There’s a joke that goes around on Halloween about dressing up as a gifted child. “What are you supposed to be?” people ask. Punchline: “I was supposed to be a lot of things.” If that joke resonates with you, then you may want to pick up Henry Oliver’s new book Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life.

There’s no single age defining a late bloomer, though it’s often relative to one’s field of endeavor. For professional athletes, it might be starting in their twenties. For an artist, their best work may begin near the twilight of life. In Oliver’s definition, late bloomers are simply “people who haven’t done something yet but maybe they will.”

Second Act blends biography with social science, profiling the lives of late bloomers to uncover what led to their success and delving into research to discover which aspects of their experiences are possibly replicable for others. The diverse cast of exemplars are both famous and lesser known: Katharine Graham, thrust into the role of president at the Washington Post after her husband’s suicide and presiding over reporting on the Pentagon Papers and Watergate; Yitang Zhang, a once-obscure mathematician whose heralded work on the twin prime conjecture began at age 54; and Audrey Sutherland, who quit her job at age 59 to become a pioneering solo adventurer, kayaking the coasts of Alaska into her eighties.

Not all of us are going to take down a U.S. president or contribute to solving the most difficult problems in mathematics. For many, late blooming may be something more prosaic, such as discovering or rediscovering a latent love of music or acting on the realization that one has become stuck on the wrong path. Taking a leap into the unknown can lead to more meaningful work or a more spiritual life.

Oliver contends that this is a ripe era for late bloomers. We are living longer, and the old three-part career arc of education, work, and retirement is less reliable. More of us are taking a meandering path, needing to adapt and explore in periods of transition to new kinds of work.

Here, social science can offer some advice. The late discovery of Grandma Moses, bringing her paintings from the periphery to the center of the art world, leads to a discussion of network theory and the importance of weak ties. Samuel Johnson’s move to London, where he finally made it as a writer, prompts a look into the effects of collaboration and urban agglomeration. Uprooting to a bigger city can accelerate change and put one in the right milieu. Then there’s the basic stuff. To be a late bloomer, one must live well long enough to do so: eat right, drink moderately, exercise, and lay off the cigarettes.

How much can one glean from the exemplary figures Oliver highlights in the book? Oliver acknowledges the objection that his case studies are, by definition, exceptional. What of all the attempts at late blooming that went nowhere? Oliver urges a cultural shift in expectations, looking less at people’s age and past accomplishments and more toward their motivation and persistence.

“We simply don’t know how many people could be late bloomers, given the opportunity,” he writes.

If your career seems aimless and meandering, perhaps you’re just banking on the benefits of “inefficient preparation,” as Oliver terms the process of slowly developing skills and finding a calling. “Many late bloomers do not plan their success,” he notes, but “the uncertain and inefficient path often gives late bloomers experiences and understanding they couldn’t have got any other way.”

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Oliver’s decision to write the book was a bit of a second act itself. He was working as a brand consultant when he was awarded a grant by Emergent Ventures, the Mercatus Center program run by economist and blogger Tyler Cowen, allowing him to quit his job and write about late bloomers. In the meantime, he honed his craft on Substack. That’s another lesson for pulling off a second act: it pays to have done the preparation when a life-changing opportunity comes along.

At the personal level, Second Act is best read as a call for change. Late blooming requires courage, hard work, and often a willingness to endure the discomfort of doing something badly while learning new skills. A common theme of the book is the role of interruption. Many late bloomers find themselves well-positioned to seize advantage of some unexpected change in circumstance. However, one needn’t wait passively for this interruption to arrive. One can, in Oliver’s phrase, “be one’s own interruption.” For anyone seeking inspiration to take such a risk in their own life, Second Act may provide a fortifying tonic.

Jacob Grier is the author of several books, including The New Prohibition, The Rediscovery of Tobacco, and Raising the Bar.