along in that career path, even though it's not what really motivates you, it's not what really excites you about your life. And so I think at any stage, you don't have to wait till you're 40 or 50 or 60 that you can maybe take a retreat, maybe you go on a camping trip or what have you, and think about, like, am I really doing what, what I want to do and being willing to try something new?
[00:34:18] Speaker B: Yeah. No, I think that's really, I think that's really important. You can, you can discover what you are passionate by, by being good at stuff, but you can also get yourself into a position where you're doing a job and you're good at it, but you don't care enough.
So I think this passion skill dichotomy is very. It's a great question. It's important to keep that in mind.
[00:34:39] Speaker A: So my mother is a geriatric social worker, and she frequently complains that american culture is overly youth focused and that ageism tends to marginalize people who still have a lot to contribute and whom we should value for their experience and the wisdom. And, of course, they're just innate human dignity.
I hope your book will make a difference in changing such attitudes. What might you tell recruiters or I, even investors who reflexively set aside applications or pitch decks from candidates over 40?
[00:35:23] Speaker B: I agree with your mother, and I find it, to me, it's just. It's just. It's difficult to believe because America is the land of the late bloomer, right?
And the way I say this to people is, F. Scott Fitzgerald has that famous quotation, there are no second acts in american lives.
This was published in the year 1941. It's in his book the Last Tycoon, which is not a finished book, but it's very good. And 1941 is the year that Eisenhower's career finally got started.
It's this great irony that one of the greatest second acts in american history was just taking off at the moment that this famous quotation arrived. Eisenhower had had no promotion for 16 years in the army, and he said to his son, oh, you know, they're going to force me to retire. I didn't get very far, but it's okay. I had a good career. And then the second world War hit America, and suddenly he's having this meteoric rise, and he's becoming Dwight Eisenhower. And you see this again and again and again in american life. You have. You have the culture, you have the history, you have the magic in your society that allows for this to happen. You have Vera Wang, you have Malcolm X, you have Abraham Lincoln, for goodness sake. It's part and parcel of being american, right? So we can have graphs and we can discuss it all. But the first thing I want to say to people over there is like, it's the american way, the idea that there are no second acts in american lives. This was the country that was like, well, if it's all gone wrong, go west, you know what I mean? Start again.
It's absolutely fundamental to the way America has succeeded and the way things have happened there.
So I find it kind of crazy and absurd that this 30 under 30 thing is so prominent. I think it's probably a side effect of the media and other things. But that's my basic answer, is that culturally, it's just so obviously not true. And America is full of people like your mother. Right. What a fantastic thing.
It's just so wonderful. That's why they should take it more seriously.
[00:37:42] Speaker A: Yes. Well, people say, or Ayn Rand said, one can ignore reality, but one cannot evade the consequences of.
So it'd be much better if we were in tune with the reality of the situation, which is that, as you say, America is the land of second acts and late bloomers.
Okay, Islamorones on Instagram asks, any advice for young people intimidated by entry level jobs already asking for years of experience.
So, you know, I guess I would offer one piece of advice, which is that you can have experience that you weren't necessarily getting paid for. Right. Maybe it was something, a project that you organized at school. Maybe it's a volunteer activity.
And I say those kinds of things are important because it's possible now, increasingly possible, to get jobs without having even gone to college. And a lot of times one's able to do that through apprenticeship or by starting your own thing and saying, look, here's this website that I built. There's this little app that I built.
Here's this little organization that I put together in my community. But what would you say?
[00:39:12] Speaker B: No, I broadly agree. I think it's very, very difficult because particularly with the college thing, what I know from the, from the job I was doing until recently is people are arriving with fully loaded cv's and the societies they've been in, the internships. I mean, everything about their college life is priming them to get these jobs.
It's become very, very competitive.
But I think, as you say, one of the things I did when I was young was I volunteered at a, what's called the Citizens Advice Bureau, which is if you have, if you need some kind of help with the, with the bureaucratic system of government or like very, very basic legal advice, that's where you go. And the volunteers there look things up and tell you, oh, you need to fill this form in and you need to go and see this person and just help them navigate the system.
[00:40:06] Speaker A: Kind of a social worker.
[00:40:08] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly right.
And I did it. I don't. I did it for a year or something. It was one day a week. It wasn't a huge, big deal. But things like that can absolutely start building a cv, even if you have no other opportunities. And then the second thing is, I mean, I'm going to revert to a couple of previous answers use your network. Use the Internet.
[00:40:29] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:40:30] Speaker B: Use your network. Use the Internet. There will be a way of you finding something that you can do.
You just have to get the coverage. It's, it's brutal, though. And I, you know, I do feel for people because I remember it and I didn't, I didn't enjoy it.
[00:40:45] Speaker A: Although you can take heart that apparently from Henry's experience, it is even more brutal if you are applying for a job in your forties or fifties. So, Isla, another piece of advice building on the point about building your network is to, again, if you're a young people, if you have read Ayn Rand and have some beginning knowledge of objectivism, apply for a scholarship to come and join us at our student conference, Scalp Gulch.
