Don't Waste Your Best Years

I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done. -Henry Ford

Don’t waste your life believing you can’t.

In 1977, in Tallahassee, Florida, Laura Shultz, who was 63 at that time, picked up the back end of a Buick to get it off her grandson’s arm. Before that time, she had never lifted anything heavier than a 50-pound bag of pet food.

Dr. Charles Garfield, author of

, interviewed her after reading about her in the

. When he got to her home, she kept resisting any attempts to talk about what she called “the event.” She kept asking Charlie to eat breakfast and call her Granny, which she did.

Finally he got her to talk about “the event.” She said she didn’t like to think about it because it challenged her beliefs about what she could and couldn’t do, about what was possible. She said, “If I was able to do this when I didn’t think I could, what does that say about the rest of my life? How have I wasted it?”

Charlie convinced her that her life was not yet over and that she could still do whatever she wanted to do. He asked her what she wanted to do, what her passion was. She said she had always loved rocks. She had wanted to study geology, but her parents hadn’t had enough money to send both her and her brother to college, so her brother had won out.

At 63, with a little coaching from Charlie, she decided to go back to school to study geology. She eventually got her degree and went on to teach at a local community college.

Don’t wait until you are 63 to decide that you can do anything you want. Don’t waste years of your life. Decide that you are capable of doing anything you want and start working toward it now.