One Story

My barber for the last four years told me he was sixty when he left a secure sales job to learn to cut hair. He had never cut another person's hair in his life. Most of the students on his training course were sixteen, and he knew exactly what they saw when he walked in: the old man in the room.

But the conversation he feared most was with his father — a former fishmonger and factory worker who had preached job safety his whole life. He strongly believed you never leave one job without another. Make sure you always have benefits. He braced for his Dad's objections. Instead, his father said: "That's fantastic. Life's so short." He was actually emotional telling the story.

He cuts as many as seventeen heads a day now, and still sweeps his own floor.

Fifty years of watching people change direction has taught me that the permission we're waiting for often arrives after we've already begun.

One Step

If you're contemplating a change late — a new trade at sixty, a move at fifty-five — the number that decides it is rarely the salary. It's the gap: how many months you'll earn less while you learn, and what covers you if something goes wrong in that window. Write down two figures before anything else: the monthly shortfall, and the number of months. Almost nobody does this, and almost everybody who abandons a late change abandons it in month four of a gap they never sized. Whatever your country's safety net looks like, find its edges before you're standing on them.

One Question

Whose permission are you still waiting for — and what does it tell you that the barber's father said yes only after he'd enrolled?

— Randy

I've spent 50+ years in international education and cultural exchange — a front-row seat to people changing careers, countries, and lives. If you're putting together a panel, a podcast, or a story and want a voice from the field, just reply. Replies come straight to me, and I read every one.