If you are in your twenties, you're still eligible because one of the things that we do there is donors that have experience in various fields offer mentoring roundtables. So being able to be at a table with other young people interested in law or interested in medicine or interested in finance or interested in academics, interested in think tank nonprofit work is to make those connections. How great to be able to get a connection with somebody who's already successful in their career and to show up. So, all right, another question is, speaking of job boards, why do you think cold calling or walking into a place with your resume has gone by the wayside for impersonal online forms?
[00:42:12] Speaker B: This is an interesting question. I got a job by handing CV's into places, walking around.
And I agree. I think you probably can't anymore, or it's much less. The basic answer is that large organizations use essentially massive database software so that when you fill that form in, all the people in the HR department, recruitment and assessment and whatever, they can see your information in the system and they can assess it and they can click buttons saying progress them or send them a letter saying no, whatever, because they just have so, so many applications that it's very difficult these days. If you bring a cv in somewhere, how is that information going to get into the system so that you can be processed by the organization. Right.
And so they need you to go through that. I agree. You say in personal online forms, I mean, it can be very, very unpleasant experience for the candidate, but I think that's the fundamental reason why.
[00:43:24] Speaker A: So I began the interview with a reference to my grandmother, and one of her persistent qualities was curiosity. All of the older books behind me in my library are from her. She was entirely selfdeveloped, taught, and she was constantly learning about history, about psychology, about philosophy. In fact, she was pursuing an online degree in philosophy well into her nineties.
I'd always associated curiosity with longevity. But how did curiosity show up among the late bloomers that you profiled?
[00:44:07] Speaker B: Well, they all had a great natural curiosity because of this earnestness. It was something that I think, in a way, was kind of innate to them. Like if you think about Eisenhower, who I mentioned before, my favorite thing about Eisenhower is that when he was a young officer just after the first World War, so he's been in the army for a few years. He's in his twenties. He's obsessed with tanks because he's very curious about tanks, right? And everyone else is saying, well, you know, stop talking about tanks.
[00:44:41] Speaker A: It's very boring.
[00:44:44] Speaker B: He decided with his senior officer to strip a whole tank down to its component pieces and then rebuild it, which is obviously a very big job. And that is, that is such a natural, pure expression of curiosity. And that's what really gets people moving with these things about late bloomers. Think about Catherine Graham, who ran the Washington Post Company, one of the most successful CEO's of the 20th century, financially, as well as all the sort of political clout we associate with her.
She like one thing that really characterizes her through her life. And she had a very, very difficult life at times, but she's always hungry for news, total news hand. You know, those people, they always want the next edition of the paper, they always want the new headline and so forth. Deep curiosity to understand the world of news and media. So it's like an innate thing, I think it's just always there for them.
[00:45:44] Speaker A: I agree. I try to cultivate more curiosity in myself to the level of like, my grandmother.
But I think that curiosity will lead to your learning things and lead to your learning a great variety of things. And that is a part of, again, that inefficient preparation.
And it can also help you with networking because, you know, you meet somebody who's passionate about tanks, you'll know something about tanks. Ike was the great tank. Stripper. Honey, I'm going out tonight to strip. I didn't know you had stuff in life.
[00:46:19] Speaker B: You know what, that's a really good point. This is like a small but very, very useful piece of advice.
I read this on a blog years ago, and I wish I could remember where so I could link to it. But whenever you go anywhere, meet anyone, any party, drinks, bar, dinner, networking event, whatever, relentlessly turn the conversation towards the other person.
So like a game, right? You have to make it that they can't, they never ask you a question. You ask all the questions.
And if you like, I was talking to a comic book guy last time I did this, and I didn't know anything about graphic novels or whatever. So my first question was, how many frames do you get to a page?
Because I'm just interested in, how do you even make a graphic novel? Or whatever? And he said, oh, no one ever asks me that, but this is really interesting. And we had this whole discussion about it, and I actually learned so much about what he does just by asking that question. It's the sort of thing I would ask because I'm from advertising, but that's just an example of how you can.
I don't care about graphic. No, I'm not curious about them particularly, but you can use that technique to be curious and actually getting someone to tell you the minutiae of their life or their work. He had this whole thing where he disagreed with the designers, and he had this argument, he wants 16 frames. They don't want 16. Like, it's human drama. It's just interesting in its own terms. Right? So relentlessly push the conversation away from yourself. I one time have succeeded at this game where I had, like, a 30, 30, 45 minutes conversation, and the other guy didn't get to ask me a single thing that's really useful, and it pays off so much. So just get good at asking really specific questions. And just, even if you don't really know what to do, just say, that sounds amazing. I have no idea what that is. What the hell do you do?
That's a great open.
[00:48:24] Speaker A: Yes. It's the complete opposite of saying, well, enough about me. What do you think of me?
The, you know, charisma. Someone explained it to me once. This way. It's. It largely boils down to the ability to project, on one hand, power, which implies the ability to help others, to help your interlocutor, and also benevolence that you are inclined to help the person that you are talking with. And so being able to ask questions demonstrate a sincere, earnest interest in the people that you meet, I think will also raise your social capital. And they will be more likely to remember you won't remember anything about you because you never answered a question, but they'll remember you, and they'll remember you positively, and that might lead to a serendipitous connection down the road. I'm going to take this one last audience question, because we are ten minutes from the top of the hour, and it is past dinnertime there in the UK, and I know, you've got your kids to attend to.
