The Difference Between 18 & 50

Recently some friends we met in Costa Rica this summer came to visit us from London.

We were talking about how we – and the other families we'd travelled with – were all at very different points in our lives.

My son and two other teenagers had been waiting for their GCSE results. An 18-year-old was about to start a degree apprenticeship. His dad was beginning a challenging new role in his 50s.

So many of us were changing direction, starting things, planning and thinking about our futures.

And somewhere between the rainforests, long journeys and the conversations you have when you're travelling with people you've only just met, I kept thinking about something.

When you're 16 or 18, everyone expects you to think about your future.
What do you want to do? Where do you want to go? What sort of life might you build?

We don't ask those questions with quite the same sense of possibility in our 50s.

Yet arguably this is one of the most interesting times to ask them.
Because at 50, unlike at 18, you have evidence.

You know what you've enjoyed. What you've endured. What you're good at. What success has given you – and what it hasn't.

You've made mistakes, changed your mind, built relationships, lost things, achieved things and learned an enormous amount about yourself and other people.

And potentially, you still have decades ahead in which to use all of that.
For some time, I'd been asking questions about my own life after almost two decades producing television:

Who have I really become? What do I really believe? And how do I want the next decade to look?

That thinking eventually became The Redesign Project – a personal strategy practice for people in their 50s who want to use everything they've learned to deliberately design the decade ahead.

At its heart is a structured methodology for examining some of the assumptions, priorities and definitions of success we've accumulated along the way – and deciding which of them should still shape our future.

I'll be sharing much more of that thinking here over the coming weeks.

But perhaps this is the question to start with:

If you could design your next decade using everything you know now, what might you do differently?