Career change at 50 seemed impossible when my mom first mentioned it. When she started talking about quitting her nursing job to sell Barbie dolls on eBay, we thought she was losing it. This is what happens, we figured, when you work with the elderly long enough. You become one of them.
She had never used a computer for anything. This was a woman who once called me long distance because she couldn’t get the television to turn on. Learning to navigate the internet and become an online entrepreneur wasn’t a concept any of us were prepared to associate with her.
We should have given her more credit.
The Photoshoot
There are many things you should do before you die. I don’t claim to know what most of them are. But if you ever have the chance to walk in on an amateur photoshoot with a 53-year-old photographer shouting direction at eight-inch plastic supermodels named Francie, Midge, Skipper, and Barbie, you’ll find a smile on your face, content that you’ve seen it all.
Her living room had become a studio. Fifty or so anatomically incorrect little people, all wielding the greatest fashions of their time, purses too tiny to carry anything practical. She had a pink baby grand piano as a prop. She was taking this seriously.
Starting From Zero
It amazes me that she was ever able to list her first doll. No computer experience. No understanding of how eBay worked. No idea how to photograph products or write descriptions that would sell.
She just started.
Within a year, she had quit nursing entirely. The business was working. She was making more money photographing vintage dolls in her living room than she ever made caring for patients.
The Lesson I Almost Missed
I was in my twenties then, convinced that my generation had some special claim on technology and reinvention. We were the ones who understood how the internet worked. We were the digital natives.
My mother, who couldn’t turn on a television without calling for help, had built something from nothing. Not because she understood the technology, but because she wanted to learn.
That’s the only difference, really. The willingness to look foolish while you figure it out. The patience to start from zero when you’re 53 and everyone assumes you’re past your prime.
The tools don’t matter. The platform doesn’t matter. What matters is whether you’re willing to become a beginner again.
My mom was. And now she shouts directions at eight-inch plastic supermodels for a living.
How awesome is that?
This is the lens the Bible is meant to be read through.
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