The title of “Second Act” itself proves to be underselling what the book has to offer: Mr. Oliver is really assembling a guide to the broader principles that make a strong career. There is an importance to slow and steady progress, to showing up and doing the work. A chapter on aging explores how an important requirement of a successful career is simply to be consistent: to improve, to try new things, and to keep creating output. Similarly, Mr. Oliver demonstrates that fears about the inevitable cognitive decline that comes with getting older are likely overblown and our capacity for innovation and wisdom later in life is undervalued. Achievement, he suggests, “isn’t reliant just on our mental ability staying high but on whether we choose to keep using and adapting the capacity we have.”
Over the past decade, I have reviewed hundreds of studies and interviewed dozens of elite performers, including athletes, scientists, artists, physicians, educators and businesspeople, and I have found the top indicators of people’s lasting success and satisfaction came down to how they answered these five questions:
Did they give their pursuit their all?
Did they live in alignment with their values?
Were they patient and present?
Did they embrace their own vulnerability?
And did they build meaningful and mutually respectful relationships along the way?
To my surprise, no idea has resonated more with Olympic medalists than groundedness — that you can be a good person and reach great heights.
In 1990, I was among the most unremarkable, underachieving, unimpressive 19-year-olds you could have stumbled across. Stoned more often than studying, I drank copious amounts of beer, smoked Camels, delivered pizza. My workouts consisted of dragging my ass out of bed and sprinting to class—usually late and unprepared.My high-school guidance counselor had had good reason to tell my deflated parents that there was no way I was college-bound: I graduated in the bottom third of my 100-person class at Lourdes Academy in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. I had to attend the Menasha extension of the University of Wisconsin, a two-year school, just to smuggle myself into the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, a four-year school in my hometown. A year into that, I was staring at a 1.491 GPA and making the guidance counselor’s case daily, unambiguously, emphatically. I was one more wasted—literally and figuratively—semester away from getting the boot. […]
Thirty years later, I am running Axios, and fanatical about health and self-discipline. My marriage is strong. My kids and family seem to like me. I still enjoy beer, and tequila, and gin, and bourbon. But I feel that I have my act together more often than not—at least enough to write what I wish someone had written for me 30 years ago, a straightforward guide to tackling the challenges of life.
It is nonsense that to shine, you need to go to a fancy school, bootlick bosses, or pay your dues at soul-sucking jobs working for bad people. You do not need to get 1500 on your SAT or to have a sky-high IQ or family connections. You don’t even need sparkling talents. You simply need to want to construct goodness with whatever life throws at you. This starts by grounding yourself with unbreakable core values and then watching, learning, and copying those who do it—and get it—right. But it also includes watching and studying those who screw it up. You need to find your own passions, not have them imposed by others. Then outwork everyone in pursuit of shaping your destiny—your own personal greatness—on your terms, by your measures, at your pace.
My own life is littered with mistakes. But I learned something from every dumb move and used it to try to get the big things right. Five decades in, that is what matters most to me: cutting myself slack on my daily sins or stumbles so I can focus on the good stuff.
For me, that list includes pursuing deep, meaningful, unconditional relationships with my kids; a healthy, resilient marriage; strong, loving relationship with my parents and siblings; a few deep and durable friendships; faith and connection beyond myself; and doing consequential work with people I enjoy and admire.
I’ve often fallen short of these goals, and so I’ve learned the value of grace. We’re all deeply flawed, wounded, selfish, clueless, and mean at different times. It does not make us bad. It makes us normal. That’s why we need to extend grace to others, and to ourselves.
I have blown many months beating myself up for being a selfish husband or an inattentive son or a harsh leader or an absent friend. And all of those things were often true. But life is not measured by a moment. In the end, I want to be able to say what we should all be able to say about ourselves: I learned a little every day, tried to do the next right thing, and got the big things right.
What is happiness, anyway? Does anybody know? It’s taken me 80 years to figure out that it’s not a tranquil, sunlit realm at the top of the ladder you’ve spent your whole life hauling yourself up, rung by rung. It’s more like the thing that Christians call grace: you can’t earn it, you can’t strive for it, it’s not a reward for virtue. It exists all right, it will be given to you, but it’s fluid, it’s evasive, it’s out of reach. It’s something you glimpse in the corner of your eye until one day you’re up to your neck in it. And before you’ve had time to take a big gasp and name it, it’s gone.
So I’m not going to spend what’s left of my life hanging round waiting for it. I’m going to settle for small, random stabs of extreme interestingness – moments of intense awareness of the things I’m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist. Things that remind me of other things. Tiny scenes. Words that people choose, their accidentally biblical turns of phrase. Hand-lettered signs, quotes from books, offhand remarks that make me think of dead people, or of living ones I can no longer stand the sight of. I plan to keep writing them down, praising them, arranging them like stepping stones into the dark. Maybe they’ll lead me somewhere good before I shrivel up and blow away.
(He) has figured out what life is about. It’s not the money that makes him happy. I truly believe Alan has figured out where enough is at. He’s found enough and the strange thing about finding enough, you often end up with more than enough.
— Steve Hartman, on Allen McCloskey in “Local Hero” (CBS Sunday Morning, August 6, 2023)
