Why your next adventure is a new genre
Why trying to reboot your 40s or 50s is a trap, and how to pioneer something entirely fresh.
Gary Bloomer | SHAKING THE TREE # 284
I started writing online in mid-2023, two months before my 60th birthday.
For me at that point I’d farted around long enough to know that the only way to become an online writer was to get online and write.
Sometimes it takes a bold decision or a startling realization to spur you into action!
Which brings me to the idea of your next thrilling adventure.
I suspect you’ve crossed a personal line of some sort. For me it was turning 60. As far as I saw things, it was then or never. So I jumped in, feet first.
Maybe for you it’s a major birthday with a zero in it.
Maybe it’s the winding down of a longer, previous chapter in your career. Or maybe you woke up last Tuesday morning and realized the old playbook is working for you any more.
If there’s a chorus of voices going on for you right now—both internal and external—voices whispering about your lack of relevance and about the world having moved on, now’s the time to tell those voices to shut up because you have work to do!
Your single, clear truth moving forward is this: what you are beginning now is not a continuation. It is a creation.
The most seductive, dangerous idea any of us of a certain age will encounter is the notion of a “second act.”
It implies that life is a neat, three-act structure where we’re merely re-entering the same stage later in life with a few new lines at a later date.
This is the language of sequels and reboots.
This is the sort of thinking that shackles you to the world of comparison—to your former self, to the fresh faces dominating your social media feed, and to an outdated definition of success.
Here is the liberating reframe: you are not picking up where you left off. You are a first-time author, creator, maker, or producer in a genre that didn’t exist until you arrived to define it.
Your first several decades were not a prelude: they were an immersive, doctoral-level field study in a subject called real life.
You weren’t just working at a job, carving out a career; you were compiling a masterclass in organization, nuance, essence, aesthetics, problem solving, and relationship management.
You weren’t just raising a family; you were conducting a longitudinal study on patience, logistics, and unconditional investment.
You weren’t just living through the ups and downs of life, work, and family; you were building a proprietary database on resilience that no AI system can scrape and that no fresh-faced graduate with their shiny new diploma can take away from you or hope to emulate, copy, or fast-track.
This isn’t necessarily about your years of experience, it’s more to do with something called accreted insight.
Accreted insight describes the knowledge you’ve gained gradually over time; somewhat akin to a snowball rolling down a hill.
You don't get accreted insight all at once in a single "Aha!" moment. Instead, you get it by gathering little pieces of learning, understanding, and comprehension through a chaotic mix of time, experience, observation, and incremental realization.
Over time these states and traits gradually clump together to form a deep, solid, highly personal understanding of the world around you based on sound reasoning, on real world observations, and on acquired wisdom.
Because it’s much more nuanced that simply learning things to pass a series of tests, this is the kind of knowing that cannot be learned in a classroom or taught in a lecture hall. It’s too layered and heavily weathered to be picked up from a 30-day online course because it’s been honed and proven under pressure over time. It is, in essence, neurological geology and at its root, it’s your native language. And luckily for you, the digital world is starving for translators.
The foundational advantages you’ve already banked
You have a patience threshold the algorithm can’t comprehend. You understand that trust and belief are not created in viral moments but in years and decades. Because of this, your content becomes the antidote to the eternal, frantic, ephemeral instant take. Rather than simply offering tips, you’re providing tested principles. In an economy of short attention spans you’re dealing in the rarest of human currencies: that of earned respect.
You possess contextual intelligence. You’ve seen markets fall and rise and cycles come and go. You can spot a repackaged old idea masquerading as a revolution from a mile away. This allows you to bypass fads and hot trends and speak to what endures. Because you’ve been listening through the static for decades your value lies in separating the signal from the noise.
You have a built-in, ready-made audience: your peers. You are not speaking into a void to “everyone.” Down that road leads emptiness and ruin. No. You’re speaking with and for a vast, often overlooked cohort—the people who built things, fixed things, and who quietly made the world work while the spotlight was elsewhere. They are waiting for a voice that sounds like clarity, not hype. That voice can be yours.
So, what do you do next? How do you pull your new found hope together to set you off on your next adventure? You pull together your Pioneer’s Checklist.
This isn't about withdrawing from life. It's about deploying the capital of your experience into a new venture where you are the CEO, Chief Curator, and Lead Engineer of your own fulfillment.
The Pioneer’s Checklist: starting from wisdom, not scratch
1. Mine your uncommon ground.
Forget searching for a “niche.” Conduct a Wisdom Excavation. Ask yourself:
“What is the quiet problem I’ve solved repeatedly over time that others seem to struggle with on a consistent basis?”
“What successful rule did I need to break to see real progress?”
“What ‘obvious’ truth did it take me twenty years to truly understand?”
The answers to these questions are not your topics or anecdotes. They are the cornerstones of your new foundation.
2. Build a point of view, not just a profile.
For the time being, I want you to forget about creating a personal brand—it’s a term that suggests a marketing an image, but that’s not how enduring brands are created. Instead pf defining your brand, invest time in codifying a core philosophy in which every piece of content is a brick in a distinct intellectual structure. Instead of being drawn to a fancy sign and the paint on the door, people will be drawn to the integrity of your beliefs and architecture.
3. Choose tools that amplify your voice, rather than distorting it
Do you think in stories? Then produce a podcast or write narratively. Do you explain with clarity? Then use brief, direct video tutorials. Do you prefer to connect through conversation? Then hosting intimate, topic-focused audio chats might be the better way to go. Rather than mastering every new editing app or online tool, your power lies in substance so let your natural mode of communication dictate the medium, not the other way around.
4. Translate your former life into an easily understood foundational code
That previous career wasn’t just a job; it was your R&D lab. You aren’t a “former teacher”; you are a specialist in communication, curriculum design, and managing multiple conflicting priorities. So repurpose that code. Reverse engineer it and explain why your experience has proven the standard, accepted wisdom in your field wrong.
5. Aim for resonance rather than reach
Forget about follower counts and vanity metrics and instead, focus on generating a resonance frequency. Are you connecting at a depth that changes how someone thinks or feels? Does your work create a sense of “Finally, someone said it!” for the person who needed to hear it? That is the pulse of a true community, not the number of followers or subscribers you have.
As you may have noticed over the years, when you make a significant change in your life the people around you and society in general will try to get you to reject your plans. This is because sudden shifts upset the programmed script that would rather see you fitting into a series of expected and existing categories.
Your singular task in these instances is to politely decline and to defiantly draw yourself a new map.
You are not starting late.
You are starting informed.
You are not creating content to join a conversation.
You are beginning one that only you have the credentials to host.
The most powerful tool on your desk isn’t your microphone or keyboard. It’s your delete key. Use it on any sentence that starts with “I used to be…” or “Back in my day…” Instead, start with: “What I see now is…”
The future of your story begins in the present tense.
Your first post?
It’s not a hello.
It’s a declaration.
Start with something along the lines of: “For the longest time, I believed ___. Now, I know ___.” and go from there.
Your genre starts here.
As always, thanks for reading.
—Gary
Feel free to follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn
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: Starting from wisdom rather from scratch
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.
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