Second Act

What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life

By: Henry Oliver

Narrated by: Joshua Manning

"Henry Oliver is a rare talent: smart, funny and insightful. SECOND ACT showcases his wide reading, deep understanding and playful prose style. Read this book to discover why it's never too late for a second act in your own life."
HELEN LEWIS, author of Difficult Women

Have you ever dreamed that you might be far more successful than you are today? Our society tells us over and over that if we're going to achieve anything, we'd better do it while we're young. But whether you're at the start of your career, sensing you're on the wrong path, or feeling unsettled later in life, you're likely wondering just how to reinvent yourself? Have you left it too late?

This book has answers. Late bloomers - individuals who experience significant success later in life - offer lessons for people who feel frustrated. This book encourages people to think about themselves as potential late bloomers and to discover and encourage and advocate for late blooming in others. After all, it's never too late to discover our hidden talents and our accomplish our goals - the road to success is never as straightforward as we are led to believe. Julia Child didn't discover that she loved to cook until she was thirty-seven. Vera Wang started her design business at forty. And Michelangelo painted The Last Judgment in his sixties.

This inspiring, passionate book combines wonderful storytelling with fascinating new research, to shift expectations around our life trajectories. You'll discover a range of blueprints for self-reinvention, pairing the newest insights from psychology and neuroscience with late bloomers' remarkable life stories, from Penelope Fitzgerald to Samuel Johnson, from Frank Lloyd-Wright to Malcolm X.

©2024 Henry Oliver (P)2024 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Inspiring, Relieving and Insightful!

As a late bloomer this was exactly what I needed to read. It both validates my lived experience and challenges areas where I have unnecessarily foreclosed possibility for myself. Thank you!!

Inspiring stories

Well written and read. I learned on many people who live meaningful and active lives despite age restraints.

The Excitement and Hope

I liked the stories and how they conveyed hope to succeed at various ages and circumstances. The overall book made a fantastic argument the possibility to achieve greatness at a later stage.

Schlock for suckers

What is even the point of this book? To showcase a handful of "late bloomers" who found success later than the expectation. Through ancedotal stories that are boring, uninteresting, and read at a pace that feels like molasses dripping off a spoon.

If you think of yourself as a "late bloomer", you won't find much help here. Unless you just like hearing the most boring stories of celebrities who found fame beyond their 20s. Fame is for outliers. Everyone can't be an outlier.

But hey, if you're playing the fame game, give it listen. Just bump the reading speed to 1.5x to keep from falling asleep.