Pivot Off Script

The Script

You are too old.

You are already irrelevant.

Changing course this late in the game is too risky.

Allen Levi practiced law for thirteen years. Then he became a musician. Then, at 66, he decided to find out whether he could write a full-length novel.

It took him three and a half years to write it.

When friends read the finished manuscript, they urged him to publish it.

He resisted.

“I’m almost 70. We’re really late in the game.”

With the help of his niece, he eventually self-published it.

Theo of Golden spread by word of mouth and spent three weeks at number one on The New York Times bestseller list.

He was 69.

Another script, perhaps louder than the first:

If you stop showing up, people will forget you.

Just One Pivot took an extended, unceremonious summer off.

You probably didn’t miss it.

And when you take your own pause, your audience may not miss you either.

That may be the gift of it.

Einstein once observed that “the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.”

Allen Levi used the quiet to finish his book, and millions of people are better for it.

I used mine to return to this writing truer to who I’m becoming.

Sometimes the pivot is finishing something that matters.

Sometimes it is beginning with a new perspective.

Either way, silence is not where relevance disappears.

It may be where a fresh perspective begins.

Where do you need to go off script?

P.S. Just One Pivot arrives when something worth saying well is ready. For a newsletter about pivoting well, it feels too harsh to do it any other way. Stay subscribed. The good stuff is coming, and my hope is it will land as a welcomed and timely gift.

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