The secret weapon to success
This is the blueprint for a career that doesn’t just “get by,” but thrives.
Gary Bloomer | SHAKING THE TREE # 293
If you’re over the age of 45, let me ask you something.
How many times have you sat in a meeting, or across a table from someone half your age, and thought: I’ve seen this before. I know exactly how this ends. And then said nothing, because nobody asked?
That stops now.
I’ve spent decades working with creatives, marketers, and entrepreneurs—helping them find their voice, helping them sharpen their message, and helping them get out of their own way. And the single most common thing I see holding experienced people back isn’t a lack of knowledge. It’s a failure to recognize the extraordinary value of what they already carry. They’re sitting on a goldmine and apologizing for taking up space.
Building an online presence later in life—whether you’re in your forties, your fifties, or well into your sixties—isn’t about catching up. It’s about finally stepping into an arena where your depth of experience becomes a genuine competitive advantage.
Let me explain.
The internet is enormous, loud, and largely shallow. It rewards youth, speed, novelty, and volume. And although that’s a great way to build popularity with anyone under the age of 30, it’s also created a massive, largely unmet demand for something different: real insight, hard-won perspective, and the kind of pattern recognition that only comes from actually having lived through things.
Although anyone with half a brain can go online and tell you what’s cool and what’s happening right now within 30 minutes, very few people over the age of 30 can tell you what it means, why it matters, and what’s likely to come next.
The people who can do that are the ones who’ve been paying attention for twenty or thirty years.
People like you.
If you’re over the age of 40, your competition isn’t some twenty-two-year-old with a ring light and a content calendar. Your competition is your own hesitation.
I hear the objections. I’ve made them myself.
I don’t understand the platforms.
I don’t know what to post.
Nobody wants to hear from me.
That world isn’t for people like me.
And I want to address every single one of those, because they all dissolve under scrutiny.
I don’t understand the platforms. OK then: LEARN!
You don’t need to master every platform. You don’t need to know everything about one platform. You simply need to know enough to create something that’s not half bad.
You need to show up consistently on one or two platforms or forums, with something genuine to say. The mechanics are learnable—and frankly, the tools are way less complicated than whatever you navigated to get where you are professionally.
If you’ve managed a team, run a project, built a client base, or simply survived the particular chaos of your industry for two decades, you can figure out how to post on LinkedIn. Or how to create an AI video. Or how to write a text prompt that gets Gemini writing content that sounds just like you.
As for not knowing what to say—that’s rarely the real problem.
The real problem isn’t knowing what to say, it’s undervaluing the things you’ve seen, experienced, and that you know form hard-won victories.
Start with the question you get asked most often by colleagues, clients, or friends.
Start with the mistake you see people making again and again that you made yourself twenty years ago and learned from.
Start with the thing you wish someone had told you when you were starting out.
JUST START!
That’s your content. That’s your valuable, differentiated, real-world content that no algorithm can produce and that no newcomer can replicate.
And as for nobody wanting to hear from you—let me push back on that firmly.
BULLSHIT!
There’s a generation of people in their twenties, thirties, and forties who are desperately looking for mentorship from older people that they’re not getting from TikTok.
They’re swimming in information and starving for wisdom.
They can find a tutorial on anything in thirty seconds.
What they can’t find easily is someone who’s been in the room when things went to shit and can tell them, from experience, how to navigate it.
That’s you. That’s what you have to offer.
That world isn’t for people like me.
Building an online presence isn’t about becoming an influencer. It’s about becoming a resource. It’s about taking the expertise, the judgment, and the hard-earned perspective that currently exists only inside your head—or inside your organization—and making it available to a wider world that genuinely needs it.
There’s something else worth saying, and it matters more than people admit.
When you’ve reached a point in your career where you’re not scrambling to impress anyone, not trying to land your next job, not performing for an audience of evaluators—you can just tell the truth.
You can say what you actually think.
You can disagree with the conventional wisdom, call out the emperor’s new clothes, and stake out a position based on what you genuinely believe rather than what’s safe or popular.
That kind of intellectual freedom is rare online. It’s also magnetic.
I started building my online presence after years of working behind the scenes, helping other people develop content in museums and nonprofits. It took me the better part of 35 years to realize that many of the thing I learned in museums were applicable to the world of business.
The shift for me came in mid 2009 when I began answering marketing and branding questions on the Know-How Exchange of marketingprofs.com.
And what I found was that the audience I connected with most readily wasn’t looking for someone young, flashy, or prolific. They weren’t even looking for someone in the marketing world They were looking for someone who knew what they were talking about and wasn’t afraid to say it plainly.
If you’re 40, or 50, or 60 and older, that’s available to you right now.
Not someday.
Now.
Your experience is not a consolation prize for missing the early days of social media. It is the thing. It is the differentiator.
It is the reason someone will choose to follow you, read you, trust you, believe you, and eventually work with you or buy from you—over every other voice competing for their attention.
The only question worth asking isn’t whether it’s too late to start because it’s NEVER too late. It’s what you’re going to say first and when you’re going to say it.
Get busy. Get talking.
As always, thanks for reading.
—Gary
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P.S. If you found this useful, share it with another creator who needs an ego check (in a nice way). Want more unfiltered takes on content creation? Join my newsletter. No fluff, just the stuff that works.
Next time on Shaking the Tree: March? Already! Time to get busy …
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Originally from the U.K., Gary Bloomer is a writer, branding advocate, marketing specialist, and an award-winning graphic designer.
His design work has been included in Creative Review (one of the UK’s largest design magazines). Since 2009, he has answered over 5,000 marketing and business questions in the Know-How Exchange of MarketingProfs.com, placing him among the top 3% of contributors. He lives in Wilmington, Delaware, USA.