Jackson Sinclair on YouTube asking, do you think over saturation in a field can curb interest or curiosity? The tinkerer became the programmer, but now there are so many programmers.
[00:49:58] Speaker B: It varies. There are so many programmers, but there's so much growth in that field. And now AI has made it really exciting again and has opened up the opportunities of how much coding you can get done and so forth. So has there been a better time to be interested in that?
Maybe, maybe not. I think that one's a really interesting example of how, if you're interested in programming, you now have an LLM to program with you, which is actually much cooler and much more exciting. And so the growth. The growth is all, I don't know. I don't know whether, like, programmers will disappear the way typists disappeared, but I know that right now it hasn't led to this over saturation.
[00:50:41] Speaker A: So, in closing, I recently interviewed Jonah Goldberg, who shared some advice that he received from Charles Murray, who said, if you set out to write a serious book and you don't change your mind on at least half a dozen issues, or at least learn something, that surprises you, you were doing it wrong. Was there anything in your research that changed your mind or that at least surprised you over the course of writing your book?
[00:51:14] Speaker B: That's a great question.
As we would expect from Charles Murray.
Yes, lots of things.
I didn't take networking seriously when I was young, not for intellectual reasons. I just didn't want to do it, and I didn't like it. And I read myself into being completely converted on the massive importance of networks.
I hadn't really given much thought to midlife crises.
I'd seen people have them, and I knew the basics. But when I became kind of a convert against what's called the happiness curve and against the idea that a midlife crisis is just something that happens, a natural process. It's hormones. Don't worry about it. Ride it out. I came to feel quite strongly about that.
I totally changed my mind about the nature of intelligence as we age. I've got a whole chapter on that.
I think we have a tyranny of the average when it comes to looking at a curve and giving people advice without saying, actually, there's a lot of variation around that curve. You don't know where you are as an individual. This is broad guidance. It's not specific advice.
I didn't. I knew nothing about Catherine Graham, and I was told someone said, oh, if you're interested in Leigh Bloomers, read her autobiography. It's a marvelous book. She's genuinely fascinating.
I need a 6th. Oh, yes. Margaret Thatcher. I was a big Margaret Thatcher nerd already. But the standard story is she became the leader because Airy Neve went around basically lying about the amount of support she had in order to scare people to vote for her. And I think that's not true anymore. I think networking theory offers a much better explanation, which is that Nev wasn't in any of the factions in the party because he was a war hero and he'd never been very successful.
He could sort of move between all the different groupings, all the different, you know, sort of opposing factions in the party. And so her real advantage was that airy neave could go and talk to everyone, left, right, center, traditional, modern, all different parts of the party. So she got a hearing with everyone, and no other candidate got that. So that's a small thing, but those are some of the things I changed my mind on.
[00:53:36] Speaker A: Let's just drill in on one of those that you mentioned this, how you changed your mind about midlife crises from just something that happens, people have to ride it out or try to avoid them. You actually have gone a full 180 on this, and you say more people should have midlife crisis. Could you unpack that a little bit?
[00:54:00] Speaker B: We are told that according to this happiness research, which I do not believe in at all, we are told that it's a natural thing. You're happy when you're 20, you reach a sort of a bottoming out of happiness when you're 40 or 50, and then it slowly goes back up into old age. And the theory is you're not unhappy when you're 50 because you have a mortgage and a job and teenagers and whatever. It's just. It's just what happens. It's just natural. It happens across all cultures. You know, the data just shows it. It turns out this research is not actually very reliable, and I think it's a gross oversimplification of human experience. There are lots and lots and lots of different patterns of happiness throughout people's life. Some people start very happy and stay very happy. Some people start miserable and sort of their life is a slow incline upwards. I mean, there are all these different patterns. So for some people, the answer is yes, you have a midlife crisis. Get a hobby, do woodwork, you know, whatever. But for some people, the midlife crisis is a signal that you want to change something, and it's completely unreasonable to sort of go around saying, oh, no, science says it doesn't mean anything. Just ignore it. It might mean something for you. And if it does, you should do something about it. Sorry, I get a bit animated.
[00:55:24] Speaker A: I love it. All right, well, everybody out there who's now thinking, gee, maybe my midlife crisis, I can have it a little earlier, I can have it a little later, and I can leverage it into my second act. So that is fantastic. Thank you, Henry. This was really delightful.
[00:55:44] Speaker B: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this. You asked such good questions. This was great.
[00:55:50] Speaker A: I guess maybe I am curious after all, as is our audience. Thanks to all of you who joined us and all of your great feedback. Interesting questions. Sorry we couldn't get to all of them. Of course, if you enjoyed this video or any of our other content and programming, remember, we are a nonprofit, so go ahead and put something in the tip jar at atlas society.org. donate and be sure to join us next week when I will be off. But my colleagues, Atlas Society senior fellows Antonella Marti and Rob Trusinski will host a webinar discussing current events in Venezuela. We'll see you then.
