It's never too late to plant seeds.

They say terrible news comes in 3’s. I have had three friends of my age or younger pass away over the last 12 months.  I guess this is simply a symptom of my getting older?  In my 20s and 30s, there were lots of wedding invitations.  Now in my forties, there are also funerals.  Growing up, I was told you’ve got time on your side.  Now I realize that may no longer be true.

Time is our most scarce resource. An actuary could tell you how long you're expected to live.  This is useful information if you are an insurance company making a portfolio bet on people’s lives. But if you are an actual living person knowing the expected value of the number of days you have left is about as useful as the number 9 on a microwave.  The truth is nobody knows how much time each of us has left on this earth. When you are a portfolio of one, it's all just speculation.

So how is one to plan? Making a plan for an uncertain time horizon feels a bit like trying to make a budget when you don’t really know your bank balance.  Looking around at my friends, I see two distinct camps: (i) Live for today crew; or  (ii) Work your tail off and save for retirement crew.  I think both camps have it wrong. 

You can’t just live for today.  Most of us will probably live more than a day. Living as though every day is your last day usually devolves into a chase for hedonistic pleasures that never ends well.  On the other side of the spectrum, working your tail off seems to be a constant hamster wheel of delayed gratification. The obvious danger here is you delay so much that you never reach the destination.

My view is you have to plan for today and tomorrow. The best way I know to do this is by planting seeds.  Some might argue that the planting season is over by the time you are in your forties. I disagree.  There are plenty of examples of very successful people whose success is clearly anchored later in life:

• Benjamin Franklin was 42 when he retired from his printing business and reinvented himself as a scientist and later a political figure and founding father of the United States.

• Ray Kroc got involved in the burger business at 52 as a franchisee and ultimately bought out the McDonald’s brothers at age 60!

• Anthony Bourdain was 43 and a recovering addict before he wrote Kitchen Confidential, which ultimately led to his TV career.

I know what you are thinking. Exceptions don’t disprove the rule.  I don’t disagree. Survivorship bias is a real thing. For every success, there is a cemetery of 1,000 or more failures. Or are they failures? My proposal is if you plant journey seeds (e.g., learn something new) rather than destination seeds (e.g., get rich), then you succeed no matter what. My paternal grandmother is a great example.  She got a second master's degree in her late 50s.  Now she never got a high-paying job with that degree. But she loved every minute of the process. And now, there are two generations of humans that have her as a great example to be lifelong learners.  I don’t know about you, but I call that success.

So go ahead and plant some seeds today. Some will turn into little sprouts, others may be stillborn, but you may have a California oak somewhere in that mystery bag. It's worth a shot. And just like fishing, planting is fun regardless of the fruit.