My Fifties Have Been Wild. Maybe That’s the Point.

Two days after I got laid off from a career I’d spent 26 years building, I decided to start a coaching business.

Looking back, that sounds…aggressive.

Or naïve.

Or maybe a little bit crazy.

I certainly didn’t have all the answers. I had no clients, no business plan worth mentioning, and no idea what building a business actually required. What I did have was a quiet conviction that I wasn’t done.

That decision turned out to be the first of many.

You already know what it feels like when the life you built stops fitting the way it used to. That's where this one begins.

The Laundry List

My fifties have been kind of wild.

Here's what that decade has actually held so far. I lost a career I'd spent twenty-six years building. I ended a relationship. I started a coaching business. I landed my first clients. I launched a podcast. I became a writer again. I learned marketing. I learned sales.

And maybe most importantly, I’ve learned just how much I still don’t know.

That’s a lot of firsts for someone who’s supposedly entering the decade when life is supposed to settle down.

The Midlife Career Script We're Handed

Somewhere along the way, we’ve been handed a script for midlife.

By fifty, we're supposed to have figured ourselves out. Become experts. Stopped experimenting. Started protecting what we've built.

Instead, I’ve found myself becoming a beginner again, because life asked me to.

What Carl Jung Understood

As I was trying to make sense of everything that had happened, I kept coming back to Carl Jung, who said: Life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research.

The first half of life asks, Who should I become?

The second asks, Who am I underneath everything I’ve accumulated?

The layoff didn't create that question so much as reveal it.

Yours might not be a layoff. It might be a birthday, a diagnosis, a quiet Tuesday. But if something in you has been asking the same question, that's information worth tuning into.

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make during a career transition is assuming that movement is the answer. Update the résumé. Apply for jobs. Network harder. Stay busy.

Sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed. But sometimes the first move isn’t forward. It’s inward.

This is where stepping back matters, and I want to be precise about what that means, because people often get it wrong. Stepping back isn't the opposite of action.

Ironically, I launched a coaching business two days after getting laid off.

So “stepping back” didn’t mean sitting still. It meant not rushing to recreate the life I’d just lost.

Instead, I started asking different questions.

What kind of work gives me energy?

What kind of life am I actually trying to build?

What parts of my old identity do I want to carry with me—and what parts am I finally ready to leave behind?

No One Is Coming to Save Us

Another realization hit me along the way: No one is coming to save us.

As we get older, youth is no longer enough. Experience doesn't automatically speak for itself. We have to become our own advocates. We have to tell our stories, build relationships, keep creating, keep learning, keep showing up.

Not out of desperation, but because we're still becoming.

I think of Kobe Bryant here, not for the trophies, but for the fact that he was always trying to figure things out. Masters don't stop learning. They keep experimenting. They stay curious.

Wisdom, it turns out, looks less like certainty and more like staying coachable.

I'm Building, Not Retreating

These days, at precisely the age people start asking about retirement, I find myself doing the opposite of winding down. I’m writing. I’m coaching. I’m podcasting. I’m collaborating. I’m mentoring.

I’m building something that didn’t exist three years ago.

But if this sounds like a neat success story, it isn’t. The truth is, I’m still having to unlearn things and relearn others.

Every week, and sometimes every day.

The journalism skills that served me for decades still matter. But the way I market, build relationships, sell my work, and think about my own value is requiring an entirely new education.

And maybe that’s the biggest surprise of my fifties.

They've been difficult, and wild, and they've reminded me I'm still capable of becoming someone new.

Wisdom, at this point, looks less like having the answers and more like staying comfortable enough with yourself to keep asking better questions.

Because I’ve started to believe something I never would have said ten years ago.

Midlife isn’t graduation. It’s apprenticeship to a different version of yourself.

What would it look like to let yourself be a beginner again? Hit reply and let me know.

I'm Richard Taliaferro. I'm a certified career coach specializing in helping mid-stage professionals gain clarity on their career journey. My 90-Second SPARK diagnostic shows you where to focus first. Click here to take yours.