You quit your job, of course.
At least, that's what I did.
For most of my life, I thought I knew what success looked like.
Work hard.
Make more money.
Get the better title.
Have more things.
Keep pushing.
Keep proving yourself.
And eventually, all that hard work would pay off and you'd arrive at this magical place called success.
Only I never really arrived.
I just kept working.
And working.
And working.
I've spent most of my life believing that if I worked hard enough, eventually I'd have something to show for it.
Financial security.
A comfortable life.
Freedom.
Maybe even the ability to stop worrying so much.
Instead, I turned 52 and found myself asking a question that is both incredibly simple and incredibly uncomfortable:
What if I've been chasing the wrong things my entire life?
The things I thought mattered
I've spent years thinking that a promotion would change things.
That a title would make me feel like I'd finally made it.
That buying things would make me feel like I was doing better.
That working harder meant I was doing something right.
And maybe those things aren't bad.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to succeed.
There's nothing wrong with wanting money.
There's nothing wrong with wanting nice things.
The problem is when those things become the measure of whether your life is good.
Because eventually you have to ask:
How much is enough?
And what happens when you finally get the thing you've been chasing...
and you're still not happy?
I don't have a successful life.
That's hard for me to say.
I've worked hard my entire life.
I've done what I thought I was supposed to do.
I've sacrificed.
I've worried about money.
I've put in the hours.
I've tried to do the right thing.
And at 52, I don't have the financial security or the life I imagined all that work would have produced.
For a long time, I thought that meant I had failed.
Maybe it doesn't.
Maybe it just means I need to stop measuring my life by someone else's definition of success.
Maybe success isn't what I thought it was.
Maybe it's having time.
Maybe it's having people you love.
Maybe it's being able to breathe.
Maybe it's waking up and not immediately thinking about everything you need to accomplish.
Maybe it's having experiences instead of more stuff.
Maybe it's laughing more.
Maybe it's simply being able to say:
I actually like my life.
So I'm starting over.
I'm leaving New York.
I'm moving to Tennessee.
I'm doing it without having anything figured out.
I'm doing it without a perfect plan.
And I'm certainly not doing it because I suddenly became an expert on life.
I'm doing it because I don't want to spend the next twenty years doing exactly what I've been doing and hoping something magically changes.
Something has to change.
And maybe that something is me.
Welcome to my project.
I called this Cyndee's Life After 50 Project because I don't know what the hell I'm doing.
I'm not writing a book about how to become successful.
I'm not going to tell you how to find happiness.
I'm not going to pretend I have some five-step formula for getting your life together.
I'm going to figure it out as I go.
I'm going to write about the things I'm questioning.
The things I'm learning.
The things I'm letting go of.
The mistakes I make.
The things that scare me.
The things that make me laugh.
The things that make me wonder why I didn't figure this out twenty years ago.
And, hopefully, the things that make me realize that maybe it's not too late.
Because that's the question I keep coming back to:
Is 52 too late to start building a life you actually want?
I don't think it is.
But I'm going to find out.
Maybe success isn't about having more.
Maybe it's about needing less.
Maybe happiness isn't something you achieve.
Maybe it's something you notice.
Maybe starting over isn't failure.
Maybe it's finally giving yourself permission to try something different.
And maybe the life we spend so much time trying to build isn't nearly as important as the life we're actually living while we're building it.
I don't know.
I'm making it up as I go.
But I'm going to try really hard to enjoy the hell out of life.
Come along.
This is just the beginning.