It’s never too late to reinvent yourself.

Imagine someone holds a gun to your head and demands that you tell him what you really wish you were doing in your life. Now imagine he tells you that if you don’t start taking steps toward making that happen, he’ll kill you. He knows where you live, and he’ll be watching.

That scenario is one my favorite scenes in Fight Club.

And thanks to the overwhelming new brain research, we now know that it’s virtually never too late to reinvent yourself. To start something totally new. To learn, even master, something completely different from what you’ve been doing for the past five, ten, forty years.

From my current favorite brain book,The New Brain, Richard Restak puts it this way:

“As recently as only a few years ago, most neuroscientists believed that brain plasticity largely ceased by adolescence or by early adulthood at the latest. At this point the brain became fixed in its structure and function–at least that was the prevailing assumption. But this assumption, too, turned out to be wrong.”

He goes on to talk about how people–regardless of age–can still achieve superior, even expert-level performance in things they haven’t done before.

The more we lear

…excerpt from: headrush.typepad.com…