The Motivation Of Second Half Thinking
If you're new to the world of second half thinking, it can be hard to know where to start. The truth is, there's no single "right" way; everyone's path will look different depending on their goals and circumstances. In this blog post, I'll share a few of my favorite thoughts for achieving what matters most — personal fulfillment and career success — by starting in the second half of your life.
2nd Half Thinking: What Is It & Why It Matters
You're about halfway through your life at this point (according to the average lifespan), which means that there are two battlefronts that you need to fight on if you want a satisfying life: within yourself and without.
Within (Self-Esteem, Self-Awareness, Resilience, etc.)
The biggest challenge we face when we're in our 20s is learning about who we are and how to develop a solid foundation in the areas of self-esteem and self-awareness. This can be a difficult enough challenge for some people, but for others it's downright impossible. The reality is that most people learn about themselves as they go through life. Sometimes it's an easy process — other times it's extremely hard — but either way, information (ideas) gets installed into our brains primarily via experiences that happen during the first half of life (because your brain changes rapidly between 9 and 30).
Unfortunately, this means that many people enter the second half of life with a lot to unlearn. This is certainly my experience over the last decade as I've tried to unravel decades of bad habits, twisted beliefs and other obstacles that have prevented me from fully realizing my potential.
This is why fighting on the battlefront within yourself is such an important task in the second half of life: because it's really only when we get to this point that we're able to truly start shaping who we are, how we think and how we'll go about our future endeavors.
Without (Career, Financial Independence, Relationships, etc.)
We also usually enter the second half of our lives with most of the foundational building blocks in place. We have a job that pays the bills and we've finished school. The point is that we now have a chance to do something that excites us and enables us to figure out how to be more successful. We can also start focusing on our long-term goals of financial independence, career success and self-fulfillment.
This is the very point at which we have the most freedom to shape our future. We can choose to take on more risk, develop more skills, explore more options and even define our own goals in ways that are totally different from anything we've done before. The question is, what are you going to do with it?
2nd Half Thinking: Why It's Important For Personal Fulfillment & Career Success
When I was in college I had a friend who was constantly working on her second half. She'd start classes (and sometimes quit them) because she felt that she needed to focus on her career path first. She'd find a boyfriend and become focused on the relationship (and then break up), because she needed to focus on getting a solid self-esteem foundation first. And she'd stay at her job for as long as possible so that she could get more experience (and then quit because she hated it).
I'll never forget the day we got into an argument about this. She was always jumping from one thing to the next, and I was always trying to make incremental progress toward my goals. Throughout our friendship, we were basically on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of how to think about life — one half vs. two halves.
Fast forward to today, and I can tell you that taking the two halves approach has been absolutely instrumental in achieving everything I'm working toward. You might think it's just a different way of looking at life, but I think it's something much bigger than that. It's really a change in perspective, philosophy and internal compass that will ripple out into every area of your life for the next 30 years (because that's how long your brain stays in its "malleable phase" — aka the teenage years).
Here are four reasons why second half thinking is so important:
1) It gives us the right lens with which to examine our lives and learn from our experiences.
One of the first steps in taking the two halves approach is to shrug off any kind of attachment (or "shoulds" or "shouldn'ts") that we have about the future. For example, I used to think that college was the only way to be successful, and I'd always tell myself that if I didn't go to college then I wasn't going to be able to do anything. When I realized that this was limiting my options and delaying my success, it completely changed my perspective on higher education as well as career advancement in general.
I've also learned over time that pursuing a specific degree or qualification doesn't guarantee great life results. It actually just locks you in to certain limitations. Instead of thinking about whether or not I was going to do something, I started thinking about what I needed to do — personally — in order to reach my goals.
2) It allows us to have integrity — meaning staying true to ourselves and not compromising our true beliefs and values.
The thing is, no matter how good your life looks from the outside, there's always another level that you can tap into by taking the path that speaks most directly to your true self. When you're in your 20s, this means that you're taught things that are out of alignment with who you really are and what will serve your highest potential down the road. In other words, you're taught things that are counter to who you have the potential to become.
Second half thinking is about creating your own reality and not sacrificing your own personal happiness for anyone else's goals. It also means having integrity — which means doing what you know to be right even when it's hard, uncomfortable or maybe even miserable. Almost every second half personal development challenge I've faced has involved having integrity with my thoughts and actions (and ultimately my life). To me, being able to do this is how I measure success.
3) It helps us make the best choices for our future based on who we really are now — not who we wish we were or who others want us to be.
It's really easy to put off having a real, honest conversation with yourself about who you are, what you want and what you need. But it's also one of the most important conversations we can have with ourselves in order to start living the life that we imagine for ourselves. Second half thinking is about creating your own reality and examining your innermost self — calling your internal "bullshit meter" into play when you need it the most. It's also about learning to trust your intuition while pushing past the fear and doubt that hold us back from making big changes in our lives.
This is why I wrote my book (and why I think every other personal development book should be written).
Conclusion
The key takeaways from this entire article are simple:
Develop a clearer, more precise vision of what you want to achieve in life and incorporate that into your every day life. Shift your focus from how you feel about yourself to how you want to feel about yourself in the future. Eliminate anything that doesn't empower you — including many of the things that come naturally to us as we get older. Figure out what your "second half" looks like, and then work tirelessly toward it until it's a reality.
If you follow these steps, I guarantee that you'll be able to live an ordinary life with extraordinary results — and create a future full of happiness, fulfillment and abundant opportunities for success.